Middle English: Mediaeval Baebes and "Besse Bunting"

Back in the day, when I was studying as an English major in college, I really enjoyed my literature class that focused on works in Middle English.  I can still recite, in Middle English, the opening to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.  You know, the one that starts "Whan in Aprille the shoures soote, the draocht of March had perced to the rote..."  Or something like that.  It was an exciting time for English.  The Normans had invaded from France and conquered the island in 1066, French replaced Old Saxon English at court, and even though the common folk still spoke Old English in whatever regional dialects they had, French words started to infiltrate.  By the time we get to Chaucer, who lived from the mid to late 14th century, English more closely resembled what we speak today, though the pronunciations of words still retained elements of the Old English.

For me, reading in Middle English was almost like reading in another language, but one where things were mostly recognizable.  I had read some bits of Old English, which may have well been a foreign language, but Middle English was very doable.  I could, even without notes, understand most of what Chaucer and other Middle English authors were trying to convey but it was foreign enough to really make me think if that word or phrase really meant this or that.  And the literature was good!  Chaucer in particular is very funny - alternating between serious themes and slapstick that included bawdy, raunchy humor and fart jokes.

When I stumbled upon the Mediaeval Baebes some years ago, it was fun to hear some of these works sung.  They didn't sing Chaucer, at least not that I'm aware, but songs and poems from that era.  And it was fun to realize that I could still understand them.  And you probably can too!  Take these lyrics from the song:

In Aprell and in May
When hartes be all mery
Besse Bunting, the millaris may
Withe lippes so red as chery
She cast in hir remembrance
To passe hir time in daliance
And to leve hir thought driery
Right womanly arayd
In a peticote of whit
She was nothing dismayd
Hir countenance was full light

In this time of our fall, it reminds us of spring as it captures a snapshot of a maid with full red lips happy and clothed in a "peticote of whit" with a countenance full of light in the months of April and May. 

This is the territory of the Mediaeval Baebes as today's song Besse Bunting illustrates. The group started in 1996 when a group of friends led by Katherine Blake of Miranda Sex Garden broke into a North London cemetery and sang in flowing white robes and leaf garlands. They soon became a group, and their first album, Salva Nos, shot to number two on the classical charts. It didn't hurt that they were all beautiful and very talented. The group has since had many incarnations. They sing in an array of obscure and ancient languages, and have placed three albums in the top ten of the classical charts and participated in the BBC's television series The Virgin Queen. Besse Bunting is from their 2000 CD Undrentide.