A Poem On The Times Of Edward II

A Poem on the Times of Edward II is a medieval English political poem edited by Charles Hardwick, the Cambridge clergyman and antiquary who lived from 1821 to 1859 and whose short academic career produced several important editions of medieval English religious and political texts.

The original poem dates from the reign of Edward II, the Plantagenet king who ruled England from 1307 to 1327 and whose unhappy reign ended in his deposition by his wife Queen Isabella and his subsequent murder at Berkeley Castle. The poem belongs to the tradition of medieval English political satire that flourished in the troubled years of the early fourteenth century, with various anonymous writers using verse to comment on the failings of the king, his favourites, the church, the nobility, and the various other targets that contemporary observers found wanting.

Hardwick edited the poem from the surviving manuscript sources for the Camden Society, the antiquarian publishing organisation founded in 1838 that produced critical editions of historical documents for serious scholarly readers. The Camden Society editions established the basic textual scholarship on which much subsequent academic medieval English studies depended, and Hardwick’s edition was one of the standard works on the early fourteenth century political verse tradition for many decades after its publication.

The poem itself, in the original Middle English, requires substantial linguistic preparation from modern readers. Hardwick’s edition provides the kind of textual apparatus and glossarial assistance that the Camden Society editions characteristically included, with footnotes explaining obscure vocabulary, parallel passages from related sources, and the kind of historical context that makes the political references intelligible to readers six hundred years after the events.

The book is mostly of interest now to medievalists working on early fourteenth century English political and religious history and to students of the medieval English political poetry tradition. It pairs naturally with the other Camden Society editions of similar material, with the modern scholarly anthologies of medieval English political verse, and with the substantial body of academic work on the reign of Edward II that has appeared across the past century and a half.