December 12th – Has anyone seen this chicken?

Many of us will feast on turkey this festive season, which may even be followed by a family favourite animation featuring a rubber-glove-combed penguin.

So, while it doesn’t sound a jot like “Deck the Halls”, this wee gem about a “cockerel” is not entirely out of place in the Christmas canon. In addition, the pious cockerel of this carol rises for matins, and has features likened to precious materials: red coral, indigo, silver, crystal, amber and azure – the colour of heaven itself.

This unimpeachable quality of our dandified cockerel, however, disguises (thinly) a somewhat cheeky ditty and we should caution readers that it is on the raunchy side of the medieval lyric. Readers of a delicate disposition should look away now:

I have a gentil cook – crowt me day,

He doth me rysn erly – my matynis for to say.

I have a gentil cook- comyn he is of gret,

His comb is of red corel, – his tayil is of get;

His legges ben of asour – so gentil and so smale,

His spores arn of sylver qwyt – into the wortewale;

His eynyn arn of cristal – lokyn al in aumbyr;

An every nyzt he perchit hym – in myn ladyis chaumbyr.

(Thomas Wright, “Carols from a manuscript”, p. 31)

To accompany our early-rising fowl we’ve selected a bevy of fancy chickens, though keen-eyed readers will spot an early-modern cockatrice (mix of cockerel and snake) has snuck into the flock.

This image is from a pamphlet printed in 1552, Erasmus Alber’s “Vom Basilisken zu Magdeburg. Item von Hanen eyhe/ daraus ein Basilisck wirt/ mit seiner Bedeutung aus der heiligen Schrifft” [On the basilisk of Magdeburg. Also on hen’s eggs from which a basilisk will grow, with their significance as written in the holy book] (TypGA.B23RG).

In this work, Alber, too, recounts a tale of a mysterious beast hiding in a chamber. In this case, though, it is not a handsome cockerel but a deadly basilisk, whose terrible glare has done for a blacksmith and his family. Alber then uses this as an allegory for the harms of contemporary preaching on the law, admittedly less light-hearted than our cockerel of silver-white spurs.

References:

Vom Basilisken zu Magdeburg : Controversia et Confessio