"This edition presents the three extant texts of a largely unrecognised genre in Middle English verse: odes to saints written in strong-stress metre in fourteen-line stanzas. These hymns were composed in the North and East Midlands in around 1400. This is the first edition of these linguistically difficult, 'knotty', poems-- for many years they were previously edited separately: in 1907 (re-edited, 1937), 1889 and 1921. The new edition takes account of recent scholarship on the Middle English alliterative verse tradition, and includes full discussion of the three poems' hagiographical and historical context."--Page [2] Book Cover.