Proverbs of Hendyng

The Proverbs of Hendyng are a later thirteenth-century poem in which one Hendyng, son of Marcolf, utters a series of proverbial stanzas. They are in a tradition of Middle English proverbial poetry attested in the Proverbs of Alfred and the two texts include some proverbs in common. The rhyme-scheme is aabccb.

Marcolf appears as an interlocutor with Solomon in some German poems in the Solomon and Saturn tradition, while ' "Hendyng" seems to be a personification generated from the word hende ["skilled, clever"], and seems to mean something like "the clever one" '.

The Proverbs are also noted for containing the earliest attestation of the word cunt in English outside place- and personal-names.

Ten manuscripts are known to attest to the poem in whole or in part (sometimes only one stanza or couplet). The most complete include:

The others are:

...
Wikipedia