OH WHERE HA' YOU BEEN, LORD RANDAL, MY SON

Lord Randal is on the point of die. He declares his will to his mother. After considering the denotative level of the poem write an argumentative text about what you have learnt of Middle Ages thanks to the poem.

This poem reports a conversation between a Lord, called Randal, and his mother.

At the beginning the mother asks him where he has been, because she's curious to know, and the son answers that he went in the forest and he orders her to make his bed because he's tired.

In the second stanza the mother wants to know who he has met and he says he has found his true love and she has given him eels fried in a pan and he gave the remaining to his hawks and hounds that then die. The mother, alarmed, asks him if he has been poisoned and he says that he's going to die because he suffers from love.

At this point the mother wants to know what he is going to leave to his parents and he tells her his will.

From this poem, I have learnt different things and aspects of the Middle Ages, mostly connected with the family and the judgment of the woman's role.

I've found out that in the Middle Ages family the son had more power than his mother and he could also give her orders as Lord Randal does in the third line of each stanza.

He is also the owner of all the lands and riches of the family, even if he had less knowledge than his mother about how to organize and use all his properties as it comes out in the last four stanzas of the poem, where the mother asks him what he will leave to his family. Even from the things he is giving, the most important ones go to his brother, and not to his mother or his sister.

Moreover I've understood that in Middle Ages the woman is seen as a creature lower and wicked, who tries to kill the Lord and that makes him suffer from love.

Indeed, in the last stanza of the poem the man wishes his true-love to go to hell, as if she was evil and she deserves to pay for her guilt.

It looks as the woman is a witch because of the fact that she has poisoned Lord Randal and she has made him falling in love with her, as if she has done a spell on him.