and the harder the blows, the better the fun." This forms a striking contrast with the aureate manner of the poet's contemporaries, the Scottish Chaucerians. The exigencies of rhyme-scheme and alliteration that the poet faces are very rigorous, but he meets them with such inventiveness and apparent ease that it has been called a tour de force of mastery of technique. Legacy "Christis Kirk" and a similar earlier poem, "Peblis at the Play", exercised a noticeable influence on the makar William Dunbar, some of whose poems use similar metrical and stylistic techniques to achieve a fast-moving effect. Similar traces of the two older poems can be seen in the anonymous 16th-century "Rauf Coilyear", "The Cursing of Sir John Rowell" and "Symmie and his Bruder". In 1718 the poet Allan Ramsay published "Christis Kirk" together with two additional cantos of his own composition. This work reached a 5th edition in only five years, and so popularized the poem that few others were reprinted so many times in the 18th century. A fourth canto followed in 1766, published in Alexander Nicol's Poems on Several Subjects. One result of the poem's success was the emergence of a whole subgenre of comic poems set at fairs, country dances and similar merrymakings, and narrated by detached and amused observers, in which horseplay, practical jokes and drunkenness play a prominent part, and colourful scene-painting makes up for thin story-lines. Examples include Robert Fergusson's "Leith Races", James Orr's "Donegore Hill" and "The Passengers", Samuel Thomson's "The Simmer Fair" and "The Hawk and the Weasel" and Robert Burns's "The Jolly Beggars", "The Ordination" and "The Holy Fair". The Christis Kirk tradition continued into the 20th century in such poems as Robert Garioch's "Embro to the Ploy". Modern editions An edition of the Laing text. Based on the Maitland text. Notes References External links Maitland Manuscript text of the poem Bannatyne Manuscript text of the poem 1490s in Scotland 1490s works 1500s in Scotland 1500s works 15th-century poems 16th-century poems Fairs in Scotland Humorous poems Poetry of the Bannatyne Manuscript Scottish humour