8   EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION   THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD   9

very loosely even as late as the sixteenth century. The Legend of Good Women names Troilus and Criseyde beside The Romance of the Rose as "translated" work.' Osbern Bokenam, writing in the next century, explains that he obtained the material for his legend of St. Margaret "the last time I was in Italy, both by scripture and eke by mouth," but he still calls the work a "translation." 2 Henry Bradshaw, purposing in 1513 to "translate" into English the life of St. Werburge of Chester, declares,

Unto this rude werke myne auctours these shalbe: Fyrst the true legende and the venerable Bede, Mayster Alfrydus and Wyllyam Malusburye, Gyrarde, Polychronicon, and other mo in deed.'

Lydgate is requested to translate the legend of St. Giles "after the tenor only"; he presents his work as a kind of "brief compilation," but he takes no exception to the word " translate." 4 That he should designate his St. Margaret, a fairly close following of one source, a " compilation," a merely strengthens the belief that the terms "translate" and "translation" were used synonymously with various other words. Osbern Bokenam speaks of the "translator" who "compiled" the legend of St. Christiana in English;' Chaucer, one remembers, "translated" Boethius and "made"

the life of St. Cecilia.'

To select from this large body of literature, "made,"

A version, 11. 341-4. Cf. Puttenham, ". . . many of his books be but bare translations out of the Latin and French . . . as his books of Troilus and Cresseid, and the Romant of the Rose," Gregory Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, ii, 64.

2 Osbern Bokenam's Legenden, ed. Horstmann, 1883, 11. 108-9, 124. The Life of St. Werburge, E. E. T. S., 11. 94. 127-130,

4 Minor Poems of Lydgate, E. E. T. S., Legend of St. Gyle, 11. 9-10, 27-32.

Ibid., Legend of St. Margaret, 1. 74.

8 St. Christiana, 1. 1028.   Legend of Good Women, 11. 425-6.

"compiled," "translated," only such works as can claim to be called, in the modern sense of the word, "translations" would be a difficult and unprofitable task. Rather one must accept the situation as it stands and consider the whole mass of such writings as appear, either from the claims of their authors or on the authority of modern scholarship, to be of secondary origin. "Translations" of this sort are numerous. Chaucer in his own time was reckoned "grant translateur." 1 Of the books which Caxton a century later issued from his printing press a large proportion were English versions of Latin or French works. Our concern, indeed, is with the larger and by no means the least valuable part of the literature produced during the Middle English period.

The theory which accompanies this nondescript collection of translations is scattered throughout various works, and is somewhat liable to misinterpretation if taken out of its immediate context. Before proceeding to consider it, however, it is necessary to notice certain phases of the general literary situation which created peculiar difficulties for the translator or which are likely to be confusing to the present-day reader. As regards the translator, existing circumstances were not encouraging. In the early part of the period he occupied a very lowly place. As compared with Latin, or even with French, the English language, undeveloped and unstandardized, could make its appeal only to the unlearned. It had, in the words of a thirteenth-century translator of Bishop Grosseteste's Castle of Love, "no savor before a clerk." 2 Sometimes, it is true, the English writer had the stimulus of patriotism. The translator of Richard Cceur de Lion feels that Englishmen ought

1 See the ballade by Eustache Deschamps, quoted in Chaucer, Works, ed. Morris, vol. 1, p. 82.

2 Minor Poems of the Vernon MS, Pt. 1, E. E. T. S., The Castle of

Love, 1. 72.