10   EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION   THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD   11

to be able to read in their own tongue the exploits of the English hero. The Cursor Mundi is translated

In to Inglis tong to rede For the love of Inglis lede, Inglis lede of Ingland?

But beyond this there was little to encourage the translator. His audience, as compared with the learned and the refined, who read Latin and French, was ignorant and undiscriminating; his crude medium was entirely unequal to reproducing what had been written in more highly developed languages. It is little wonder that in these early days his English should be termed "dim and dark." Even after Chaucer had showed that the despised language was capable of grace and charm, the writer of less genius must often have felt that beside the more sophisticated Latin or French, English could boast but scanty resources.

There were difficulties and limitations also in the choice of material to be translated. Throughout most of the period literature existed only in manuscript; there were few large collections in any one place; travel was not easy. Priests, according to the prologue to Mirk's Festial, written in the early fifteenth century, complained of "default of books." To aspire, as did Chaucer's Clerk, to the possession of "twenty books" was to aspire high. Translators occasionally give interesting details regarding the circumstances under which they read and translated. The author of the life of St. Etheldred of Ely refers twice, with a certain pride, to a manuscript preserved in the abbey of Godstow which he himself has seen and from which he has drawn some of the facts which he presents. The translator of the alliterative romance of Alexander "borrowed" various books when he undertook his English rendering? Earl Rivers, returning from the Continent, brought back a manuscript which had

E. E. T. S., Cotton V esp. MS. 11. 233-5.   2 E. E. T. S., 1. 457.

been lent him by a French gentleman, and set about the translation of his Dictes and Sayings of the Old Philosophers.' It is not improbable that there was a good deal of borrowing, with its attendant inconveniences. Even in the sixteenth century Sir Thomas Elyot, if we may believe his story, was hampered by the laws of property. He became interested in the acts and wisdom of Alexander Severus, "which book," he says, "was first written in the Greek tongue by his secretary Eucolpius and by good chance was lent unto me by a gentleman of Naples called Padericus. In reading whereof I was marvelously ravished, and as it hath ever been mine appetite, I wished that it had been published in such a tongue as more men might understand it. Wherefore with all diligence I endeavored myself whiles I had leisure to translate it into English: albeit I could not so exactly perform mine enterprise as I might have done, if the owner had not importunately called for his book, whereby I was constrained to leave some part of the work untranslated." 2 William Paris — to return to the earlier period — has left on record a situation which stirs the imagination. He translated the legend of St. Cristine while a prisoner in the Isle of Man, the only retainer of his unfortunate lord, the Earl of Warwick, whose captivity he chose to share.

He made this lyfe in ynglishe soo, As he satte in prison of stone,

Ever as he myghte tent therto

Whane he had his lordes service done.3

One is tempted to let the fancy play on the combination of circumstances that provided him with the particular manuscript from which he worked. It is easy, of course, to emphasize overmuch the scarcity and the inaccessibility of

See Cambridge History of English Literature, v. 2, p. 313. Preface to The Image of Governance, 1549.

Sammlung Altenglischer Legenden, ed. Horstmann, Christine, 11. 517-20.