This seems rather hard measure to mete out to the garrulous old voyager; nor does the evidence against his having Englished his own Romance stories, appear fully conclusive. What we may count for certain about the matter is this:—There does exist a very considerable budget of delightfully extravagant travellers’ tales, bearing the Mandeville name, and written in an English which—with some mending of bygone words—is charming now: and which may be called the first fair and square book of the new English prose;—meaning by that—the first book of length and of popular currency which introduced a full measure—perhaps over-running measure—of those words of Romance or Latin origin, which afterward came to be incorporated in the English of the fifteenth century. The book has no English qualities—beyond its language; and might have been written by a Tartar, who could tell of Munchausen escapes and thank God in good current dialect of Britain.
I give a specimen from the description of his descent into the Valley Perilous—which he found beside the Isle of Mistorak, nigh to the river Phison:
This Vale is all full of devils, and hath been always. And men say there that it is one of the entries of hell. In that Vale is plenty of gold and silver; wherefore many misbelieving men, and many Christians also, oftentimes go in, to have of the treasure.… And in midplace of that Vale is an head of the visage of a devil bodily—full horrible and dreadful to see. But there is no man in the world so hardy, Christian man, ne other, but that he would be drad [afraid] for to behold it. For he beholdeth every man so sharply with dreadful eyen that ben evermore moving and sparkling as fire, and changeth and steereth so often in divers manner, with so horrible countenance, that no man dare not nighen toward him.
The author says fourteen of his party went in, and when they came out—only nine: “And we wisten never, whether that our fellows were lost or elles turned again for dread. But we never saw them never after.” He says there were plenty of jewels and precious stones thereabout, but “I touched none, because that the Devils be so subtle to make a thing to seem otherwise than it is, for to deceive mankind.” He tells us also of the giants Gog and Magog, and of a wonderful bird—like the roc of Arabian Nights’ fable—that would carry off an elephant in its talons, and he closes all his stupendous narratives with thanks to God Almighty for his marvellous escapes.
I have spoken of its popularity. Halliwell—who edits the London edition of 1839—says that of no book, with the exception of Scriptures, are there so many MSS. of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries existing; showing that for two centuries its fables were either not exploded, or at least lost not their relish.
Early Book-making.
And now what do we mean by books and by popularity at the end of the thirteenth century? The reader must keep in mind that our notion of popularity measured by thousands of copies would then have been regarded as strange as the most monstrous of Sir John Mandeville’s stories. There was no printing; there was no paper, either—as we understand. The art, indeed, of making paper out of pulp did exist at this date with the Oriental nations—perhaps with the Moors in Spain, but not in England. Parchment made from skins was the main material, and books were engrossed laboredly with a pen or stylus. It was most likely a very popular book which came to an edition of fifty or sixty copies within five years of its first appearance: and a good manuscript was so expensive an affair that its purchase was often made a matter to be testified to by subscribing witnesses, as we witness the transfer of a house. A little budget of these manuscripts made a valuable library. When St. Augustine planted his Church in Kent—he brought nine volumes with him as his literary treasure.
Lanfranc, who was one of the Norman abbots brought over by the Conqueror to build up the priesthood in learning, made order in 1072 that at Lent the librarian should deliver to the worthiest of the brotherhood each a book; and these were to have a year to read them. At the commencement of the fourteenth century there were only four classics in the royal library of Paris; and at the same date the library of Oxford University consisted of a few tracts kept in chests under St. Mary’s Church.—Green, in his “Making of England,”[31] cites from Alcuin a bit of that old Churchman’s Latin poem—“De Pontificibus”—which he says is worthy of special note, as the first catalogue which we have of any English Library.
“Quidquid Gregorius summus docet, et Leo Papa;
Basilius quidquid, Fulgentius atque, coruscant,