He that will more look,
Read in the French book,
And he shall find there
Things that I leete here.[149]
The Northern Passion turns from the legendary history of the Cross to something more nearly resembling the gospel narrative with the exhortation, "Forget not Jesus for this tale."[150] As compared with this, writers like Nicholas Love or John Capgrave are noticeably explicit. Love pauses at various points to explain that he is omitting large sections of the original;[151] Capgrave calls attention to his interpolations and refers them to their sources.[152] On the other hand, there are constant implications that variation from source may be a desirable thing and that explanation and apology are unnecessary. Bokenam, for example, apologizes rather because The Golden Legend does not supply enough material and he must leave out certain things "for ignorance."[153] Caxton says of his Charles the Great, "If I had been more largely informed ... I had better made it."[154]
On the whole, the greatest merit of the later medieval translators consists in the quantity of their comment. In spite of the vagueness and the absence of originality in their utterances, there is an advantage in their very garrulity. Translators needed to become more conscious and more deliberate in their work; different methods needed to be defined; and the habit of technical discussion had its value, even though the quality of the commentary was not particularly good. Apart from a few conventional formulas, this habit of comment constituted the bequest of medieval translators to their sixteenth-century successors.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Trans. in Gregory's Pastoral Care, ed. Sweet, E.E.T.S., p. 7.
[2] Trans. in King Alfred's Version of the Consolations of Boethius, trans. Sedgefield, 1900.
[3] Trans. in Hargrove, King Alfred's Old English Version of St. Augustine's Soliloquies, 1902, pp. xliii-xliv.
[4] Latin Preface of the Catholic Homilies I, Latin Preface of the Lives of the Saints, Preface of Pastoral Letter for Archbishop Wulfstan. All of these are conveniently accessible in White, Aelfric, Chap. XIII.
[5] Latin Preface to Homilies II.
[6] Ibid.