75. þe Lapidarye, Latin Lapidarium, was a manual of precious stones, which contained a good deal of pseudo-scientific information about their natures and virtues, just as the Bestiary summed up popular knowledge of animals. A Latin poem by Marbod bishop of Rennes (d. 1123) is the chief source of the mediaeval lapidaries, and, curiously enough, there is a French prose text attributed by so intimate an authority as Jean d'Outremeuse to Mandeville himself. Several Old French texts have been edited by L. Pannier, Les Lapidaires Français du Moyen Âge, Paris 1882. Their high repute may be judged from the inclusion of no less than seven copies in the library of Charles V of France (d. 1380); and it is surprising that no complete ME. version is known. But much of the matter was absorbed into encyclopaedic works like the De Proprietatibus Rerum of Bartholomaeus, which Trevisa translated.
97. Mistranslated. The French has: qi sont violastre, ou pluis broun qe violettes.
100-1. But in soth to me: French: Mes endroit de moy, 'but for my part'; the English translator has rendered en droit separately.
108. þerfore: the context requires the sense 'because', but the translator would hardly have used þerfore had he realized that ll. 108-9 correspond to a subordinate clause in the French, and do not form a complete independent sentence. He was misled by the bad punctuation of some French MSS., e.g. Royal 20 B. X and (with consequent corruption) Harley 4383.
136. Cathaye: China. See the classic work of Colonel Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither, 2 vols., London 1866. The modernization of the Catalan map of 1375 in vol. i gives a good idea of Mandeville's geography.
142. withouten wolle: the story of the vegetable lamb is taken from the Voyage of Friar Odoric, which is accessible in Hakluyt's Voyages. Hakluyt's translation is reprinted, with the Eastern voyages of John de Plano Carpini (1246) and of William de Rubruquis (1253), in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, ed. A. W. Pollard, London 1900. The legend probably arose from vague descriptions of the cotton plant; and Mandeville makes it still more marvellous by describing as without wool the lamb which had been invented to explain the wool's existence.
143-4. Of þat frute I haue eten: This assertion seems to be due to the English translator. The normal French text has simply: et cest bien grant meruaille de ceo fruit, et si est grant oure [= oeuvre] de nature (MS. Royal 20 B. X, f. 70 b).
147. the Bernakes: The barnacle goose—introduced here on a hint from Odoric—is a species of wild goose that visits the Northern coasts in winter. It was popularly supposed to grow from the shell-fish called 'barnacle', which attaches itself to floating timber by a stalk something like the neck and beak of a bird, and has feathery filaments not unlike plumage. As the breeding place of the barnacle goose was unknown, and logs with the shell-fish attached were often found on the coasts, it was supposed that the shell-fish was the fruit of a tree, which developed in the water into a bird. Giraldus Cambrensis, Topographia Hibernica, I. xv, reproves certain casuistical members of the Church who ate the barnacle goose on fast-days on the plea that it was not flesh; but himself vouches for the marvel. The earliest reference in English is No. 11 of the Anglo-Saxon Riddles, of which the best solution is 'barnacle goose'. For a full account see Max Müller's Lectures on the Science of Language, vol. ii, pp. 583-604.
157. grete notes of Ynde, 'coco-nuts'.
163-4. Goth and Magoth: see Ezekiel xxxviii and xxxix. The forms of the names are French.