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efore 1385. Second, the contents of this commentary (the prevalence of an English readership
which does not known French or Latin) justify Trevisa’s posture in using “everyday” English to
explain ideas. Therefore, although most of Trevisa’s readers were fluent in French and learned in
Latin, it is natural to assume that vernacular translations were possible because of a rising,
literate class educated mostly in English just as Trevisa’s comment claims. 349
This gloss, however, seems too opportune for Trevisa’s career as a translator to be taken
to describe the proliferation of the vernacular accurately, and there are hints that suggest that
Trevisa’s claims may be only a type of posturing. Just as Higden appears to comment upon
English identity through history, Trevisa’s commentary “self-consciously” takes vernacular
linguistic proficiency as a mark of national identity. 350 Consequently, Trevisa’s gloss continues
the gestures in favor of “everyday” speech given by the prefatory “Epistola” to the
Polychronicon and does not simply aim to teach the reader about vernacular proficiency. This
doubt heightens when we consider the absence of any reflection about the status of the
vernacular from his other translations, like Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum and
Barthalomeous Anglicanus’s De Propietaribus Rebus, whose treatment of language and politics
would have merited a “factual” commentary on the state of England.
Still, the Polychronicon may seem like the one “commonsense” place where Trevisa
could personally write about the proficiency of vernacular learning. His ruminations on English
seem but to follow a logical connection of content to a reader—from Higden’s commentary of
the state of the vernacular in the past (1340’s) to Trevisa’s description of its role in the present
(1380’s). Higden spends a greater part of his chronicle thinking about what it is to write for an
349 Ibid. 184.
350 See Andrew Galloway, “Latin England,” Imagining a Medieval English Nation, ed. Kathy Lavezzo
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
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