WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

English people, and we would expect a writer with a pedagogical intent of explaining a foreign
concept to a reader to situate his comments in a way that could be readily accessible.
Even so, it is hard to ignore the clear “authorial” gestures in Trevisa’s commentary. For
example, there is the matter of the stylistic similarities that link the commentary signed “Trevisa”
to the one signed by the letter “R” of Ranulfus Higden. In signing his name, Trevisa not only
claims originality of what he says but asks the reader to compare one voice to another. As
Andrew Galloway has noted, this differentiation has its roots in Vincent de Beauvais’s attempt to
authorize a compilator’s voice in front of textual tradition. 351 The stylistic roots of the change
from “Trevisa” to “R” should give us pause before taking Trevisa’s gloss at face value,
particularly considering the extraordinary claims made by the gloss itself:
Trevisa: Þis manere [of speaking French instead of English] was moche yused tofore þe furst
morey and ys seythe somdel ychaunged, ffor John Cornwal a mayster of gramere chaynged þe lore
in gramer scole and construction of Freynsch into Englysh, and Richard Pencrych lirned þat
manere-techyng of hym and oþer men of Pencryth. So þat now, þe yer of oure lord a þousond þre
hundre foure score and five, of þe seconde kyng Richard after þe conqueste nyne, in al þe gramer
scoles of Engelond childern leveþ Frensche and construeþ an Englysch. 352
Despite its appearance of portraying only the facts, this commentary is clearly an exercise in
hyperbole. It argues that, due to the work of one grammar teacher and of the influence of his
young pupils, Cornwall has now initiated a cultural movement that has “now” influenced
children throughout England to “leveþ Frensche and construeþ an Englysch” as if a) English was
commonly experienced as a unified tongue and b) French was no longer spoken or even a
necessary part of English culture.
Both Trevisa and his readers knew that the fourteenth-century use of English was far
from a unified “national” phenomenon. For one, Trevisa’s translations do not reflect the dialect
351 See Galloway “Latin” 50 and Andrew Galloway, “Chaucer’s Legend of Lucrece and the Critique of Ideology in
Fourteenth-Century England,” ELH, 60. 4 (1993): 823.
352 Ranulfus Higden, Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden monachi Cestrensis; together with the English translations
of John Trevisa and of an unknown writer of the fifteenth century, ed. Churchill Babington, 9 vols (London, 1865) 2.
161.
214