WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

presumably been one of those young Cornish boys, who learned grammar in the mid-fourteenth
century under the famed grammar master and also continued such a change by teaching grammar
classes of his own in Oxford. 356 Although Trevisa’s target audience may have ignored these
similarities, the way that Trevisa’s translation claims a pedagogical stance, in not only
356 Trevisa’s claim of John of Cornwall’s prowess as a teacher at the center a fourteenth-century Cornish grammar
revolution demands some attention because this detail has been taken as proof that the gloss is but an amalgam of
“personal observations” of Trevisa’s world and not stylistic conventions of his authorial aspirations (Fowler The Life
49, 182). As W.H. Stevenson has argued, there is proof that a Ioannis Cornubiensis was “magister” ‘teacher’ in
Oxford at Merton’s College from 1344 to 1349 which would correspond to the time of the “furst morey,” ‘the first
Death’ or Plague (W.H. Stevenson, “The Introduction of English as the Vehicle of Instruction in English Schools,”
An English Miscellany Presented to Dr. Furnivall in Honour of his Seventy-Fifth Birthday (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1901) 421-429). Further, the Oxford Bodleian Library houses a fifteenth-century manuscript of the Speculum
grammaticale, a manual for learning Latin which, although a bit advanced, explains verb and grammatical Latin
constructions through English terminology authored by a “Jo. dictus ‘de Cornubia’” (A.B. Emden, A Biographical
Register of the University of Oxford to A.D. 1500 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957) 490). The proximity of these two
facts, coupled with Trevisa’s description, has led to a support of Trevisa’s claim and (in extreme cases) as proof of
his key role in “saving” the English language (Peter Ellis, The Cornish language and its literature (London:
Routledge, 1974) 49-51). I would only like to point out the tautology of this argumentation: the only proof that
Trevisa knew John of Cornwall goes back to Trevisa himself, and even Stevenson speculates as much in stating that
he had to be aware of Cornwall or Penrych “for the provincial spirit was very strong amongst Oxford students”
(Stevenson 422). Trevisa may well be a reliable witness even if he was just seven when we have the last record of
John of Cornwall in Oxford. After all, Cornwall may have left a twenty-year old legacy in Oxford despite only being
a grammar teacher. Still, it is important that Higden, writing in the 1360’s does not comment upon Cornwall’s
“reformist” developments given that scholars have also documented the increased use of the “secular” English and
French in such Latin settings as the monasteries which were home to him (M. Legge, “The French Language and the
English Cloister.” Medieval Studies Presented to Rose Graham (Oxford: University Press, 1950) 146-162).
Nevertheless, the faultiness of the scholarly claim is not the arguable closeness of Trevisa to Cornwall, but the
inability of his vernacular “revival” to have any effectiveness since the glosses of grammatical treatises written c.
1340 (around his tenure as a scholar) are only in Latin and French (David Thomson, “The Oxford Grammar Masters
Revisited.” Mediaeval Studies. 45 (1983): 308). Prior to Henry V’s use of the vernacular in the mid-fifteenth
century, there simply was no need to standardize English formally. To try to articulate as David Thomson and others
have done, that “Cornwall introduced the use of English as a language of grammatical instruction at Oxford” (Ibid.
308) given the absolute lack of manuscript evidence is to prove either a) the real failure of John Cornwall’s early
“reform” efforts or b) that the author of the Speculum grammaticale was not the Oxfordian Cornwall. Given
Trevisa’s close concern for English identity, I believe a projection of grandeur to a Cornish country-man would suit
better his “provincial spirit” than the actual success of Cornwall’s efforts—albeit with a sense of irony since Trevisa
uses the French word “morey” and not English “deth” to date Cornwall’s grammarian revolution. Further, it is not
unlikely that the author of the Speculum grammaticale, given the wide dissemination of Trevisa’s Polychronicon,
would himself take up the name John Cornwall from Trevisa’s description just as others picked up the name
Chaucer or Piers Plowman to author vernacular poetry. I do not agree with David Thomson’s dating of the Speculum
as a copy of an earlier 1340 text. First, no text of the Speculum survives from the fourteenth century. Secondly, the
statutes of the disciplining of English use in Oxford, which Thomson uses to date the Speculum, predated its
formation for more than fifty years, and they do not reflect new policies against the use of English in Oxford—as if
Cornwall was responsible—but traditional expectations of a pupil’s behavior (Graham Pollard, “The Oldest Statute
Book of the University,” Bodleian Library Record, 8.2 (1968) 78). Still, even if the real Cornwall managed to leave
his imprint in the development of the vernacular, it is worthwhile to remember that all of the scholarship stems from
a circular presupposition of using Trevisa’s own description to prove the veracity of what he says, using someone
vested in authorizing his tradition to date back the “beginning of a tradition of grammatical texts” to the middle of
the fourteenth century (Cole 1161).
216