Introduction

Summary

THE CHRONICLER LAȜAMON, priest of Areley and self-confessed bibliophile, describes in the prologue to his Brut how ‘hit com him on mode’ to tell the history of the English people in the English language. Recalling his travels ‘wide ȝond þas leode’ to gather his sources from French, Latin and English books, he then recounts how he has used this material to create a new work:

Laȝamon leide þeos boc. & þa leaf wende.

he heom leofliche bi-heold. liþe him beo Drihten.

Feþeren he nom mid fingren. & fiede on boc-felle

& þa soþere word sette to-gadere.

& þa þre boc þrumde to are.

[Laȝamon opened these books and turned the pages; he looked upon them with pleasure – God be gracious to him! He took a quill pen in his hand and wrote on parchment, and putting together the truthful words, combined the three books into one.]

The leisurely and somewhat anecdotal quality of this passage, composed in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, could easily conceal the fact that this contains the first Middle English translator's prologue introducing material from a French source. The term ‘translation’ does not appear, and Laȝamon's discussion of how he condensed or ‘þrumde’ three existing books, in what may be three different languages, to make a single English poem, may have as much to do with redaction as with translation. And yet, this passage voices ideas about the patient and workmanlike creation of a new English tradition by translation that proved very durable and can be found much later in the Middle English period. Three hundred years on, the prologues written by William Caxton for his printed translations present the works which follow in similarly anecdotal and bookish terms, informing the readers of his 1490 edition of Eneydos that there ‘happened that to my hand cam a lytyl booke in frenshe [which] I delybered and concluded to translate it in to englysshe And forthwith toke a penne & ynke and wrote a leef or tweyne’.