I have argued that Bartholomew’s early readers could interpret the properties of things in the everyday world — fishes, farmyard poultry, the ploughman and his team, bees and other creatures — as reminders of the preacher’s role, vows and hopes of heaven. However, while the image of the bee was ideal for the monastic worker, enclosed in a hierarchical community and separated from the world, Franciscans entering into apostolic missionary work had no such assurance of subsistence or protection. They were committed to a life of homelessness as well as celibacy. Bartholomew’s recurring mentions of peregrines, viatores, transeuntes, ambulantes, navigantes and remiges (pilgrims, wayfarers, travellers, walkers, mariners and rowers) seem appropriate to the needs of students who expected to be literally exposed to perilous contact with the world in a way that enclosed monastic laborantes were not.
Bartholomew’s description of the migratory crane in Book 12 tends to support the view that while the moralised image of the bee matched beautifully the ideals of opus Dei, castitas and stabilitas of the enclosed Orders, the mendicants needed a more adventurous metaphor to express their aims. The crane’s bestiary character suited the Franciscans in some of its features: according to the bestiary the crane looks after its brothers, obeys and follows its leader on long journeys, is grey in colour, has a loud voice, fights pigmies armed with arrows and keeps watch holding a stone in one claw.[94] Bartholomew in De grue, ‘On the crane’, refers to bestiary authorities but he restricts his account to the strength of the crane's voice and the wings, the urge to seek far places, the orderliness of the brotherhood and especially the office of the leader, who is replaced if he grows hoarse, and the bird's vigilance and defensive strategies.[95] In an early manuscript of ‘Properties’, against the first line of the column text the glossator has put: ‘Take note concerning the lord’s ascension.’[96] From this we might reasonably infer an analogy between this bird's strong upward flight and Christ’s Ascension from Mt Olivet.[97] But if we consult the early-fourteenth-century Liber rerum moralizatae, the collection of preaching exempla based on parts of ‘Properties’, on the moral properties of the crane, we find that the Franciscan compiler of this later work expands on the gloss to convey a wider meaning relevant to his Order. The redactor first repeats Bartholomew’s account and then enlarges upon the significance of the crane's large wings, strong voice and lofty flight in search of distant places:
The crane, briefly, is found among the authors to have these conditions or properties. First, as Ambrose says in the Hexameron, it is a bird of large wings and strong flight, seeking the high air like a pilgrim seeking those regions. It signifies powerful prelates or [ ] great and famous contemplatives, as was Paul, who was snatched up suddenly towards a beam of light and into Paradise, where he heard the words of the archangel which it is not lawful to hear in this place. It was written of the blessed Francis who, on such strong and powerful wings, [ ] was many times suspended in rare and sweet contemplation, and indeed the Seraphim irradiated him with glory so that he might become altogether one with God, with whom he is now become like a bird of the angels.[98]
This passage in the later work tends to confirm that, for Franciscan readers especially, the strong upward flight of the crane could connote an ideal of ecstatic contemplation and the light-filled apotheoses of the Order's spiritual great ones, recounted in scripture and legend: that of St Paul (‘caught up to the third heaven’ in a vision) and of St Francis (lifted up in ecstatic contemplation on Monte Verna).[99] It strongly suggests that the later work might provide important complementary data for the study of ‘Properties’; it also reminds us that the full freight of meaning of the glosses may now be lost, along with stories they could once evoke.
We need not assume that medieval readers read ‘Properties’ from Book 1 to Book 19; the sequence of Books and chapters may reflect a thinking and organising process rather than a set plan for the reader. Nevertheless, the reader, too, can be considered as a kind of traveller through the book. As Roger Chartier observes, reading can be seen as a kind of work and a kind of travel.[100] In the thirteenth-century context, ‘Properties’ as a ‘world book’ also implies a journey for the reader through the properties of created things, just as the world itself is a place of peregrinatio or pilgrimage.[101]
A respected precedent existed in the words of St Augustine for seeing, within every actual or contemplated journey, a pilgrimage towards our true home that is not of this world:
Suppose, then, we were wanderers in a strange country, and could not live happily away from our fatherland, and that we felt wretched in our wandering, and wishing to put an end to our misery determined to return home. We find, however, that we must make use of some mode of conveyance, either by land or water, in order to reach that fatherland where our enjoyment is to commence … Such is a picture of our condition in this life of mortality. We have wandered far from God; and if we wish to return to our Father’s home, this world must be used, not enjoyed, so that the invisible things of God may be clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made — that is, that by means of what is material and temporary we may lay hold upon that which is spiritual and eternal.[102]
Bartholomew reminds the reader from time to time that we are all pilgrims through life and, like travellers by land and sea, are at risk of getting lost in the dark or in bad weather, of arriving late, being distracted, encumbered or poorly prepared. In Book 1, Bartholomew tells us that God is announced by many names, including way, life and truth.[103] The notion of the travelling and endangered soul is introduced at the beginning of Book 3, on the soul and reason. Here, Bartholomew describes a difficult concept in concrete terms: ‘For [the soul] is one with the body as a driving force is one with a moving object, and as the sailor is one with his boat.’[104] Thereafter the reader is given glimpses, scattered in several Books, of the fallible wayfarer and the frail mariner on dangerous routes, threatened by many hazards but aided by stars, islands, winds, floating spars or stabilising barnacles on the hull. In Book 9 we are reminded that although daylight turns to darkness the movement of the heavens can give light and guidance to travellers: ‘[I]n the darkness of night wayfarers and mariners easily miss the right way, unless they are guided by the movement and position of the stars.’[105] In Book 13's chapter on the sea, discussed more fully in the next chapter, Bartholomew warns that the inadequately captained ship may come late to the harbour.[106] In Book 17, brambles are troublesome to passers-by, they spread everywhere, blunt the knife, catch at the feet and clothing, scratch the hands.[107] The short phrases, plentiful verbs, graphic details, recognisable brambles and memories of the sensations of such an everyday experience, all invite the reader to identify with this walker. In Book 17 we also see the walker in a dark wood, where the light is dim and robbers lurk waiting to rob or strangle the passer-by. The properties of dense woods include both dangers and delights for the traveller: on the one hand pagan rites are enacted in their darkness, snakes lurk, there are many paths, and it is easy to be led astray by false signs and pointers made by robbers. On the other hand, birds find shelter there from predators, and bees find hollow trees in which to hide their honey.[108] These are all things that we know and experience as part of active daily life and work. As on any cross-country excursion, the traveller through the world — or vicariously through the world book — needs to have faith and rely on guiding signs, but may find sources of enjoyment along the way. The reader can pick up references to them throughout the compilation — but all paths lead to Book 19.