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This chapter and the next look at ‘Properties’ on the next major stage of its journey through the Middle Ages. This is the later-medieval context of war, famine and plague in which noble lay patrons commission prose translations of ‘Properties’ into vernacular European languages; in which manuscripts of the Latin text, in whole or in part, proliferate in Europe; and in which readers and writers refer to Bartholomew as an authority on the properties of the natural world.
We saw in the last chapter that in the first half of the thirteenth century the Catholic church was facing great challenges to its authority from opponents and detractors from outside and from within. In the Friars Minor it had an evangelising brotherhood with a mandate to travel, however arduously, and committed to preaching without payment. With the papacy's support, small groups of friars made their way across Europe, across the English Channel and thence across the Irish Sea. The friars first arrived in England in 1224 and in Ireland by 1230.[1] Little more than a decade later, Bartholomew’s finished work could have been available to support the Order’s efforts.
The time and the manner of the first arrival and dissemination of ‘Properties’ in England are matters of speculation, but need to be seen in the context of the church’s insistent focus upon preaching and scholarship at a time of social upheaval, when the secular and regular clergy were perceived to be performing poorly. Its reception and transmission over the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries must also be seen against the background of the long-term effects of the Black Death that were undermining traditional social norms; of recurrent warfare between the kings of England and France; and of the competitive culture of Christian chivalry, with its supporting texts, that was shared by the inter-related nobility of both countries. This chapter examines how far Bartholomew’s world-book could have found a ready reception among English speakers, listeners, writers and readers during these troubled times: whether they were the poor, finding solace in its homely exempla; or the wealthy, responding to its endorsement of a divinely ordered system of status, and to its possibilities as a material commodity.
We have a partisan record of the arrival of the first friars in England in the account of the English Franciscan Thomas of Eccleston (floruit 1240–50), who records, barely a generation after the event, that in the early years of the Order in England, the friars received support from clerics and laity who supplied plots of land and recruits. Countess Loretta, ‘a noblewoman who lived as an anchoress at Hackington’, cherished the friars ‘and discreetly exercised her influence’ to obtain favour for the four Friars Minor and five lay-brothers who arrived at Canterbury in 1224.[2] From the start, the brotherhood of Minorites comprised a novel type of educated religious available to aid the devotions of noblewomen as well as men. Kings Henry III and Edward I gave money to the Order, and over three reigns Queen Eleanor of Provence, Queen Margaret and Queen Isabella of England founded and financed the London Greyfriars and their church.[3] Favours were forthcoming from clerical and lay sources — for example, from Simon of Langton, brother of the Archbishop of Canterbury — and from Sir Henry of Sandwich, a wealthy merchant who gave land to the friars in 1225. Eccleston tells us that recruitment to the Order gathered momentum across all ranks.[4] By 1240, when Bartholomew was completing ‘Properties’ in Magdeburg, at least 29 English houses had been established; the first in the west midlands, followed by the south-east.[5]
With them the friars brought their training in preaching, their knowledge of popular stories and songs, and their experience of how to communicate with people of all ranks. Whether they brought books, we do not know. There is an absence of firm information about the first copies of the Latin ‘Properties’ to arrive in England, when they were brought, and whether by Franciscan preachers. At the time of the friars’ first arrival in England the Order was still grappling with the practical and ideological problems of absolute poverty and the use of books. It was not until the end of the century that papal directives legitimised the owning of property, including books, for the Minorites’ use, bringing them into line with the Dominicans. It is reasonable to speculate that ‘Properties’ may have come to the notice of English readers through preachers from the continent, where it had been available for copying under the Paris pecia system at the end of the century.[6] ‘Properties’ was a suitable, available work that met the needs of students, chaplains and preachers, providing exempla and stories with which to enliven their teaching. It also met the needs of scholars for a comprehensive, authoritative world book and useful compendium of sources.
The friars were initially welcomed as chaplains in the households of wealthy laity and as sympathetic pastors of the poor. These are two possible points of entry for ‘Properties’, both orally and as manuscripts, into wider circulation in England. One can imagine the difficulty of taking even Bartholomew’s handy compendium on a long journey, but an illustration in a manuscript of Rubruck’s journey to the land of the Tartars shows two friars with staves, each with a book slung on his back, suggesting that books were carried far afield in this way.[7] It is on record that in the fourteenth century Charles VI of France gave a safe-conduct to a Minorite who had bought four books in Paris, including ‘Properties’, and who wanted to return with them to London.[8] By the mid-fourteenth century, and possibly earlier, ‘Properties’ was a valued possession and reference work held in several private, college and monastery libraries in England. Its content was thus available to clerics of different levels of education, and to laypeople within the social networks that had access to these libraries.[9] Thomas Eccleston records that in the 1240s lecturers were appointed at the Franciscan houses and ‘[g]radually the gift of learning spread abroad over the whole English province’.[10] This implies the kind of network of exchange, borrowing and bequest that broadens the readership of a valued work.