Whether or not writers name Bartholomew, we know that ‘Properties’, with its affirming, normative representations of labour and reward, of lordship and the familia, would have fitted the social concerns of English landowners in the fourteenth century. ‘Properties’ preserved, and made available for preachers and readers, a fundamentally simple and understandable image of hierarchy upon which later interpretations could be based. Bartholomew’s descriptions of familiar animals such as asses, oxen and bees fitted the fourteenth-century convention of depicting agricultural labour as a metaphor for Christian life on earth. They also supplied models of harsh treatment. We might wonder, but cannot prove, whether exploited workers identified, through the medium of the mendicant’s sermon, with Bartholomew’s accounts of the serving woman bought and sold like a beast; with the victims of bad landlords who unfairly exacted tallages; with the dog, an excellent servant to his lord, ending his days lying on the dunghill; and with the overworked, abused and unrewarded ass, who even has his rough but serviceable coat taken from him after death.^[18]

Echoes of, and references to, Bartholomew do occur in new writings, although it is not possible to say whether writers knew the work directly. A. S. G. Edwards notes that there is a mention in the popular Ayenbyte of Inwyt (1340), by the Benedictine Michael of Northgate, of ‘a great scholar … called Bartholomew’.^[19] Baudouin van den Abeele has analysed manuscripts of sermon material, the Stella Clericorum, that testifies to the later use of animal exempla from ‘Properties’ and from Cantimpré’s De natura rerum as sources for preaching.^[20] More than half of the Contes Moralisés of the Franciscan preacher and writer Nicolas Bozon (d. c.1340) are thought to be based upon Bartholomew’s descriptions of the properties of animals and birds in Books 18 and 12, and of everyday life in Book 6. Another of Bozon’s sources, identified by Lucy Toulmin-Smith, is a ‘sevenfold Treatise of the Moralities of the heavenly bodies, of the elements, of animals, fish, trees or plants, herbs, and precious stones’.^[21] This is the Proprietates rerum moralizatae (or Liber moralizate) mentioned in Chapters 2 and 3 above.^[22] Toulmin-Smith observes that Bozon deals with ‘the moral aspects of all sorts of affairs in everyday life’ including social relations: ‘Evidently a man of experience among various orders of society, his sympathies are manifestly on the side of the poor against their oppression and robbery by rich masters and lords, while many of his stories are pointed against the great and powerful.’ However, Bozon distributes blame or admonitions to all classes; several of the contes treat relations between servants and masters, admonishing faults in both high and low, but not advocating a change in the status quo.^[23]

Gregory Kratzmann and Elizabeth Gee demonstrate connections between collections of exempla made in the early fourteenth century in response to preachers’ needs for sermon material. These include the Anglo-Norman Contes moralisés and the Latin Dialogus creaturatum moralizatus, and the earlier Proprietates rerum moralizate mentioned above.^[24] ‘Properties’ is a chief source for these three works, but how directly is not clear except perhaps in the case of the Moralizate, which clearly has close links to the glosses in ‘Properties’ (see Chapter 3). It is now agreed that the Moralizate is a late-thirteenth-century or early-fourteenth-century abridgement of ‘Properties’ that highlights its Franciscan teaching, possibly in the light of Bonaventure's Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, since the author gives it a carefully organised seven-fold form.^[25] In it, the writer has abstracted passages from ‘Properties’ Books 8, 4, 12, 13, 18, 17 and 16 and arranged them into seven tracts, explaining the moralised properties or conditiones of the heavenly bodies; elements; birds; fishes; animals; trees and plants; and precious stones. John Friedman notes the utility of its detailed index, which names the included subjects and also their conditiones: ‘Thus the user of the LM may find an item in the work according to the letter or to the spirit.’^[26] The Dialogus also has seven parts: on the heavenly bodies, the four elements, birds, fish, animals, plants, and gemstones. Like ‘Properties’, it had a long life. Translated into English as Dialoges of Creatures Moralysed, it went into print in Holland, copiously illustrated with woodcuts, in 1480 and 1530, probably for an English market and probably as a tool for preachers and as recreational reading for laity.^[27]

The writers of later works on salvation such as Jacob’s Well, The Litil Tretys on the Seven Deadly Sins, The Prick of Conscience, The Cloud of Unknowing, and Destructuorium Viciorum may also have been indebted, knowingly or unknowingly, to Bartholomew. At least some of them seem to use the glosses as well as the column text of ‘Properties’. Bartholomew’s learned yet lively exempla found their way into recorded sermons such as those of John Bromyard, Thomas Wimbledon, John Waldeby and other popular preachers.^[28] These and, no doubt, as yet undiscovered sources testify that while there was much new Latin and vernacular writing in later-medieval England, at the same time established Latin compendia of authorities, including ‘Properties’, were being preserved, owned, read and borrowed from on both sides of the English Channel, as Seymour’s studies of ownership have shown.^[29] We must conclude that their content fed into the pool of ideas available to writers, preachers and artists making new works for their own time. As Michael Twomey points out, a reception history of a medieval compilation such as ‘Properties’ is not likely to reveal clear lines of derivation; it should take into account the fluidity of medieval texts and their intertextual exchanges over time.^[30]