For the above writers, ‘Properties’ was an available work that presented an image of the created world within a divinely ordered cosmos, but that also focused attention upon the physical world in all its immense variety and significance, spiritual and material. It could appeal to both clergy and laity. While the Latin ‘Properties’ continued to be disseminated among clerics and held safely in abbey libraries, its earliest known associations with England place it in the south-west, at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, in a secular household of local nobility who maintained a strong connection with the work over three centuries.

Thomas Eccleston records that some time after 1240 the Franciscan brothers at the Gloucester house (established by 1230), having parted with some ground at an earlier date, managed to regain it ‘with considerable difficulty from Lord Thomas Berkeley only through the wisdom and favour of his lady’.^[49] This lady was Joan, wife of Thomas I (1170–1243). As a widow, in about 1250 she ‘essentially refounded’ the town of Wotton-under-Edge in the neighbourhood of Berkeley Castle, earning the title domina de Wotton.^[50] There is no evidence that Joan employed a Franciscan chaplain or confessor, but as an interested and influential person who championed the local friars, and whose husband had given them land, she exemplifies the kind of opportunity that existed for friars to become integrated into the upper ranks of English landed society as well as with the poor of the towns — an opportunity for them to introduce their own reading material, attitudes and image of the world.

We lose sight of Joan but there is evidence that the work came into the possession of her daughter-in-law Lady Johanna Berkeley (d.1310), who married Lord Thomas Berkeley II (1245–1326) in 1267, and that it circulated back to a clerical library as a valued commemorative item. This is witnessed in a donation made to the friars before 1310, recorded in a discarded list of donations to the Ipswich Franciscan house (established 1226).^[51] One listed donor was domina Johanna de Berkele, who also left songs both sacred and secular, stories, saints’ lives, glossed books of the Bible, liturgical items and Hugonem de arca Noe (which, as we saw in the last chapter, was a text concerning salvation, associated with a form of world map).^[52] Bartholomew stands in this list alongside other religious texts, implying high status in the library of a well-read laywoman who considered it worthy of a commemorative function. Her bequest supplements other evidence that ‘Properties’ may have been circulating in the west country by early in the fourteenth century.^[53] It also situates the work within the Berkeley family, members of which continued to be patrons of learning and letters over several generations. According to Smyth, the eighteenth-century Berkeley steward and chronicler, Thomas Berkeley III (d.1361) sponsored ‘an hopefull scholler’ of the neighbourhood and founded numerous chapels and chantries.^[54] It was under Thomas III that John Trevisa started his translation work. Thomas’ first wife, Margaret, founded the grammar school at the local town of Wotton-under-Edge. In the 1390s, his son by his second wife, Thomas Berkeley IV (1352–1417), included ‘Properties’ among the set of prose texts considered worth the effort and expense of translation at the hands of the clerical servant, John Trevisa, whom he inherited from his father.^[55] Thomas IV’s daughter and heiress, Elizabeth, would continue in her family’s footsteps as a patroness of letters and especially of translation.^[56]

In 1398 Trevisa, of Cornish birth but a long-time resident and chaplain at Berkeley Castle, completed On the Properties of Things, a translation of the 19 Books of ‘Properties’ into the local dialect of the region.^[57] On the Properties of Things was not Trevisa’s first large literary undertaking for Sir Thomas. In 1387 he had completed his translation of Higden's The Polychronicon, another lengthy text.^[58] There is no explanatory prologue at the beginning of any of the extant manuscripts of either The Polychronicon or On the Properties of Things, and it is only at the very end of the latter that Trevisa gives us a glimpse of himself in the act of signing off: ‘þise translaciouns i-ended at Berkeleye, the sixte day of Feuerer ... the ʒeere of my lordes age, Sire Thomas, lord of Berkeley, that made me make this translacioun, seuene and fourty.’^[59] To gain some insight into the motivations behind the repeat of such a major undertaking we are obliged to look across the Channel at similar ventures taking place there, and extrapolate from prologues supplied by continental translators of ‘Properties’ into Italian and French.