The later life and literary achievements of Gaston de Foix may help us to understand this valuation and this concept, and thus to be able to appreciate what ‘Properties’ could have had to offer him and, by extrapolation, other magnate patrons such as Thomas Berkeley. From what we know of Gaston’s life, his recorded devotion to hunting was more than just recreational. The hunting treatise that he wrote consists of two parts, the practical Livre de chasse and the devotional Livre d’ oraisons, which suggests that he found spiritual edification as well as physical satisfaction in his domination of the natural environment of his estates.^[66] Reconstructions of extensive pleasure-parks such as the 2000 acres of Hesdin in northern France, created in 1288, suggest that such a domain could have encompassed a wide variety of terrains and habitats, including vineyards, like a mini-creation. The theory and management practices of estates were similar across European chivalric culture. The typical English hunting park averaged about 200 acres, and contained coppiced woodland, dense woodland, open pasture with pollarded trees and vistas, ponds and rivers, all designed to protect but also reveal the many animals enclosed within the banked perimeter.^[67] For a nobleman of either country wishing to be seen to possess the full knowledge in practice and also in the form of written authority, ‘Properties’ would have provided references to ancient authority and covered the necessary ground. Books 17, 18, 13 and 12 treat the flora and fauna likely to be encountered in the lord’s domains, including domestic animals and birds, wild game, horses and hounds. Bartholomew includes chapters on the animals and birds of venery included by Gaston in his treatise (for example deer, hare, badger, otter); on the care as well as the physical and moral properties of hounds and horses; on different kinds of hawk and their capabilities; and on timber trees and crop plants. A glance at the tabula of ‘Properties’ would be enough to show a secular lord, even if he had little Latin, that this work held useful facts about the plant and animal life, terrains and waterways over which he aimed to keep his dominion. Nevertheless, the way Bartholomew draws noblemen’s secular contacts with the material world into the theological domain could have helped to sanctify for them their everyday lives, environments and status.^[68]

In Book 6 of ‘Properties’, Bartholomew is explicit about the duties and mutual obligations of lords and servants, and the need for lordship to maintain peace, order and good governance.^[69] John Trevisa makes these chapters resonate for a fourteenth-century secular lord:

There is much more on this theme, with further citations from Isidore of Seville, St Gregory, St Ambrose and the Bible to support it. Bartholomew asserts, independently of his sources, that obedience to a lord is an ordained means by which people learn to obey God:

It does not seem surprising that those who could see in these words authorisation for their own position as ‘set before others’ would want this book to circulate among their associates. In this same chapter on the good master, Bartholomew also presents a parallel between the situation of people, where God’s dispensation sets some before others, and the situation of animals, birds and other creatures such as bees:

While the clerical or monastic reader could have understood the bees to refer to themselves under their clerical leaders, the secular landowner could have seen in these words a reassuring vision of the ranks of creation over which he or she ruled, bees after all being one of the exploitable creatures on an estate.

We might infer from the cross-Channel examples given by Corbechon and Belcalzer that Berkeley had a similar perception of the writings of the learned and wise as a source of power to be annexed for temporal purposes. Berkeley has been described as the most important baronial castle in the area in the fourteenth century.^[72] Removed as they were from London and holding sway over the western port of Bristol, the Berkeley family wielded great power in their domains. Like Gaston de Foix, Thomas Berkeley IV was a great huntsman. According to John Smyth, ‘hee and his brothers have kept out four nights and days together with their nets and dogs in hunting of the fox … and with this delight of hunting this lord began and dyed’.^[73] The keeping of hounds, hawks and horses, the buying of land to create new deer parks, and ‘sea furnitures in a sumptuous manner’ kept for ‘delight and recreations’ on the river Severn, all indicate both means and leisure. Smyth styled him ‘Thomas the Magnificent’ in response to his lifestyle and expenditures. Thomas was made Admiral of the Fleet in Bristol, acquiring in effect a private navy. Ralph Hanna notes that his mercantile activities included wool-trading and probable piracy in the Bay of Biscay.^[74]

The English and French were at war at the time of the vernacular translations of ‘Properties’. Nevertheless they shared a chivalric culture expressed in hunting, heraldry and a body of literature. It is arguable that a highly important function of the English translation was the matching of Charles’s achievement, the countering of Corbechon’s interpretation, and the reclamation of Bartholomew for England, especially its south-west midlands. Trevisa already knew from Higden’s use in the The Polychronicon of material from Book 15 of ‘Properties’ that Bartholomew had presented the English from the comfortable point of view of a compatriot. The compiler had included the story of Britain’s Trojan origins and the descent of its kings from Brutus, and of St Gregory’s comparison of its children to angels; and the importance to the south-east English of Canterbury, the site of St Augustine's arrival and of the shrine of Thomas Becket. Kent was the only named part of England singled out by Bartholomew, and Trevisa is fluent in rendering the enthusiastically first-hand account of ‘þe plenteuouseste corner of þe world, ful ryche a londe þat vnneþe it nedeþ helpe of any londe’.^[75] Trevisa’s rhythmical alliteration may reflect a clerical reverence:

Trevisa is fluent, too, in rendering Bartholomew’s full and fulsome treatment of the English rose: ‘Among alle floures of þe worlde þe flour of þe rose is chief and bereþ þe prys, and þerfore ofte the chief partie of man, þe heed, is crowned with floures of rose, as Plius seith …’ For the pious reader these words could evoke the image of the martyrs crowned, or of the Virgin; but also an image of Englishness that would grow in political significance.^[77] Trevisa did not need to add or subtract anything in his translation of Bartholomew’s accounts of Britain, of Kent, or of the rose. Corbechon, on the other hand, working on the Livre des propriétés des choses during the Hundred Years’ War, had been obliged to make certain changes. Besides the addition at the end of Bartholomew’s chapter on the lily, stating that it was doubly superior to all other flowers, he criticises Bartholomew’s biased opinion concerning Brittany and modifies the statement on the German origin of the name of France, to accommodate a Trojan hero for the French genealogy.^[78] Trevisa’s Properties can help us to feel something of the complex dynamics of territorial allegiance at that time. For example, as we read the warmly approving account of Brittany in Book 15, we can imagine its emotive force for people like the Cornishman Trevisa and the people of the Bristol area, who might well feel kinship with Cornwall and Wales and the other Celtic provinces. In Trevisa’s words, Bartholomew states that Brittany (‘þe lesse Bretayne’) is really an offshoot of Britain (‘þe more Bretayne’) so that the Bretons are in fact Britons of a slightly inferior quality: ‘And þeiʒe þis Bretayne be worþi and noble in many þinges, ʒit may nouʒt the douʒter be pere to þe modir.’^[79]