Hanna notes that Berkeley was expelled from his court post in the conflict between Richard and the Appellants and that this conflict followed him to Gloucestershire.^[80] In spite of Richard II’s attempts to make an alliance with Charles VI and his second marriage to the French princess Isabel in 1396, hostilities were to be renewed by Henry V in 1415. Richard II’s uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, with his military library and deep distrust of the French, was one English nobleman who opposed peace negotiations.^[81] Berkeley may well have had similar views reflected in Trevisa’s translation of ‘Properties’. The record of Thomas IV’s troubles with local lawless men in the king’s pay shows the effects of the factionalism being generated at this stage of Richard II’s reign, and Trevisa’s own involvement in support of his lord. Richard II visited Berkeley in 1386 and may have had a particular interest in it as the place where his great-grandfather Edward II had died, but the visit may have been a tense one for both guests and hosts. In the 1380s, as Trevisa was working there as chaplain and translator for the Berkeley family, Richard was enlisting support from the people further north, especially in Cheshire, and favouring the city of York after his quarrel with London.^[82] Patronage was a means of giving support to dependents and legitimising aspirations to leadership in society. When Berkeley commissioned from his chaplain translations of Higden’s Polychronicon and Giles of Rome’s De Principe he was not only satisfying his own thirst for knowledge; he was also enhancing his reputation at a time when he was being challenged in his domains by the rise of the favourites of King Richard II. To be seen to honour a writer could add greatly to a lord’s prestige; it was part and parcel of the process of image-building.^[83]

Trevisa’s first translation made for Thomas Berkeley IV in 1386, that of the Polychronicon, encompassed the history of Britain and the role in it of legendary and recent Worthies. Berkeley too could have sought to project an image of himself as a worthy man of learning, building a library of books to support his wisdom and skill as a military lord. Properties arguably had a place as an informational work in Berkeley’s library complementary to that of the Polychronicon. Ralph Hanna, discussing the question of the ‘usefulness’ of Trevisa’s texts, points to the comprehensive nature of the main items in the Trevisan translation program (Higden’s Polychronicon 1386, De regimine principum, Properties 1398):

Or, to extrapolate from Elizabeth Salter’s discussion of late-medieval poetry, whereas the Polychronicon can be said to present a `typological’ account of creation and peoples down the ages, Properties presents a `structural’ image of the world predicated upon the doctrine of promise, fulfilment and reward.^[85] At the same time, the manuscript Arundel 123 allows us to infer that fourteenth-century readers could associate ‘Properties’ Book 15, the wisdom of Aristotle, and the Worthies Alexander and Julius Caesar. It suggests that Bartholomew’s account of the properties of things could support a quantitative and material, as well as qualitative and moralised, image of the world.

Richard Firth Green suggests that the books that Trevisa (and later John Walton under the patronage of Thomas IV’s daughter Elizabeth) translated for the Berkeley family were the very titles that a nobleman would have needed to instruct him in history, in military practice and chivalric ethos, and in the principles of good government.^[86] Sometime between The Polychronicon (1386, from the Latin universal history compiled by Ralph Higden c.1350) and On the Properties of Things (1398), Trevisa also translated the Gospel of Nicodemus (a source of Arthurian matter basic to the chivalric ideal), probably De Regimine Principum of Giles of Rome, and Fitzralph’s Defensio Curatorum. It is instructive to compare this list with the library of the king’s uncle, Thomas Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, which included The Polychronicon and De proprietatibus rerum in Latin; De Regimine Principum; Vegetius’ De Re Militari; epics, romances and poetry and Mandeville’s Travels in French.^[87] The comparison indicates that the known canon of works translated by Trevisa under the patronage of Berkeley embraced subjects appropriate for a secular nobleman asserting local dominance and promoting a chivalric image of sound learning and lineage.

John Trevisa, a cleric himself, may well have been interested in testing the capabilities of the language for works that combined a devotional with an informational purpose. Waldron sees Trevisa as the introducer of a new genre of faithful prose translation of non-canonical works of historical and scientific information, within a possibly continuous, Alfredian tradition in western England of providing useful learning for nobility.^[88] In the 1380s and 1390s, the Cornish-born Trevisa was an innovator, trying out his adopted Gloucestershire vernacular for new purposes, and striving to convey underlying meaning by using the familiar and, at times, colloquial language of his circle.^[89]

It seems important to keep in mind, however, that in spite of Trevisa’s care to translate the Latin accurately, giving sense for sense, the vernacular must have imposed a late-fourteenth-century interpretation upon the original. His transformation of natura into ‘kynde’, for example, turns the meaning away from that of divine intermediary towards something more mundane, that of breeding or generation. The situation at Berkeley presents a fascinating parallel with that in London, where Chaucer was using the south-eastern dialect to translate Latin literature and present it in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Richard’s court. In Chaucer’s work the concept of nature appears as something different again: ‘the noble goddess of kind’ presiding over the birds in The Parlement of Foules is a mythologised and firmly gendered figure far removed both from Trevisa’s ‘kynde’ and Bartholomew’s natura.^[90]

The very provincialism of the Berkeleys suggests a reason for their eagerness for translations and for their appreciation of the Latin ‘Properties’ as a suitable subject. To Berkeley’s desire to exert patronage, and his apparent pride in the English language, could have been added a local inability to take advantage of existing French translations. Trevisa interpolates the comment in The Polychronicon that in all the grammar schools of England children are being taught not in French but in English; the disadvantage being that now ‘childern of gramerscole conneþ no more Frensch þan can here lift heele … Also gentil men habbeþ now moche yleft for to teche here childern Frensch.’^[91] This suggests a linguistic divide between the south-west (and Trevisa cites schoolmasters with Cornish names) and the Westminster court which, with its French tutors, visitors, books and later queen, was still to some extent bilingual. The French translation made by Corbechon for Charles V in 1372 may have set a precedent for the English translation of 20-odd years later and, according to Michael Seymour, in educated and courtly circles where there was a growing demand for vernacular books, the Livre des propriétés des choses was beginning to establish itself.^[92] Nevertheless, a picture emerges of the Berkeley translation project as a regional undertaking, taking a stance on the appropriateness of English prose for serious English writing, within the context of a general and growing demand by laypeople for devotional and utilitarian literature in the vernacular. At this point in the journey of ‘Properties’ as it lived on in popular and courtly cultures of late-medieval England, we can see patron and chaplain in a regional setting, responding to challenges that were both linguistic and political.