Over time, both the French and English translations of ‘Properties’ became perquisites of the educated and affluent in London as well as the west country. Ralph Hanna and, more recently, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton open up the question of how the translation became better known in the metropolis among literate laity, including merchants and lawyers.^[93] Hanna surmises that on the accession of Henry IV, Thomas Berkeley resumed his duties at court and his business affairs in London. He argues that Berkeley supplemented his rural living by urban activities in Bristol and London, and that his agent in London (and legatee) was one Robert Knolles, probably related to the alderman and grocer Thomas Knolles in London, and the grocer and merchant William Knolles in Bristol where Berkeley also had shipping interests.^[94] Berkeley’s contact with the merchant Robert Knolles shows that his business network extended beyond his own rank. His business activities, contacts and possession of a house in London enabled him to disseminate among other magnates, who met there from time to time on court matters, literary works translated under his patronage. As evidence, Hanna cites an early manuscript of On the Properties of Things, now British Library Additional Manuscript 27944, dated to before 1410 and written in a western dialect by three scribes, one of them (‘Scribe D’) a prolific westerner whose hand has also been identified in copies of works by Gower and Chaucer.^[95] Similar scribal evidence from a manuscript of Trevisa’s Polychronicon leads Hanna to conclude that a taste for Trevisan translation existed among the circle of magnates who patronised contemporary courtly verse, and who were Berkeley’s parliamentary colleagues. Berkeley’s activities in London included active publicising of his sponsored works among these colleagues and the book trade, and efforts to promote the commissioning of copies.^[96] The active involvement of Scribe D in Berkeley's projects, and the purchase of On the Properties of Things by a wealthy lawyer, Thomas Chaworth (1380–1459), supports this view.

Chaworth, of Wyverton, Nottinghamshire, another regional landowner with London connections, commissioned the sumptuous manuscript which is now Columbia University Manuscript Plimpton 263 in about 1440. Chaworth, then, had access to the Berkeley exemplar either personally or through his London agent, the merchant Richard Thorney, and considered it worth the expense of having it copied and embellished. While the record shows that Chaworth inherited his title, was a keen huntsman, the owner of coalmines in Derbyshire, and a Member of Parliament for 40 years, there is nothing in his known library to suggest that he was a scholarly or religious man; rather, that he was a lawyer and man of business. He bequeathed two copies of the Polychronicon and some legal works.^[97] His copy of On the Properties of Things is not mentioned in his will but it evidently stayed in the family, since the Chaworth manuscript passed to Sir Thomas’ kinsman and executor Richard Willoughby at the time of his death, and was later used by Wynkyn de Worde as a copy text for the printing of On the Properties of Things in Westminster in 1495. ^[98]

To sum up this chapter: there are some safe conclusions to be drawn from fragmentary and diverse forms of evidence about the role and reception of ‘Properties’ in England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Bartholomew’s accounts of the properties of things entered the pool of popular preaching and devotional material in England, and began to be diffused in written and in oral form before the end of the thirteenth century. The friars provided a channel for communicating ideas about penance and salvation through their preaching, but how far they used ‘Properties’ directly cannot well be demonstrated. However, it is arguable that some images and ideas are common to both ‘Properties’ and some of the sermon and devotional literature of the later Middle Ages, and that preaching was one mechanism for their dissemination through different ranks of society. People from all three estates could have imbibed Bartholomew’s imagery with or without a clear idea of its source.

Preserved manuscripts in academic settings and in lay libraries testify that ‘Properties’ had status as a religious authority in the centuries after it was compiled, among the mendicants and also among scholars of other orders who required a moralised or factual compendium of knowledge. More lavish manuscripts of translations of ‘Properties’ show that during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries lay people from the upper layers of society in France, Italy and England, especially, became its owners, patrons and re-writers. In appropriating the compilation they were also taking possession of the authorities within it and, in effect, helping to preserve and pass on the written body of knowledge that encompassed salvation, history and worldly wisdom. It was the economic, social and political patronage of the work as a prestigious possession that propelled ‘Properties’ and its compiler into the secular sphere and into noblemen’s libraries in the later Middle Ages.

While Bartholomew’s sub-textual images of pilgrimage, labour and salvation continued to be meaningful for readers, preachers and writers long after his own time, lay noblemen and women continued to find in the work’s allegorical depth and moral authority validation for their secular interests and values. As it was commodified by the wealthy and powerful, the conception of ‘Properties’ expanded and changed to meet the needs of a range of readers scarcely envisaged by Bartholomew. Publicised involvement with the work imbued the nobleman with both the spiritual gravitas and the worldly wisdom seen as necessary for good lordship. Moreover, the idea of the universe as a hierarchical system in which everything has its appointed place suggested, for the comfortably-off, a fundamental stability in the status quo. A well-made book that endorsed such an image of the world and society was itself a desirable piece of property. It is safe to assume that for patrons such as Thomas Berkeley and Thomas Chaworth, the English word ‘property’ implied not only a moral or physical attribute but also the family estate, the ships, the coalmines, the London house and the library.^[99]

‘Properties’ reflected and reinforced belief in the right and duty of lords to hold sway over the ‘things’ of their demesnes, even if in reality they were leasing out those demesnes and losing control over their peasant labour. Reciprocal obligation between the levels of society was an ideal which the powerful could at least acknowledge (if not put into practice) through their patronage of books of wisdom such as ‘Properties’, in Latin or the vernacular. This compilation’s value to noble patrons lay, arguably, in the fact that it was a ready-made compendium of received wisdom on a multitude of ‘things’, reflecting the diversity of creation itself. But it also presented an image of the world as the centre of an ordered, hierarchical cosmos, validating the ideal of a clearly-differentiated society ruled by those of highest rank.