Bartholomew’s status as an authority on nature tends to be confirmed by re-makers of ‘Properties’ in Latin and/or English who selected only from Books and chapters concerning birds, plants, stones and animals. For example, a fourteenth-century workshop-produced manuscript with a professional finish and layout, British Library Manuscript Royal 12 E iii, consists of Books 12, 16, 17 and 18 only, in Latin. It is stylishly produced in book-hand, well laid-out, with neatly coloured initials. The focus of the selection is on birds, fishes, stones and minerals, and herbs, with no reference to the elements in which they are found or to the medieval scheme of creation as a whole. The chapters of Book 17 on plants are reduced by the exclusion of the general, the exotic and the processed, while materials from the omitted first chapter on the general properties of trees and plants are made into two short chapters on leaves and flowers. A later hand has added alphabetical tables of the listed birds, stones and animals, as if to further organise the wealth of information.^[19] We cannot tell for whom it was made but this selection of Books of ‘Properties’ again suggests that Bartholomew was regarded as a marketable, acceptable source on the properties of birds, stones, plants and animals.

It does seem arguable that Properties in English provided information transmitted in the Latin bestiaries. For the writer of Mum and the Sothsegger in the 1390s, ‘Bartholomew the bestiary’ had been an authority on bees.^[20] A manuscript that has been described as a unique late-medieval representative of the bestiary genre in England, now in Cambridge University Library, draws heavily on Bartholomew as an acknowledged source supplemented by readers’ annotations in English.^[21] It is made in the form of a bestiary, with entries on animals, each with a prominent illustration and with each description of properties followed by a moral significatio. Its maker and original purpose are unknown, but the content and marginalia all suggest it could have supplied recreation, instruction and moral edification from bestiary sources. The manuscript indicates that Bartholomew was still seen as an authority and repository of even older authorities on the properties of animals, birds, fishes and plants late in the fifteenth century, but the illustrations suggest that the volume was designed to be diverting as well as instructive.^[22] It testifies to a continuity of interest in animals as moral examples along with a more empirical attitude in written texts to animals and birds as local and identifiable objects of interest. In spite of the fact that it does share some features with bestiary manuscripts, we need to ask what function a moralised collection of animal properties could have had in late-medieval England in a non-clerical context.