David C. Fowler

    John Trevisa was born in Cornwall, studied at Oxford University, and, having come to the attention of the Berkeley family, he was instituted vicar of Berkeley, a position he held until his death in 1402. Even these few facts are not easy to come by, and I must confess to a complete ignorance of this man until some ten years after completing my graduate work in English. At the time I was writing a book on Piers the Plowman, a fourteenth-century alliterative poem existing in three versions, the earliest of which (the "A"-text) I had edited as a dissertation and later published (1952), in posthumous collaboration with Thomas A. Knott. Since the circumstances of my discovery of Trevisa are importantly related to some of my theories about him, it seems only proper to relate briefly how he came to my attention.

    The book I was working on was Piers the Plowman: Literary Relations of the A and B Texts (1961), and one of the problems I faced in writing it was identifying, in a chapter entitled "Principles of Order in the B-Continuation," the literary sources or influences that determined the shape of the latter half of the"B" text or second version of Piers the Plowman (B passus XI-XX). One of those influences, I concluded, was the fourteenth-century Latin chronicle by Ranulph Higden known as the Polychronicon, and almost immediately this brought Trevisa to my attention, since his English translation was included in the Rolls Series edition of the Latin Polychronicon published in nine Volumes in 1865-86.

    One of the distinctive features of Trevisa's translation of the Polychronicon is his inclusion of notes, usually prefixed by his name, commenting on the text he is translating. These notes are often quite opinionated, and I noticed right away that the views of

A wise man would ween that Earl Roger had as much meed of that he was a monk, as Malkyn of her maidenhood, that no man would have, and not a deal more.

Could Trevisa have known Piers the Plowman? In the earliest version of the poem the author is addressing wealthy men, and warns them against relying on external religiosity as a means of achieving salvation (A 1 157-8):

The traditional allusion to Malkyn as a country girl of loose morals is not at issue here, since this Malkyn has her virginity intact (whether or not it is to her own credit), a point stressed epigrammatically in both of these quotations and nowhere else to my knowledge.

    In addition to the Polychronicon, another source of influence in the shaping of the B-continuation of Piers the Plowman, it seemed to me, was the medieval drama. Yet after I had read through the four major biblical cycles in Middle English, with one eye on the B version, passus XI-XX, I was disappointed in that, apart from certain general parallels (and one important connection with the Chester Doomsday), there was nothing very specific to authenticate my conviction that the poet was influenced by the drama. Then I remembered a fact acquired in graduate school: there was a fifth cycle of medieval drama in England, little known because it was in a different language: the Cornish Ordinalia.

    Not really expecting to find much, but for the sake of completeness, I began plowing through the ten thousand lines of Cornish biblical drama, with the aid of a translation by Edwin Norris (1859). What I found, in brief, were two important passages

    My eventual conclusion from all this was that Trevisa, a Cornishman, although too young to have been the author of the A text of Piers (c. 1362), may possibly have been responsible for the revision and continuation of that text in the two forms known as the B and C texts. On the strength of this belief I added a chapter to Literary Relations entitled "About the Author" in which I frankly set forth the Trevisa hypothesis. But subsequently my main efforts were directed toward learning more about the man himself and his corner of the world: medieval Cornwall. Before going to Britain for the first time I taught a seminar in the Cornish language, barely keeping ahead of the students in the small grammar by Caradar (A. S. D. Smith) that we were using. Two of the students in this seminar eventually visited Cornwall and did significant work in Cornish literature.

    In the spring of 1959 I went to Cornwall and enjoyed the hospitality of Mr. E. G. R. Hooper, who was named Grand Bard of Cornwall later that same year (after the death of R. Morton Nance), and there I learned for the first time of the movement to revive the Cornish language, which had died out some century and a half previously. Quite apart from the documentary research that I did there, the experience of meeting people like Mr. and Mrs. Hooper enabled me to get a sense of the Cornish culture within Britain, still seeking to maintain itself even after all the centuries that had passed since the time of Trevisa. My indebtedness to many friends in Cornwall gained over the years can never be fully expressed.

    In addition to the Cornish phase of my studies I wanted to follow Trevisa's path, first to Oxford and eventually to Berkeley (including some time in London at the British Museum and Public

    Going to Berkeley was perhaps to some extent a sentimental journey: I simply wanted to see the castle and the church where Trevisa had been vicar in the final years of his life. Yet the possibility of new discoveries also beckoned, since the muniment room of the castle contained much of importance, and had not been available to researchers for many years. Even A. J. Perry, whose edition of Trevisa's minor works (1925) contains the fullest and best account of the translator's life, was unable to have access to the castle.

    My efforts over a period of time to gain entry to the Berkeley muniment room (ultimately successful) will not be detailed here. Needless to say, I am very much indebted to Major John Berkeley and to the Trustees of the Estate for making it possible for me to work there. What is still vivid in my mind from the first visit to Berkeley in 1959 is the church, which is very little changed from what was likely to have been its appearance when Trevisa was vicar. I arrived there on a beautiful spring afternoon, completely anonymous, intent only on visiting the church for my own satisfaction. The setting is beautiful: it is very near the Castle but hidden by a wall and almost surrounded by a grove of trees. The birds were singing and sunlight illuminated the glass of the west window as I entered. In the south aisle was the tomb of Thomas III, Lord Berkeley, who may have originally been responsible for giving Trevisa the opportunity to study at Oxford.

    While I was sitting in one of the pews, thinking fourteenth-century thoughts, and completely alone in that large church, in walked a black-robed figure, a man who turned out to be the Vicar of Berkeley. When I was later recounting this experience to a colleague in Seattle, he responded anxiously: "Do you mean the present Vicar of Berkeley?" And indeed it was Canon J. H. W.

    Although I have since been occupied with other kinds of research in subsequent visits to England in 1962-63,1969-70,1975-76, the summer of 1979, and in 1982-83, my interest in Trevisa has persisted, and my memory of the original visit of 1959 remains a strong factor in motivating me to write a biography of John Trevisa, an effort made possible by the aforementioned leaves of absence from the University of Washington. Constructing the life of a somewhat obscure fourteenth-century scholar and translator can scarcely be called "biography" in the modern sense, since the facts are few, and about all one can do is try to fit these facts into a hypothetical account within a historical setting (a procedure that I find myself referring to as "drawing lines to connect the dots"). In the case of Trevisa we have a little more evidence of personal views than might be expected, in his notes to the Polychronicon; without these we might well despair of ever getting inside his mind.

    Even the facts about Trevisa have been strangely elusive, however, perhaps in part because there has been no standard biography, and even the valuable introduction to his life published by Perry in 1925 is not widely known. Probably most readers would likely rely on the Dictionary of National Biography, where there are two columns devoted to him which contain more than a half-dozen misleading statements: both dates are wrong; he was not born at Crocadon; he was not a canon of Westbury-on-Severn; his writing of verses from the Apocalypse on the walls of a chapel is not in Berkeley church; he is not the translator of the Methodius tract or Vegetius' De Re Militari (the latter was indeed completed in 1408, but that was six years after Trevisa's death); there is no internal evidence (beyond the allegation of John Shirley) that the Gospel of Nicodemus was translated at the request of Lord

    The comedy of errors surrounding efforts to determine the dates of Trevisa's birth and death may serve to illustrate the problems facing a would-be biographer. Even Chaucer's birth-date is not known, so it is not surprising that we have no record of the year of Trevisa's birth. And it is to the credit of the earliest writers who refer to him that they do not try to guess the date, but merely affirm that he was born in Cornwall. But beginning with Thomas Fuller in the seventeenth century, efforts were made to fix upon a date, with the result that Trevisa is said to have been born at times ranging from 1322 "or before" to 1342. This wide divergence, however, can be explained.

    The very early dates for Trevisa's birth are guesses based on William Caxton's curious change in the date of completion of the translation of Higden's Polychronicon. Trevisa had written the following conclusion (modernized):

For whatever reason Caxton in 1482 printed this same passage with the completion date changed to 1357. It was not a mere misprint, for he then proceeded to change the regnal date to "the 31st year of King Edward the Third" which is correct for the earlier date he had inserted. Afterwards when John Smyth of Nibley was writing his Lives of the Berkeleys (about 1622, though the work was not published until much later), he accepted Caxton's date, but

    This can be seen easily in the speculations of Thomas Fuller, writing in the middle of the seventeenth century:

It is this sort of conjecture that gave rise to the assortment of early dates that we find in most later notices. Thus Boase and Courtney (1874-82) have 1326, and this is repeated by Kingsford in the Dictionary of National Biography, who gives Trevisa's dates as 1326-1412.

    A death date is usually easier to find: we know that Chaucer died in 1400. But even here Trevisa did not escape the curse of inaccuracy. The first person to cite the date of his death was John Smyth of Nibley (in his Lives of the Berkeleys, c. 1622, I, 22), who gives it as 1412, citing the Worcester episcopal register. This date is repeated toward the end of the seventeenth century by Henry Wharton (who consulted Smyth), and thereafter by Tanner, Towneley, Babington, Rogers, Boase and Courtney, Cooke, Jeayes, C. W. Boase, and Kingsford in the Dictionary of National Biography. It was not until the present century that Wilkins (1915) and Perry (1925) discovered the correct date (1402) in the Worcester Episco-

    Ironically, the best guess for the date of Trevisa's birth (1342) first appears in Fabricius (1735) as an apparent misreading of an entry on Trevisa in Bale's Catalogus (1557), which erroneously states that Trevisa's continuation of the Polychronicon extended from 1342 to 1397. Fabricius seems to have read the first figure as Trevisa's birth date. This is then picked up by Rogers (1870) who states flatly that Trevisa was "born in the year 1342." To my knowledge the only person to arrive at the date 1342 as I have (based on the date of his arrival in Oxford: 1362) is C. W. Boase in his edition of the Registry of Exeter College (1894), where he gives the date of Trevisa's birth as "about 1342." But old traditions die hard. Even the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, I, 467 (1974) cautiously gives the birth date as c.1330.

    One might suppose that this discussion of dates is much ado about nothing, but in the case of Trevisa, at least, this is not so, because important inferences have been made by the use of these dates. Thus the attribution to Trevisa of the Pedigree of the Berkeley family, for example, which records the birth dates of children ending with the birth of John on 21 January 1351, is based on the assumption that he was already an educated adult attached to Lord Berkeley in the thirteen-fifties. John Smyth had first proposed this in his Lives (I, 7), whence it was picked up by Shrapnell (1808), and in turn by Jeayes who, in his published catalogue of the muniments in Berkeley Castle (1892), carries it a step further and says that Select Roll 102 (the document in question) "was the original production, if not in the very handwriting of John Trevisa." Both Wilkins and Perry list this Roll among Trevisa's works without question. A translation of Vegetius' De Re Militari is dated 1408, and was attributed to Trevisa until this century, when the true date of his death was discovered. I should add that some uncertainty remains: when did Trevisa become chaplain to Lord Berkeley? when vicar of Berkeley?

    The first three chapters of my biography (on Cornwall, Oxford, and Berkeley) will deal directly with Trevisa's life, beginning in each case with what is known or can be inferred. The chapter on translations will discuss Trevisa's known works, and the final two chapters will present hypotheses in which I have associated Trevisa with translation of the Early Version of the Wyclif Bible (in the thirteen-seventies), and with revision of Piers the Plowman (B version 1378-83; C version, c. 1388 or later). Students of medieval literature will certainly be aware that these latter chapters are highly theoretical, but it is well at this point to acknowledge publicly that the final two chapters of my biography will not represent an accepted point of view. Naturally it is my hope that subsequent research by others, with more specialized knowledge than I have, will disprove or (preferably) confirm the truth of these two hypotheses concerning Trevisa, who has suffered enough (as we have seen) from the slings and arrows of misinformation.

    By way of conclusion let me say that colleagues in the field of Piers Plowman studies have treated me kindly. After all, it might have been tempting to brand me as a Baconian, but they have not done so, and for that I am grateful. Their silence I interpret as respectful and skeptical. One of the few scholars to address the question directly in recent years has been John M. Bowers in his book The Crisis of Will in Piers Plowman (1986). In the opening chapter he develops a hypothesis that the poet's education went no farther than a cathedral school, perhaps that of Worcester, which was not far from the Malvern Hills mentioned in the poem. In arguing against the suggestion that the author was educated at Oxford, Bowers remarks "the reader of Piers Plowman is forced to conclude that the poet was very much unlike John Trevisa" for the following reasons: the B-poet shows no signs of being a foreign traveler, admits to behaving contemptuously to social superiors such as Lord Berkeley would have been, and betrays little of the encyclopedic lore to be gained from Bartholomeus or the historiographical method to be found in Higden.... (p. 18)

    Since offering my Trevisa hypothesis I have tried to avoid defending it at every turn, but let me now make an exception to

    Second it is the Dreamer, not the B-poet, who "admits to behaving contemptuously to social superiors." Such a blurring of the distinction between Dreamer and author would never be tolerated in Chaucer studies, and it is even more important to guard against it in "Langland" studies where the practice is rampant. But even if we tolerated it in this case, what is to be done with those numerous passages in the B text reflecting aristocratic interests (See Appendix, "Berkeley" for examples)?

    Third, Bowers sees little evidence of the method of Higden or the lore of Bartholomeus in the poem. As regards the former I am at a loss, since he makes no attempt to invalidate my numerous examples of connections between the B-text and the Polychronicon both as regards the general structure of the B-continuation and its poetic details. As for Bartholomeus, we should not be surprised at the absence of his lore from the B-text, written perhaps a decade before the translation of the De Proprietatibus Rerum was undertaken.

    Finally, Bowers is skeptical that one person could have had time to write Piers Plowman and also translate so many works. Of course no one can provide a certain answer to such an objection, and I should add that my theory of authorship remains just that: a theory. But that theory includes a hypothetical chronology: Trevisa's shorter translations were probably completed during his stay in Exeter College (1362-69); his help with the Wyclif Bible occurred at Queens during the period 1370-78; revision of Piers Plowman was undertaken following his expulsion from Queens in the years 1378-83; the Polychronicon translation was completed in 1387; translation of the De Regimine Principum of Aegidius Romanus probably belongs to the period 1388-92 along with the C-revision of Piers Plowman accomplished during that same time; and finally the encyclopedia of Bartholomeus was translated during 1394-99.

    In reciting the above chronology I may sound a bit more confident than I am. But in the midst of so much uncertainty it is probably best to be decisive. My theory that John Trevisa was responsible for the B and C versions of Piers Plowman may indeed be improbable; the only thing more improbable, in my opinion, is the theory that they were written by William Langland.

University of Washington