Sir John Mandeville, fl. 1350 (?). The name under which the famous book of travels, composed about 1350, was written. The author is possibly identical with Jean de Bourgogne, who died at Liège, Nov. 1372. Earliest known MS. in French, 1371. First printed: in Dutch, 1470 (?); in German, 1475 (?); in French, 1480; in Italian, 1480; in Latin, 1485 (?); in English, 1499.
Besides the French, English, and Latin texts, there are others in Italian and Spanish, Dutch and Walloon, German, Bohemian, Danish, and Irish, and some three hundred manuscripts are said to have survived. In English Dr. Vogels enumerates thirty-four. In the British Museum are ten French, nine English, six Latin, three German, and two Irish manuscripts.
I, John Maundevylle, Knyght, alle be it I be not worthi, that was born in Englond, in the Town of Seynt Albones, passed the See, in the Zeer of our Lord Jesu Crist MCCCXXII, in the Day of Seynt Michelle; and hidre to have ben longe tyme over the See, and have seyn and gon thorghe manye dyverse Londes, and many Provynces and Kingdomes and Iles, and have passed thorghe Tartarye, Percye, Ermonye the litylle and the grete; thorghe Lybye, Caldee, and a gret partie of Ethiope; thorghe Amazoyne, Inde the lasse and the more, a gret partie; and thorghe out many othere Iles, that ben abouten Inde; where dwellen many dyverse Folkes, and of dyverse Maneres and Lawes, and of dyverse Schappes of Men…. And zee schulle undirstonde, that I have put this Boke out of Latyn into Frensche, and translated it azen out of Frensche into Englyssche, that every Man of my Nacioun may undirstonde it.
A lytell Treatise or Booke, named John Mandevyll, Knyht, borne in Englande, in the towne of Saynt Abone, and speaketh of the wayes of the Holy Lande toward Jherusalem, and of the Marvyles of Ynde and other diverse Countries.
John Mandevil Knight, borne in the Towne of S. Albans, was so well given to the study of Learning from his childhood, that he seemed to plant a good part of his felicitie in the same: for he supposed, that the honour of his Birth would nothing availe him, except he could render the same more honourable, by his knowledge in good letters. Having therefore well grounded himselfe in Religion, by reading the Scriptures, he applied his studies to the Art of Physicke, a Profession worthy a noble Wit: but amongst other things, he was ravished with a mightie desire to see the greater parts of the World, as Asia and Africa.
Captain Robert Pugh assures me that Sir John Mandeville, the famous traveller, lyes buryed at Liege in Germany, with which note amend lib. Bd, where I thought he had been buryed at St. Alban’s abbey church as Mr. Thomas Gore told me. But I thinke I remember something writt of him there in a table on a pillar or wall: but he was there borne (as in his life).
There are no books, which I more delight in than in travels, especially those that describe remote countries, and give the writer an opportunity of showing his parts without incurring any danger of being examined or contradicted. Among all the authors of this kind, our renowned countryman, Sir John Mandeville, has distinguished himself, by the copiousness of his invention and greatness of his genius. The second to Sir John I take to have been Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, a person of infinite adventure, and unbounded imagination. One reads the voyages of these two great wits, with as much astonishment as the travels of Ulysses in Homer, or of the Red Cross Knight in Spenser. All is enchanted ground, and fairy-land.
Mandeville has become proverbial for indulging in a traveler’s exaggerations; yet his accounts of the countries which he visited have been found far more veracious than had been imagined. His descriptions of Cathay, and the wealthy province of Mangi, agreeing with those of Marco Pollo, had great authority with Columbus.
I will undertake to say that, of no book, with the exception of the Scriptures, can more manuscripts be found of the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth centuries.
Mandeville was the Bruce of the fourteenth century, as often calumniated, and even ridiculed. The most ingenuous of voyagers has been condemned as an idle fabulist; the most cautious, as credulous to fatuity; and the volume of a genuine writer, which has been translated into every European language, has been formally ejected from the collection of authentic travels. His truest vindication will be found by comprehending him; and, to be acquainted with his character, we must seek for him in his own age…. Sir John Mandeville’s probity remains unimpeached; for the accuracy of whatever he relates from his own personal observation has been confirmed by subsequent travellers.
More credulous than the most bigotted monk.
Although the dialect of Mandeville exhibits the language, upon the whole, in a more developed phase than the works of any preceding author, there is otherwise nothing in his volume which marks him as an Englishman. It is purely a record of observations, and a detail of information gathered from other resources.
His style is clear, simple, and natural. It is to a modern reader the easiest of all the English writings of the fourteenth century; and it is certainly the most entertaining.
Extraordinary legends and fables, every sort of credulity and ignorance, abound in his book.
Gives us his gossipy, fugacious travels that stint at no marvels, and grant to myths as easy admittance as if the author were at a fairy tale. There are thus huddled together, fancies for the poet and a few facts for the historian; as first reapers, on the margin of a great field, may gather and bind in one sheaf, grass and flowers and scattered heads of grain.
One of the most remarkable features of this singular work is the evidence it affords of a great advance in geographical knowledge since the period of the first crusade. Mandeville devotes the whole of a highly-interesting chapter to an attempt to prove the earth a sphere, and the existence of antipodes not only possible but in the highest degree probable. From a scientific point of view this chapter is worth all the rest of the book put together, as it affords evidence that during his long sojourn at Cairo he had become indoctrinated with the systems of Arab geographers.
An ingenuous voyager; the first example of the liberal and independent gentleman journeying over the world in pursuit of knowledge, honored wherever he went for his talents and personal acomplishments. If he was gossipy and credulous, it was because his age was so. The critic who thus comprehends him, will neither calumniate nor ridicule him. A journey over the globe at that distant day was scarcely less solemn than a departure to the realm of spirits; and, considering the circumstances under which he travelled and wrote, he must be conceded to have been a remarkable man. If he related fables, he did it honestly, while other accounts, long resting on his single and unsupported authority, have been confirmed by later discoveries,—as the burning of widows on the funeral pile of their husbands—the artificial egg-hatching in Egypt—the spheroidal form of the earth—the crocodile—the hippopotamus—the Chinese predilection for small feet—the trees which bear wool of which clothing is made.
That none of the forms of the English version can conceivably be from the same hand which wrote the original work is made patent to any critical reader by their glaring errors of translation, but the form now current asserts in the preface that it was made by Mandeville himself, and this assertion has been taken on trust by almost all modern historians of English literature. The words of the original “je eusse cest livret mis en latin … mais … je l’ay mis en romant” were mistranslated as if “je eusse” meant “I had” instead of “I should have,” and then (whether of fraudulent intent or by the error of a copyist thinking to supply an accidental omission) the words were added “and translated it agen out of Frensche and Englyssche.” Schönborn and Mätzner respectively seem to have been the first to show that the current Latin and English texts cannot possibly have been made by Mandeville himself. Dr. J. Vogels states the same of unprinted Latin versions which he has discovered in the British Museum, and he has proved it as regards the Italian version. The terseness, the simplicity, and the quaintness of the English version, together with the curiosity of the subject-matter, will always make it delightful reading; but the title “father of English prose,” which in its stricter sense already belonged to King Alfred, must in its looser sense be now transferred to Wickliffe.
SIR JOHN,—Wit you well that men holden you but light, and some clepen you a Liar. And they say that you never were born in Englond, in the town of Seynt Albones, nor have seen and gone through manye diverse Londes. And there goeth an old knight at arms, and one that connes Latyn, and hath been beyond the sea, and hath seen Prester John’s country. And he hath been in an Yle that men clepen Burmah, and there bin women bearded. Now men call him Colonel Henry Yule, and he hath writ of thee in his great booke, Sir John, and he holds thee but lightly. For he saith that ye did pill your tales out of Odoric his book, and that ye never saw snails with shells as big as houses, nor never met no Devyls, but part of that ye say, ye took it out of William of Boldensele his book, yet ye took not his wisdom, withal, but put in thine own foolishness. Nevertheless, Sir John, for the frailty of Mankynde, ye are held a good fellow, and a merry; so now, come, I shall tell you of the new ways into Ynde.
There seems to be no reason for questioning the authenticity of Maundeville’s book, but very great reason for considering it to have been based partly upon actual experience, partly upon compilation from records of other men who had been about in the world. The object was to make a book of travels in which, for unity of plan, the Holy Places of Jerusalem should be approached from different directions, and the record of what was to be seen should be made full, lively, and interesting. Obviously, also, the information given would be received most easily and pleasantly if it were associated throughout with the movements of a single traveller. In all forms of instruction writers then incorporated the experiences and thoughts of their predecessors, and repeated thoughts or facts without much regard for the claims of the men by whom they were first uttered or discovered. What should we think now of a Dan Michel who issued an “Ayenbite of Inwit” as a book for the English people without mentioning that it was translated from the French? Remembering the difference of times, and that in a tale of travel there must be a traveller, who will excite most interest when he speaks in his own person, we need not reproach Sir John Maundeville—who is but a name—for eking out his own experience with the experiences of other men when he made a travel book for general instruction and delight.
What we may count for certain about the matter is this:—There does exist a very considerable budget of delightfully extravagant travellers’ tales, bearing the Mandeville name, and written in an English which—with some mending of bygone words—is charming now: and which may be called the first fair and square book of the new English prose;—meaning by that—the first book of length and of popular currency which introduced a full measure—perhaps over-running measure—of those words of Romance or Latin origin, which afterward came to be incorporated in the English of the fifteenth century. The book has no English qualities—beyond its language; and might have been written by a Tartar, who could tell of Munchausen escapes and thank God in good current dialect of Britain.
For a long time, and up to our day, the title and dignity of “Father of English prose” has been borne by Sir John Mandeville, of St. Albans, knight, who, “in the name of God glorious,” left his country in the year of grace 1322, on Michaelmas Day, and returned to Europe after an absence of thirty-four years, twice as long as Robinson Crusoe remained in his desert island. This title belongs to him no longer. The good knight of St. Albans, who had seen and told so much, has dwindled before our eyes, has lost his substance and his outline, and has vanished like smoke in the air. His coat of mail, his deeds, his journeys, his name: all are smoke. He first lost his character as a truthful writer; then out of the three versions of his book, French, English, and Latin, two were withdrawn from him, leaving him only the first. Existence now has been taken from him, and he is left with nothing at all. Sir John Mandeville, knight, of St. Albans, who crossed the sea in 1322, is a myth, and never existed; he has joined, in the kingdom of the shades and the land of nowhere, his contemporary the famous “Friend of God of the Oberland,” who some time ago also ceased to have existed. One thing however remains, and cannot be blotted out: namely, the book of travels bearing the name of Mandeville the translation of which is one of the best and oldest specimens of simple and flowing English prose.
Dauntless literary freebooter, dowered with an imagination so tremendous in its inventiveness as at times to make even the grasping credulity of the Middle Ages stand aghast…. But take Sir John with an open mind, and in the spirit of his age, and you will find his “Voiage and Travaile” one of the most entertaining and delightful of books.
The more one examines the Mandeville problem the more bewildering does it appear. The only thing that seems at all certain is that the English book is based on a French original produced at Liège soon after the middle of the fourteenth century, by a physician of that city who had visited the court of a Mameluke Sultan some thirty years before. Whether he was a Belgian posing as an English knight, or an English knight disguised as a Belgian, will perhaps remain unknown to the end of time…. In short, if the interest of a problem were to be measured by its difficulty rather than by its importance, it must be allowed that this Mandeville question deserves a place by the side of the “Letters of Junius,” or the “Man in the Iron Mask.” The old notion of Mandeville, as the “father of English prose,” may indeed be considered as abandoned. But whether the author of the original French book was a Belgian doctor or a knight of St. Albans will perhaps always remain an open question.
He uses many French words, while his English is as modern in the main as that of the Elizabethan age.
The French version of Mandeville may be—very likely is—the oldest. It may have been—it very likely though by no means necessarily was—written by some one who was not an Englishman. But it is a book which, in the history of literature, has very little importance. French prose had been written currently on all subjects for two centuries before it; and there was nothing remarkable in its existence. No one has contended that the French author can for a moment vie with Villehardouin, or Joinville, of his own contemporary Froissart, as a prose writer. The book has had no influence on French literary history—no great French writer has been inspired by it, none of its “notes” in the least corresponds to any mark of French. The contrary of all these things is the case in regard to the English version. Even the infidels do not place that version much later than 1400, and it may be permitted to doubt whether it is not older; for though the prose shows an advance in ease and resource on Wyclif, a great one on Trevisa, it is not much, if at all, in front of Chaucer. It is quite an admirable thing in itself; it shows, if it be a translation, that some third person must be added to Malory and Berners to make a trinity of such English translators, as the world has rarely seen, in the fifteenth century. It expresses with remarkable fidelity the travelling mania of the English, and in the stories of the “Watching of the Falcon,” the “Daughter of Hippocrates,” and others, it has supplied romantic inspiration for generation after generation. As French it is little or nothing to Frenchmen or to France; as English it is a great thing to England and to Englishmen.
