Page:The Review of English Studies Vol 1.djvu/25

Rh Latin; not one is in English. It is not till the reign of Richard II. that English begins, very tentatively, to make its reappearance in civic affairs. Before this, Wyclif had been using English, but with a clumsiness which contrasts with the ease of English verse, whether in the hands of Chaucer and Gower or of the alliterative poets, or even of inferior craftsmen like Minot. Not till the fifteenth century do we find an English prose which can rival that of the Ancren Riwle.

Now it was just during these two centuries of French ascendancy that the manuscripts of the Ancren Riwle were being multiplied. There is one French manuscript, whilst there are eight English. Further, the Latin is translated from the English, not from the French. Now assuming the English to be the original, this is intelligible; for if the French translation came to be made decades after the English, it is easy to understand that the English might well have had such a start that the French, in spite of the popularity of that tongue, could not catch it up. But if the work is really a French work, it is difficult to see why, during this period when French prose was so fashionable and English prose so depressed, the English manuscripts should be so much more numerous than the French. Of course, it may be said that the French were more numerous, but that a mere accident has led to the preservation of the English and the destruction of the French. This may be so. A priori appearances may be misleading; but, for what they are worth, the a priori appearances are all in favour of the English being the original.

There remains, then, no argument whatever in favour of French as the original language of the Rule, whilst the converging arguments in favour of English are many of them so strong that only conclusive documentary evidence to the contrary could shake them. The question of the authorship does not allow of so satisfactory a solution. The Latin version says that Simon of Ghent wrote it for his sisters at Tarente. Simon was Bishop of Salisbury, and died in 1315; language and palæography make it impossible that he can have been the author of the English version, though we may accept the statement as evidence that he is the author of the Latin recension. This was recognised by Morton when he edited the English text; but Morton was led by the mention of Tarente (presumably Tarrent Kaines in Dorsetshire) to attribute the English Rule to an earlier