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repute. Enough did I try, but I could do no good herein. It is long ago that I knew of it; but nevertheless it should never have been betrayed by me; but now that it is so widely known through others, I cannot gainsay it. They say that it is bad; and yet it is worse than they say. Grieved and sorry I am that I must say it; but in truth it is so, and that is a great grief. For many other things he (or she) is greatly to be praised; but not for these, and woe is me therefore. No one can defend them.”^[1]

A book of devotion, written by a pronounced ascetic, for three ladies, anchoresses, whose way of life was, as the writer says, one perpetual martyrdom, might have proved painful reading. Instead, it is so kindly and gentle, so full of sound common-sense, that although the reading of it is no easy task, the reader looks back on it as one of the most pleasant of mediæval books, and one of the principal ornaments of the literature to which it belongs.

 

Thirteen manuscripts of the Rule are extant, complete or fragmentary: eight in English, four in Latin, and one in French.^[2] There is no doubt whatever that the book was written in England—the fact that the writer thanks God “that heresy prevails not in England” is one sign out of many. In what language it was written has been the subject of dispute from the outset. The work was known to Wanley in the eighteenth century, and he, not unnaturally, took it for granted that the Latin was the original and the English a translation.^[3] Morton, when he edited the English version in 1853, argued from the blunders of the Latin text that it could be nothing but a translation, and often a mistranslation, of the English. For forty years this view held the field, till Bramlette^[4] tried to

1. Cf. Morton, p. 88.
2. English, Thirteenth Century: First Recension: Cotton Nero A. xiv. (printed by Morton), Titus D. xviii., Cleopatra C. vi. (with some corrections from second recension), Caius College, Cambridge, 234 (a book of extracts, specimen printed by Hall); Second Recension: Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 402 (extracts printed by Heuser in Anglia, xxx. 108–10, by Macaulay, and by Hall). Fourteenth Century: Vernon Manuscript, and a fragment in the possession of Lord Robartes edited by Napier in Journal of English and Germanic Philology, ii. 199; Pepys, 2498 (Magdalen College, Cambridge) is a Third Recension, discovered by Miss Paues and printed by Påhlsson, Lund, 1911.
   French: Vitellius F. vii. (damaged; beginning of the Fourteenth Century).
   Latin: Cotton Vitellius E. vii. (almost destroyed: early Fourteenth Century); Merton, Oxford, 44 (early Fourteenth Century, reported by Miss Allen, Modern Language Review, xiv. 209); Magdalen, Oxford, 67 (late Fourteenth Century); British Museum Royal 7, C. x. art. 4 (early Sixteenth Century, reported by Miss Allen, Modern Language Review, xvii. 403).
3. Wanleii Catalogus, 228 (Oxoniæ, 1705, in Hickes’ Thesaurus). He describes the Nero Manuscript as ex Latino translatus.
4. Anglia, xv. 478–498.