reassert the priority of the Latin. Here and there Bramlette scores a point against Morton: so that this is one of the numerous controversies where the reader who does not go back to see exactly how much of the original case remains unshaken, may well think that such case has been overthrown. In point of fact, the number of Morton’s arguments which remain quite untouched is amply sufficient to prove his case that the Latin is a translation; and were this not so, there remain any number of further arguments in reserve. This was conclusively shown by G. C. Macaulay.[1]
G. C. Macaulay was the first scholar to make use of the French version of the Rule. Morton had been unable to consider its claims, for the French manuscript was so damaged in the great Cottonian fire as to be in his day quite unusable. It has been repaired, and most of it can now be read. Macaulay’s study led him to the conclusion that, though the Latin was translated from the English, the English in its turn was translated from the French.
Yet there is one fact which was well known both to Bramlette and to Macaulay, and which makes extremely difficult any theory which denies that the English version is the original one. That G. C. Macaulay should have passed so lightly over the fatal flaw in his argument emphasises the saying of the Ancren Riwle, that “often does a full cunning smith forge a full weak knife.”
In the English Ancren Riwle occur six long lines of rhyming verse.[2] Now in the corresponding place in the French, and in the Latin, is found a literal translation of these lines into prose. Macaulay proposed to account for these facts by supposing that these lines of verse were not by the author of the Ancren Riwle, but were current at the time. “The French writer, who was no doubt an Englishman, turned them into French prose when he adopted them for his purpose … the English translator, being familiar with the original, quoted them as verse.”
Now a precedent for such treatment of a translated passage can be found. When Bede gave his account of the poet Cædmon in his Historia Ecclesiastica, he gave the text of Cædmon’s first song in a Latin prose translation. When, under Alfred, Bede’s Latin was translated into English, Bede’s paraphrase was not retranslated, but the English text of Cædmon’s song was substituted for it. But such action by a medieval translator in dealing with the
