to make, but it would be an anachronism to suspect them of adding, like Pooh-Bah, “corroborative detail intended to give artistic verisimilitude to a bald and unconvincing narrative.” Of course, though the translator would not be likely to add to the details about the original anchoresses, details appropriate to those for whom he was translating the work might well come to be recorded. We shall see that a case of this occurs in the association of the Latin version (and that version alone) with Tarente. But where, as here, some detail is vouched for as original by its occurrence in both versions (“your book of St. Margaret”), then the version which gives this in its fullest detail (“your English book of St. Margaret”) is likely to be the original one.
Finally, it should be said that Dr. Joseph Hall, in his Selections from Early Middle English, has edited two passages from the Rule, giving indeed a model edition of the closing pages. He has compared the two versions throughout these passages, and finds no trace of English mistranslations from the French, but several of French mistranslations from the English. His general comparison of the two is noteworthy: “The English has all the vigour and raciness of an original work, while the French gives the impression of being unidiomatic and wanting in spontaneity.”
The question arises: How did a scholar like Mr. Macaulay come to attach such importance to a number of double-edged arguments as to make him overlook the clearest evidence to the contrary? The answer is found in his own words: “the a priori probabilities are of course in favour of the supposition that the English was translated from the French.” Now this may be true enough in dealing with the fourteenth century—the period with which Mr. Macaulay was most conversant, and where he had such extraordinary knowledge alike of Anglo-French, Anglo-Latin, and English, as his edition of Gower in those three languages testifies. But at the date when the Ancren Riwle was written, the matter is different. Of course it is difficult to fix that date exactly; but few scholars are found who would date it much before 1140 or much after 1220. Now, during this period the a priori probabilities are surely in favour of English.
An English prose had been deliberately created by King Alfred, three centuries before the rise of French prose. This tradition was continued by a group of scholars of whom Ælfric is the best known:
