original treatise on herbs written by an Englishman during
the Middle Ages was that by Bartholomaeus Anglicus, and on the
plant-lover there are probably few of the mediaeval writers who
exercise so potent a spell. Even in the thirteenth century, that age
of great men, Bartholomew the Englishman ranked with thinkers such as
Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus. He was accounted one
of the greatest theologians of his day, and if his lectures on
theology were as simple as his writings on herbs, it is easy to
understand why they were thronged and why his writings were so eagerly
studied, not only in his lifetime but for nearly three centuries
afterwards. A child could understand his book on herbs, for, being
great, he was simple. But although his work _De Proprietatibus Rerum_
(which contains nineteen books) was the source of common information
on Natural History throughout the Middle Ages, and was one of the
books hired out at a regulated price by the scholars of Paris, we know
very little of the writer. He spent the greater part of his life in
France and Saxony, but he was English born and was always known as
Bartholomaeus Anglicus.[39] We know that he studied in Paris and
entered the French province of the Minorite Order, and later he became
one of the most renowned professors of theology in Paris. In 1230 a
letter was received from the general of the Friars Minor in the new
province of Saxony asking the provincial of France to send Bartholomew
and another Englishman to help in the work of that province, and the
former subsequently went there. We do not know the exact date of _De
Proprietatibus Rerum_, but it must have been written about the middle
of the thirteenth century; for, though it cites Albertus Magnus, who
was teaching in Paris in 1248, there is no mention of any of the later
authorities, such as Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon and Vincent de
Beauvais. It was certainly known in England as early as 1296, for
there is a copy of that date at Oxford, and there still exist both in
France and in England a considerable number of other manuscript
copies, most of which date from the latter part of the thirteenth
century and the early part of the fourteenth. The book was translated
into English in 1398 by John de Trevisa,[40] chaplain to Lord Berkeley
and vicar of Berkeley, and Bartholomew could scarcely have been more
fortunate in his translator. At the end of his translation, Trevisa
writes thus:--

"Endles