itten, according to its
author, first in Latin, then in French, and, lastly, in the year 1356,
translated into English for the behoof of "lordes and knyghtes and
othere noble and worthi men, that conne[12] not Latyn but litylle." The
author professed to have spent over thirty years in Eastern travel, to
have penetrated as far as Farther India and the "iles that ben abouten
Indi," to have been in the service of the Sultan of Babylon in his wars
against the Bedouins, and, at another time, in the employ of the Great
Khan of Tartary. But there is no copy of the Latin version of his
travels extant; the French seems to be much later than 1356, and the
English MS. to belong to the early years of the 15th century, and to
have been made by another hand. Recent investigations make it probable
that Maundeville borrowed his descriptions of the remoter East from many
sources, and particularly from the narrative of Odoric, a Minorite
friar of Lombardy, who wrote about 1330. Some doubt is even cast upon
the existence of any such person as Maundeville. Whoever wrote the book
that passes under his name, however, would seem to have visited the Holy
Land, and the part of the "voiage" that describes Palestine and the
Levant is fairly close to the truth. The rest of the work, so far as it
is not taken from the tales of other travelers, is a diverting tissue of
fables about gryfouns that fly away with yokes of oxen, tribes of
one-legged Ethiopians who shelter themselves from the sun by using their
monstrous feet as umbrellas, etc.

[Footnote 12: Know.]

During the 15th century English prose was gradually being brought into a
shape fitting it for more serious uses. In the controversy between the
Church and the Lollards Latin was still mainly employed, but Wiclif had
written some of his tracts in English, and, in 1449, Reginald Peacock,
Bishop of St. Asaph, contributed, in English, to the same controversy,
_The Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy_. Sir John Fortescue,
who was chief-justice of the King's Bench from 1442-1460, wrote during
the reign of Edward IV. a book on the _Difference between Absolute and
Limited Monarchy_, which may be regarded as the first treatise on
political philosophy and constitutional law in the language. But these
works hardly belong to pure literature, and are remarkable only as
early, though not very good, examples of English prose in a barren time.
The 15th century was an era of decay and change. The Mid