reference to the _Gesta Romanorum_:

In the old Romayn gestes may men fynde
Maurice's lyf, I bere it not in mynde.

Such vagueness and uncertainty, if not positive misunderstanding with
regard to source, are characteristic of many romances. It is not
difficult to find explanations for this. The writer may, as was
suggested before, be reproducing a story which he has only heard or
which he has read at some earlier time. Even if he has the book before
him, it does not necessarily bear its author's name and it is not easy
to describe it so that it can be recognized by others. Generally
speaking, his references to source are honest, so far as they go, and
can be taken at their face value. Even in cases of apparent falsity
explanations suggest themselves. There is nearly always the possibility
that false or contradictory attributions, as, for example, the mention
of "book" and "books" or "the French book" and "the Latin book" as
sources of the same romance, are merely stupidly literal renderings of
the original. In _The Romance of Partenay_, one of the few cases where
we have unquestionably the French original of the English romance, more
than once an apparent reference to source in the English is only a close
following of the French. "I found in scripture that it was a barge"
corresponds with "Je treuve que c'estoit une barge"; "as saith the
scripture" with "Ainsi que dient ly escrips";

For the Cronike doth treteth (sic) this brefly,
More ferther wold go, mater finde might I

with

Mais en brief je m'en passeray
Car la cronique en brief passe.
Plus deisse, se plus trouvasse.[95]

A similar situation has already been pointed out in _Ywain and Gawin_.
The most marked example of contradictory evidence is to be found in
_Octavian_, whose author alternates "as the French says" with "as saith
the Latin."[96] Here, however, the nearest analogue to the English
romance, which contains 1962 lines, is a French romance of 5371 lines,
which begins by mentioning the "grans merueilles qui sont faites, et de
latin en romanz traites."[97] It is not impossible that the English
writer used a shorter version which emphasized this reference to the
Latin, and that his too-faithful adherence to source had confusing
results. But even if such contradictions cannot be explained, in the
mass of undistinguished romances there is scarcely anything to suggest
that the writer is trying to give his work a factitious va