There are many who say this and that of Sir John Mandeville, his Travels; that he was not; that he was a Frenchman; that no one knows who he was. For years he was to me an English Knight who lived at St. Albans, and from there set out to travel over all the world seeking adventure, and relating the peculiarities of his journey in fascinating, if slightly imaginative, language. I rejoiced when he saw a board from the Noah’s Ark, when he talked with the Cham of Tartary; and told of the wonders of Ind. But comes along this and that expert who upset the figure of the gallant Knight, and heave him from horse to ground as a dummy figure, and burn him for firewood as a fallen idol. And why? It appears that Sir John is no more a real being than Homer, or Æsop, or any other of those personal names for great bundles of collected literature; and is a literature all by himself, and a series of impudent thieves who stole travellers’ tales and jotted them together in a personal narrative. For all that I believe in a figure of the blind Homer, and the impudent slave Æsop who played tricks on his master, and I firmly believe in a stalwart figure of Sir John Mandeville, Knight, “albeit,” he says, “I be not worthy, that was born in England, in the town of St. Albans, and passed the sea in the year of our Lord Jesu Christ, 1322, in the day of St. Michael.”

There is one thing, a touch of character, put in, maybe, by the skilful editor of these travels, that makes us lean to the man as being a real person. It is his love of Gardens, and his pains to tell of them, and the stories of trees, and legends. And whether one who confessed to the fraud of putting these travels together—Jean de Bourgogne, by name—was a keen gardener or herbalist, or whether it was a literary habit of the fourteenth century (which, when I come to think of it, is so), somehow I feel that there is a garden-loving spirit in forming the book, and for that I love the man.

In his wanderings Sir John meets many things, and of these I beg leave to choose here and there one or two of his anecdotes when they touch an idea such as gardeners love. The first is of the True Cross, and the story of its origin. All of Sir John I have read in Mr. Pollard’s edition, than which nothing could be more satisfactory and clear expressed.

Of the Cross

“And the Christian men, that dwell beyond the sea, in Greece, say that the Tree of the Cross, that we call Cypress, was one of that tree that Adam ate the apple off; and that find they written. And they say also, that their Scripture saith, that Adam was sick, and said to his son Seth, that he should go to the angel that kept Paradise, that he would send him the oil of mercy, for to anoint with his members, that he might have health. And Seth went. But the angel would not let him come in; but said to him, that he might not have of the oil of mercy. But he took him three grains of the same tree, that his father ate the apple off; and bade him, a soon as his father was dead, that he should put these three grains under his tongue, and grave him so; and so he did. And of these three grains sprang a tree, as the angel said it should, and bare a fruit, through the which fruit Adam should be saved.

“And when Seth came again, he found his father near dead. And when he was dead, he did with the grains as the angel bade him; of the which sprung three trees, of the which the Cross was made, that bare good fruit and blessed, our Lord Jesu Christ.”