The Old French Bible is the first vernacular translation of the entire Bible in medieval Europe, and it is orthodox; Samuel Berger established both points in 1884, as will be discussed below, and placed its composition between 1226 and 1250. It is followed by several other bible translations before 1500, which between them cast light on what the public expected of a bible translation in medieval France. Understanding the Old French Bible today involves identifying what its first audience expected. What is the thirteenth-century understanding of a bible? What is the contemporary understanding of translation? What status does a vernacular require to permit any texts at all to be written in it? It also involves being aware of what the attitude of the Church was to vernacular bibles. What, if anything, has changed in Church attitudes since the Christian Bible was first formed in Greek? Today's readers have inherited a history of bible translation composed in the sixteenth century, during the conflict between the reformers and the Catholic Church. Does this history reflect the expectations of French society in the thirteenth century, or does it need to be amended? Did those expectations change, and if so before or during the sixteenth century? It seems best to start with some definitions.

What precisely is a bible? Its Greek stem “biblion” is cognate with that of “bibliotheca,” a library, and its earliest meaning seems to have been a collection of books. The Latin “biblia” then specialized to mean a collection of religious books, and then a collection of Christian religious books. Yet the older sense of a general collection of books survives through Latin into Romance, so that we find in thirteenth-century France a satirical text entitled La Bible du Seigneur de Berzé (The Lord of Berzé's Bible), which brings together various follies of the secular world. It is not therefore surprising that the books comprising the Christian Bible remained unspecified, until the pressure of religious conflict made the sixteenth-century Counter-Reformation Council of Trent decide that a canon of Biblical books was necessary. All that can be said before then is that local custom and usage determined what books were normally included in any given copy of the Bible, which in Western Europe will typically have been in the Latin translation by St. Jerome which came to be known as the Vulgate.

Among the articles of the peace treaty ratified by King Robert I of Scotland at Holyrood on 17 March 1328 and by King Edward III of England at Northampton on 4 May, a treaty by which England renounced all claims of overlordship or sovereignty over Scotland, is the following clause: ‘And it is the intention of the said King of Scotland, and of the aforesaid messengers and proctors of the said King of England that, by the treaties that are now made, no manner of prejudice should be done to the right of Holy Church in the one realm or in the other.’ Holy Church was quick to take advantage of this. On the day before the signing of the treaty, 16 March, Robert I inspected a number of charters granted by his predecessors to Durham Priory, thus confirming its possession of its Scottish cell at Coldingham; in England, the close rolls show instructions given on 31 August 1328, and again on 28 October, for the restoration of lands and possessions seized during the war to a variety of religious houses in Scotland. Two petitions asking for the return of such property, from the abbot and convent of Jedburgh and the abbot of Arbroath, survive in the SC 8 class at The National Archives, Kew, as numbers SC 8/16/756 and SC 8/16/757. We know from external evidence that they were presented to the Salisbury parliament of October 1328. Both concern the return of churches: Jedburgh claimed Arthuret in Cumberland and the advowson of Abbotsley in Huntingdonshire; Arbroath asked for Haltwhistle in Northumberland. The petitions received similar responses: inquisitions were to be held and justice was to be done; as a result, Haltwhistle was returned to Arbroath on 25 May 1329 and Arthuret to Jedburgh on 22 February 1330. (The inquisition into the advowson of Abbotsley was delayed by the death of one of those appointed to hear it and it remained in the king's hand, although the parson was ordered to pay the abbot the pension due from the church.)

What immediately strikes the reader of these petitions is the very different strategies used by the supplicants. In this chapter I examine these strategies and what they say about the two houses and their occupants during the First Scottish War of Independence.

Scope and argument

The principal aim of this chapter is to characterise the medieval translations of the Bible into French and to describe their purpose and function. To do this, a survey will be undertaken, presented in chronological order, which will show considerable stability in translation types over many centuries. The number of translations, with over 240 known from the tenth century to 1450 (and well over 300 before the Council of Trent), precludes description of individual texts, whose production peaks in the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. These peaks belong respectively to the Old French (c. 800–1300), and the Middle French (c. 1300–1550) periods, and reflect only Christian translation activity, since Jewish writers in their Hebrew texts supply occasional French glosses but do not produce extended translations. A secondary aim is to contextualise Bible translation within the kingdom of France, a kingdom in which, at its creation as western Francia in 843, Latin was the language of government and religion, Germanic and Romance varieties were spoken by the dominant families, and more than one of these varieties had, or would have in the future, a written form. This put these languages in a relation of diglossia, such that Latin was used for the so-called High functions – including religion, administration and education (hereafter H-function) – and a vernacular, Romance or Germanic or both, was used for the so-called Low functions – including conversation with family and friends (hereafter L-function). The vernaculars were, by 843, beginning to be used in writing, with the potential of competing with Latin for H-function uses.

The two earliest French Bible translations, both dating to the tenth century, a bilingual sermon on Jonah now in Valenciennes and a verse Passion now in Clermont-Ferrand, show, first, that competition with H-function Latin as the language of religion was beginning experimentally on the frontier with Germanic (Jonah) and with Occitan (Passion) and, second, a focus on the message of individual salvation through interpreting source texts, allowing their detail to be treated more freely than a literal approach to translation would allow.