This is an ongoing project that will, it is hoped, bring fifty Medieval stories into Modern English, in addition to those in the Scot Manuscripts. You may not be entirely comfortable reading Middle English. It may take quite a while to cut through the strange dialect, unfamiliar words and grammar and the crazy spelling. But the true enjoyment of a story requires fluency. A true understanding, it could be argued, requires fluency.
Many of these tales have been published in Middle English by the Early English Text Society, of which the present writer is a member (the EETS would wish, however, I am sure, to disclaim any involvement in the quest underlying this maverick and unendorsed project that has become eleusinianm). Many others have been made available by TEAMS (Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages) or under the Camelot Project at the University of Rochester, USA. Inestimable thanks to all these projects are very gratefully given. Scholars for TEAMS and on behalf of the EETS have researched and transcribed these tales from fragile and often less than perfect manuscript copies that have languished for hundreds of years in libraries such as the Bodleian in Oxford, the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Colleges of Oxford and Cambridge Universities and many others, and brought them painstakingly into modern print. But a vital last step has sometimes been lacking. A Medieval Bunch of Fives tries, however audaciously and however imperfectly, to have a shot at taking this last vital step. Because six hundred years is a long time. The language has moved on, but the stories are as entertaining as ever to the general reader; as entertaining as the novels behind the eighteenth century period dramas that are currently so popular on British television, and a lot more interesting in the current author's opinion if only they could be read fluently. These Medieval stories are marvellously imaginative, intriguingly focused and throw a wonderful light upon an age that Terry Gillian and Monty Python (bless them both) have tried undeservedly to cast into a black and brown mire of horrific squalor. But the Medieval period was in fact a very colourful and vibrant age, and often a very thoughtful one. Life, after all, was very precarious. And it was an age that was possibly trying to keep alive something that was impossible at the time to transmit openly. Read these stories and make up your own mind.
Twenty-five Medieval tales and romances have already been translated (however audaciously and however imperfectly) in the Hannah Scot manuscripts. These, however, were intended to illustrate a single point, a vital point about these romances that seemed to cry out for attention. But in doing so they necessarily give a rather one-sided view of Medieval literature. And although the grand theme will be found to ricochet still further through many of these additional tales and writings that make up A Medieval Bunch of Fives, such as Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the outrageous stories of Sir Isumbras, Saint Edmund the Martyr, Sir Amadace and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Arthurian tales of Merlin, Sir Cleges and the Carle of Carlisle, stories about Sir Bevis of Hamtoun, the Isle of Ladies and many more, A Bunch of Fives seeks to redress this balance. In fact, if the reader chooses one tale randomly from each section and puts the ten into a folder, he or she will have made a book that a Medieval family might have been proud to own. Something for everybody.
