It is a little curious that the name preceding Mangevilayn in the list of persons pardoned is "Johan le Barber." But Dr. G. F. Warner has ingeniously suggested that de Bourgogne may be a certain Johan de Bourgogne, who was pardoned on Aug. 20, 1321. Did this suggest to de Bourgogne the alias "a le Barbe," or was that only a Liege nickname? Note also that the arms on Mande ville's tomb were borne by the Tyrrells of Hertfordshire (the county in which St. Albans lies) ; for of course the crescent on the lion's breast is only the "difference" indicating a second son.
By far the greater part of these more distant travels, extending in fact from Trebizond to Hormuz, India, the Malay Archipelago, and China, and back again to western Asia, has been appro priated from the narrative of Friar Odoric (written in 1330). These passages, as served up by Mandeville, are almost always, indeed, swollen with interpolated particulars, usually of an ex travagant kind, whilst in some cases the writer has failed to un derstand the passages which he adopts from Odoric and professes to give as his own experiences. Thus where Odoric has given a most curious and veracious account of the Chinese custom of employing tame cormorants to catch fish, the cormorants are converted by Mandeville into "little beasts called loyres (layre, B), which are taught to go into the water" (the word loyre being apparently used here for "otter," lutra, for which the Provencal is luria or loiria). Much, again, of Mandeville's matter, par ticularly in Asiatic geography and history, is taken from the Historiae Oriotis of Hetoum, an Armenian of princely family, who became a monk of the Praemonstrant order, and in 1307 dictated this work on the East, in the French tongue at Poitiers.
A good deal about the manners and customs of the Tatars is demonstrably derived from the famous work of the Franciscan Ioannes de Plano Carpini (q.v.), but Dr. Warner considers that much was taken at second hand and that Mandeville's immediate source was the Speculum historiale of Vincent de Beauvais.
The account of Prester John (q.v.) is taken from the famous Epistle, which was so widely diffused in the 13th century, and created that renown which made it incumbent on every traveller in Asia to find some new tale to tell of him. Many fabulous stories, again, of monsters, such as Pliny has collected, are in troduced here and there, derived no doubt from him, Solinus, the bestiaries, or the Speculum naturale. And interspersed, especially in the chapters about the Levant, are the stories and legends that were retailed to every pilgrim, such as the legend of Seth and the grains of paradise from which grew the wood of the cross, that of the shooting of old Cain by Lamech, that of the castle of the sparrow-hawk (which appears in the tale of Melusina), those of the origin of the balsam plants at Matariva, of the dragon of Cos, of the river Sabbation, etc.
While recording Mandeville's borrowings it is only fair to recognize his imaginative powers ; a notorious passage, filched, with additions, from Boldensele, seems likely to have inspired the Valley of the Shadow of Death in Pilgrim's Progress. Nor does it follow that the whole work is borrowed or fictitious. In such works as those of Jan van Hees and Arnold von Harff we have examples of pilgrims to the Holy Land whose narratives begin apparently in sober truth, and gradually pass into flourishes of fiction and ex travagance. So in Mandeville also we find particulars not yet traced to other writers, and which may therefore be provisionally assigned either to the writer's own experience or to knowledge acquired by colloquial intercourse in the East.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.—The oldest known ms. of the original—once Bar rois's, afterwards the earl of Ashburnham's, now Nouv. Acq. Franc. 4515 in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris—is dated 1371, but is never theless very inaccurate in proper names. The first English translation direct from the French was made (at least as early as the beginning of the 15th century) from a ms. of which many pages were lost.