ABSTRACT
Children and adults in the Middle Ages enjoyed performances by roving ballad mongers and storytellers of tales, verse, and songs that were part of an international traffi c in story material. Quite how such orally transmitted texts passed from one language into another will never be known, but once stories and ballads were available in manuscript or printed form, translation satisfi ed the demand for lengthy tales of heroism and fantastical adventures in the medieval and early modern periods. As well listening to such tales, some children also read them in English versions. William Caxton’s (c.1422-1492) dedication of his translation of a French romance, the History of Jason, to the six-year-old Prince Edward in 1477 indicates that it was considered appropriate reading matter for a royal child and that the lure of new stories takes precedence over any didactic purpose:
To thentent/he may begynne to lerne read Englissh, not for ony beaute or good Endyting of our englissh tonge that is herein, but for the nouelte of the histories whiche as I suppose, hath not be had before the translacion he rof. (Crotch, 1928: 33)
Prince Edward died at the age of twelve in the Tower of London, probably killed on the orders of the usurper Richard III, so it can only be hoped that Caxton’s translation brought some pleasure to his short life. Cynthia Harnett puts an imaginative modern spin on this episode in her children’s novel The Load of Unicorn (1959) when she has the prince’s uncle and protector, Lord
Rivers, convey the boy’s delight in the book to Caxton. Indeed, Rivers himself was translator of the fi rst book Caxton ever printed, The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers (1477), a text he deemed appropriate for his princely young charge ‘thinking also full necessary to my said lord the understanding thereof’ (1477: 3).
