Trevisa’s Translation of Higden’s Polychronicon, Book I, Chapter 38, De Wallia: an Edition

Abstract

Higden tells us in his Second Preface to the Polychronicon [Chronicle of Many Times] that the first of the seven books “describes places and countries and lands all over the world,” while the subsequent six books contain an account of the conduct and deeds of the six ages of man from the creation to “our time” (i.e., the fourteenth century). For Higden the world is no flat earth, but a sphere, precisely 20,040 miles in circumference, in which the three continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe are surrounded by the great Ocean, which “embraces all the earth like a garland.” He intended that every copy of the Polychronicon should have as a frontispiece a mappa mundi, like the famous Hereford one, and some extant copies do have this. The first book (after a discussion of the location of the Earthly Paradise) describes the inhabited world, starting with India in the Far East and moving westwards through Asia Minor, the Middle East, and North Africa, to Western Europe, homing in, in Chapters 32–60, on Ireland and Britannia, a term he uses interchangeably with Anglia to refer to England alone, as well as for the whole complex of regions later called the British Isles.