1. The earliest MSS of a French version of any part of the Bible which have come down to us elong to the 12th century. These contain the Psalter, the Books of Kings, the Apocalypse, and five chapters of St. John’s Gospel. All but the last are, in the earliest MSS, in the Norman dialect ; the last is in Provencal, and was probably copied at Limoges.
(a) Two MSS of the Psalter, the so-called Eadwin Psalter in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a Paris MS of the 12th or 13th cent. (Fonds lat. 8846), translate Jerome’s Psalter- ium Hebraicum, i.e. his rendering of the Psalter from the Hebrew. In the Cambridge MS, which was written by Eadwin at or near Canterbury about 1120, the French is an interlinear gloss written over the Hebrew in a triple Psalter. The Paris MS, which contains only Ps 1-98°, has a Latin text which probably represents a revision made in Normandy at Bec under Lanfrance’s influence. These Psalters were edited by Michel at Paris in 1876. Besides the Psalteriwm Hebraicum of Jerome, his Psalterium Gallicum, or Latin trans- lation based on the Hexaplar text, was used as the
version which underlies another group of early French Psalters. The most important MS of this
group is that written at Montebourg in Normandy before the year 1200. This is now in the Bodleian Library (MS Bodl. Douce 320), and was edited by Michel at Oxford in 1860. It is written in the Norman dialect. Several other MSS belonging to this family are known, three of which are con- nected with England, viz. a Cotton MS (Brit. Mus. Nero C. iv.) of the end of the 12th cent. written at Shaftesbury ; an Arundel MS 230 of the same date with an English calendar; and a 14th cent. MS also in the British Museum (MS Harl. 1770) from Kirkham in Yorkshire. In the Arundel MS the interlinear French gloss is put word for word over the corresponding Latin. Two other MSS of this family are Bibl. Nat. Fonds lat. 768, of the early 18th cent., and a Munich MS 16 of the 14th
century. This version of the Psalter, of which the Arundel MS is perhaps the most ancient repre- sentative, and of which Berger mentions nearly a hundred MSS, was the basis of all the French translations of the Psalter down to the edition of Olivetan. Between this and the version based on Jerome’s Hebrew Psalter there is ‘no difference of glossary or of grammar.’ The underlying Latin is of course different, but the French in both is the Norman dialect, resembling that of the Oxford MS of the Chanson de Roland of the latter half of the 12th century.
(6) The version of the Books of Kings is found in several MSS, the most important and the oldest of which is a Mazarin MS 70 of about the year 1170. Another MS mentioned by Berger is in the Arsenal Library at Paris, No. 5211, and to these P. Meyer (Romania, xvii. 126) adds Bibl. Nat. 6447, and in the same library Nouv. acg. fr. 1404. The version is not literal, but has many glosses, and is in parts versified. It is a translation of a text of the Vulgate not unlike the revision of Alcuin, written in Anglo-Norman, and not, as Leroux de Lincy thought, in the dialect of the [le de France.
(c) The Apocalypse is preserved in ‘pure Norman of the 12th cent.’ in an early 13th cent. MS (Bibl. Nat. fr. 403); in a slightly different version in Bibl. Nat. MS jr. 13096 (A.D. 1313); and in the dialect of the Ile de France in Bibl. Nat. MS 1036. The version, originally one and the same, has been re- produced in more than eighty MSS and in various dialects. There is also an early 13th cent. version of 1 and 2 Mac., of which there have been several editions, in a dialect which has been the subject of much controversy.
(d) The five chapters of St. John are found in a MS dating from the end of the 12th cent. in the British Museum (MS Harl. 2928), and are the earliest representative of the Bible in the dialect of southern France.
2. About the same date we meet with several references to the existence of partial translations of the Bible in the south and east of France in con- nexion with the Waldenses, or followers of Peter Waldus of Lyons, and the natives of the Vaud. Thus Walter Mapes, who was himself present at the Lateran Council of 1179, tells how certain Walden- ses librum domino pape presentaverunt lingua conscriptum Gallica im quo textus et glossa psalterti plurimorumaque legis utriusque librorum contine- batur. Again, Stephen of Bourbon, writing soon after 1225, says that a man named Waldus, a native of Lyons, arranged with two priests to translate the Gospels for him, and that besides this they also translated ‘several books of the Bible.’ Again, a Bull of Innocent 111., dated 12th July 1199, refers to the translation into French of the Gospels, St. Paul, the Psalter, the moralia on Job, and other books, and bids the bishop and Chapter of Metz make inquiries about them. The moralia Leroux de Linecy edited with the Books of Kings from a late 12th cent. MS (Bibl. Nat. fr. 24764) in a dialect which he thought to be Bur- gundian, but which P. Meyer says belongs to the neighbourhood of Liege. The MSS connected with Provence and Vaud have been made the subject of two monographs by Berger in Romania, xvili. 353 ff. and xix. 506ff. The MSS themselves belong to a later date than the references just mentioned, but probably the version goes back to the religious movements in the 12th and early 13th centuries—movements of which an important feature was a study of the Bible ; and the text they contain has Close affinities with one which cireu- lated in the districts mentioned, in the 13th cen- tury. Amongst the Latin MSS of the Bible we find a group with a peculiar mixed text, quite local in its distribution, containing only the NT, and