From The Chronicle of England, by John Capgrave [fifteenth century], edited by the Rev. Frances Charles Hingeston, B. A., The Rolls Series, London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts; 1858; pp. 355-356.
Brother John Capgrave, the Monk of Lynn, [1394-1464] was a very respected historian and writer in the 15th Century. Latin was the language of the wise in those days. Medieval Latin was not the pure Latin of Antiquity and of Modern Times, because many Classical Latin texts were still hidden, waiting in far-off cities or in remote monasteries for the manuscript-hunters of the Pre-Renaissance to find and copy them for broader use.
So, some of his Latin is made fun of by people later, who had a great many more resources available to them than the intellectuals of the Middle Ages. This is to say that the Latin he uses makes him liable to disrespect from people whose Latin is of a different standard, modeled on a form of a language that had died out many hundreds of years before, while he was the master of the successful evolution of that language in its surviving form.
The living Latin of the first three-quarters of the Christian era of which we are now a part, was in use for more centuries than that used for the short span of Classical Latin Literature. This Latin has no fan club. That is an artificial marker though. Like saying that only opera is correct or the only really important music or something, and ignoring the fact that the tune of Greensleeves is still being hummed today in many places by many kinds of people, while the venerable Gregorian chant wouldn't be recognized in those quarters.
More, to discredit some one because of say "It ain't so" shouldn't invalidate the words or the person entirely. Nor does it make true what in fact "isn't so." To do so, is intolerably intolerant, especially since saying "ain't" was perfectly correct grammar at times in our far more recent past.
I feel quite sure that the Latin that Capgrave spoke was of the highest standard of his times, or he wouldn't be known at all today. His work was good enough to be copied in enough places to ensure their survival. He made a living writing medieval Latin and there are a lot of people who can't say that, in any language.
To pick on Medieval scholars because they didn't know something we know and them label them as ignorant or somehow stupider than us is the worst form of intellectual bigotry.
What is important to know is that Capgrave was considered one of the leading lights in the world of brainy types during his own liftime. That era had just as many smart people as today, that their talents were not ours, might mean that we are not better, but instead are incapable of mastering what they were able to accomplish in order to be considered famous and admired across many levels of their society in their own lifetimes.
This does not mean that mistakes should be propagated slavishly. Many modern medical words in usage today originated in an absymally ignorant pseudo-scientific pretense of being Latin-based, e.g., dilatate for dilate. A totally wrong propagation of an incorrect term. Adding an extra syllable was egregiously (look it up, it's a great word, but don't ask me how to pronounce it) stupidly done in order to sound smart in an area, the written language, in which some scientific researcher got poor grades. Whoever it was may have been a good scientist but he was not so great a communicator. This sort of specialization of science as separate from basic skills like spelling and grammar might explain why people are getting sicker instead of better in areas where effective and correct communication have failed to spread the results of real, unbiased, scientific investigation.
Moving along slowly. The missing or non-existent histories of really early times led to a reliance on the oral histories of a land, the only other option to explain the presence of the physical evidence of the remote past that was still to be seen in daily life. Thanks to the strength of those traditions, which were the stories good enough to repeat, we have some marvelous "legends" that still arouse our imagination and emotions today. Later discoveries have decided that the written "histories" of the more distant past taken down from an older set of oral histories, that differed from the later histories now deemed fabulous, from the very same sort of sources were truer. This assumes that classic writers, or any writers, can't be simple story-tellers too. A big assumption. The written word still retains a gloss that implies it is correct and the sole criterion of truth. The older the writing, the more likely it is to be believed, just because of its age. Gullibility takes many forms. Too bad, discrimination in favor of the aged only applies to books, art and furniture.
Often these 'real' histories proved less interesting and better sounding ones replaced them. If not, the real history wouldn't have disappeared in the first place. Boring stories vanish, true or not. Therefore the history of old buildings and statues of a place, develop a past that is independent of the truth, whatever that might be. If there is a record, fine and dandy, if not, the powerful imagination alive with the curiosity and fancy that characterizes humans will find an explanation. So it was in the Rome that Capgrave visited in the 1400's. Nobody know exactly, for sure, how some of the statues appeared there, so the best guesses became the truth. There was a popular truth probably and an official truth. Which Capgrave had available to him on his visit, nobody knows. Did his host take him around the city and show him the sites? Did his co-workers, his professional peers, who he might have visited on his business trip, tell him about their city? Or did he hire a tour-guide who had all the credentials of an informed and reliable tour guide available for his hire?
He says himself that he looked at the written records at hand while he was there, being a discriminating sort of traveler, where and what these were, he doesn't say in the fragment that is left to us. But his report, since he was known as a serious and excellent researcher, must be what seemed to him the most reliable of the explanations of the wonders he saw when he at long last reached the seat of his faith in person. This research, written and oral, he passes on in the scraps of this rough draft, or maybe it was the notebook he used to jot down what he had heard in outline to expand on in the final version. Obviously there were no tourist pamphlets in his hotel-room, or a shelf on local authors at the bookstores to pack up and take home to use when he wrote his guide for his friends and neighbors back home in England in the comfort of his own study.
With the benefit of hindsight, and the luxury of being able to benefit from the impasstioned work of some very able and talented book-hunters, now we have more reliable information about early Rome. It may be more "factual" (having a longer tradition of being reckoned to be true) than what Capgrave heard, but some of those "facts" aren't nearly as wonderfully and marvellously entertaining, which is what those two adjectives really mean, instead of just implying credulity, and superstitious naivity to the stories that survived all the intervening years from Cicero to Machiavelli.
Capgrave's little scraps are delightful and readable. Despite the fact that he was sick on his trip, he found information that he thought was worth repeating, worth taking the trouble to write down in his native language by hand using expensive ink and expensive stationery, instead of writing on scholarly matters in the language of his profession.
There is more to learn from his work, besides. Local languages of countries were not, and are not yet, standardized and regional dialects made people of Southern France or Southern England incomprehensible to their neighbors around them. Johnson had not made his standard English dictionary yet, nor had anybody else in Europe.
What this means, is that Capgrave's few works in English, instead of Latin, illustrate some of the oddities of spelling and syntax that characterized his neck of the woods, East Anglia, and also helps a person understand that spelling phonetically has a long and glorious past.
Pleasantly enough, I find, when the work is read outloud the strange looking words sound like words you know the meaning of, even though we have adopted some unphonetical but "correct" spellings of many English words.
Unfortunately, this whole little prologue is longer than the scraps. How I do run on.