The art of forging credentials was well understood in the Middle Ages, and the purpose of this addition was to silence doubters by the _imprimatur_ of the highest authority, just as the marvel of the Dancers of Colbek is confirmed by the sponsorship of Pope Leo IX (I 246-9). The different interpretation of the latest editor, Hamelius, who thinks it was intended as a sly hit at the Papacy (_Quarterly Review_ for April 1917, pp. 349 f.) seems to rest on the erroneous assumption that the passage belonged to the French text as originally written. The anachronism by which the author is made to seek the Pope _in Rome_ gives a clue to the date of the interpolation. From the beginning of the fourteenth century until 1377 Avignon, and not Rome, was the seat of the Pope; and for another thirty years there was doubt as to the issue of the conflict between the popes, who had their head-quarters at Rome and were recognized by England, and the antipopes, who remained at Avignon and had the support of the French. The facts were notorious, so that the anachronism would hardly be possible to one who wrote much before the end of the century, even though he were a partisan of the Roman court. From internal evidence it would seem that the interpolation first appeared in French. The style is the uniform style of translation, with the same tags—_and ȝee schull vndirstonde_ = _et sachiez_; _ȝif it lyke ȝou_ = _si vous plest_; and the same trick of double rendering, e.g. _of dyuerse secte and of beleeve_; _wyse and discreet_; _the auctour ne the persone_. More decisive is an example of the syntactical compromise explained in the note to l. 329: #be# _the whiche the Mappa Mundi was made_ #after#. With so many French MSS. of Mandeville in use in England, an interpolation in French would have more authority than one that could not be traced beyond English; and it can hardly be an insuperable objection that no such French text exists to-day, since our knowledge of the Cotton and Egerton versions themselves depends in each case on the chance survival of a single MS. The point has a bearing on the vexed question of the relations of the English texts one to another. For brevity we may denote by D the defective text of the early prints and most MSS., which is specially distinguished by a long gap near the beginning; by C the Cotton text (ed. Halliwell, Pollard, Hamelius); by E the Egerton text (ed. Warner). Nicholson (in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_) and Warner give priority to D, and consider that C and E are independent revisions and expansions of D by writers who had recourse to the French original. Their argument seems to be this: There is precise evidence just before the gap that D derives direct from a mutilated French text (see _Enc. Brit._), and if it be granted that a single translation from the French is the base of C, D, and E, it follows that C and E are based on D.