To pass from the preface to the “Epistle of Othea” itself, there is no reason to suppose that the translator had received the training of a scholar; on the contrary, the probability is that, owing to a sickly youth and other drawbacks, his education had been more or less neglected. It is not even certain that he had been regularly taught French. From a curious passage interpolated by Trevisa in his translation of Higden’s “Polychronicon,” which was finished in 1387, it seems that the fashion was then already dying out among the class to which by birth he belonged,[88] and possibly therefore he learnt all he knew of the language while he was with his stepfather in France. Be that as it may, his rendering of Christine de Pisan’s French may claim on the whole to be fairly well done. The verse of his “textes” is too much of the doggrel type and his meaning is sometimes obscure, but as a rule he follows the original closely, while the orthography of the MS., though atrociously bad, is no worse than what we are accustomed to in the _Paston Letters_ and elsewhere at the same period. Occasionally, as is only natural, he goes astray, though it is of course possible that the fault lay with the MS. from which he translated. In most cases the source of his errors is obvious. Thus he translates “ton bon cuer” (p. 5) by “all good hertys,” having evidently mistaken “ton” for “tou[t]”; and again “en quant fraisle vaissel est sa vie contenue” (p. 28) by “in how frele (_sc._ frail) a vessel his lyff is all naked” (toute nue)! Similarly “conscience pour soy” (p. 16) appears as “conscience for feyth” (foy); “ala querre les autres dieux” (p. 62) as “thanne went he forth [to seek] the tothir ii^o” (deux); “mais a nostre propos [la fable] veult dire” (_ibid._) as “Mars to owre purpose seith”; and “gard toy de lagait (l’agait) de tes ennemis” (p. 73) as “kepe the (_sc._ thee) from the peple (la gent) of thyn ennemyes.” It is not so easy to understand the process by which the simple sentence “Vanite fist lange devenir deable” (p. 15) was transformed into “Vanite made avoyde degre to becum a fende,” whatever that may mean; or why in the story of Acis and Galatea (p. 65) “un iouuencel qui Acis estoit nommez” became “and he was dede” (_sc._ dead), though possibly in this case there was some confusion between “acis” and “occis.” But the strangest mistranslation is in the words “Averyse and covetise be ii^o sausmakers the which sesseth neuer to seye, ‘Bryng, Bryng’” (p. 105), where the French text has “sont ii. sancsues,” sanguisugæ, or leeches. The reference of course is to Proverbs xxx. 15, “The horseleach hath two daughters, crying, ‘Give, give’”; and, as stated in the note, “horseleeches” is in fact the rendering given in another translation of Christine’s work. Scrope’s “sausmakers” can hardly be anything but “sauce-makers,”[89] but it is not impossible that he coined the mongrel word “sanc-suckers,” which the scribe miscopied.