The first English translation direct from the French was made (at least as early as the beginning of the 15th century) from a MS. of which many pages were lost.[12] Writing of the name Califfes (Khalif), the author says (_Roxburghe Club ed._, p. 18) that it is _tant a dire come roi(s). Il y soleit auoir v. soudans_--"as much as to say king. There used to be 5 sultans." In the defective French MS. a page ended with _Il y so_; then came a gap, and the next page went on with part of the description of Mount Sinai, _Et est celle vallee mult froide_ (ibid. p. 32). Consequently the corresponding English version has "That ys to say amonge hem _Roys Ils_ and this vale ys ful colde"! All English printed texts before 1725, and Ashton's 1887 edition, follow these defective copies, and in only two known MSS. has the lacuna been detected and filled up.
One of them is the British Museum MS. Egerton 1982 (Northern dialect, about 1410-1420?), in which, according to Dr Vogels, the corresponding portion has been borrowed from that English version which had already been made from the Latin. The other is in the British Museum MS. Cotton Titus C. xvi. (Midland dialect, about 1410-1420?), representing a text completed, and revised throughout, from the French, though not by a competent hand. The Egerton text, edited by Dr G. F. Warner, has been printed by the Roxburghe Club, while the Cotton text, first printed in 1725 and 1727, is in modern reprints the current English version.
That none of the forms of the English version can be from the same hand which wrote the original is made patent by their glaring errors of translation, but the Cotton text asserts in the preface that it was made by Mandeville himself, and this assertion was till lately taken on trust by almost all modern historians of English literature. The words of the original "je eusse cest livret mis en latin ... mais ... je l'ay mis en romant" were mistranslated as if "je eusse" meant "I had" instead of "I should have," and then (whether of fraudulent intent or by the error of a copyist thinking to supply an accidental omission) the words were added "and translated it agen out of Frensche into Englyssche." Matzner (_Altenglische Sprachproben_, I., ii., 154-155) seems to have been the first to show that the current English text cannot possibly have been made by Mandeville himself. Of the original French there is no satisfactory edition, but Dr Vogels has undertaken a critical text, and Dr Warner has added to his Egerton English text the French of a British Museum MS. with variants from three others.