The collected works of the English poet John Gower, who died in 1408, run to around 30,000 lines, divided into Latin, Middle English and French at roughly a third each. Linguistically speaking, Gower perhaps deserves to be called, as he often is, a fence-sitter, but there is of course another way to look at Gower's three languages. Indeed, he suggests it himself (for I am quite convinced that the words are his own) in a Latin poem supposedly penned by ‘a certain philosopher’ and known, from its first two words, as ‘Eneidos, Bucolis’. In it, Gower is found superior to Virgil, whose ‘justly famous’ three works, the Aeneid, the Bucolics and the Georgics, are all nonetheless only in Latin, while Gower ‘wrote … three poems in three languages,/ So that broader schooling might be given to men’ [‘Te tua set trinis tria scribere carmina linguis/ Constat, ut inde viris sit scola lata magis’]. If I am correct in assuming that Gower, ‘fingens se auctor esse Philosophorem’, wrote that about himself, we have reason to take a greater account than has been the case of differences in the kinds of work he produced in each of his three languages.

Clearly, Gower the writer of French who ought to stand outlined visibly before us had different ambitions for each of the poems he wrote. Because of his evident trilingual fluency, he could make choices – and must have – about the use to which he wished to put each one.