From a preamble to one of those compilations which undoubtedly belongs to Rustician, and which we shall quote at length by and bye, we learn that Master Rustician “translated” (or perhaps transferred?) his compilation from a book belonging to King Edward of England, at the time when that prince went beyond seas to recover the Holy Sepulchre.  Now Prince Edward started for the Holy Land in 1270, spent the winter of that year in Sicily, and arrived in Palestine in May 1271.  He quitted it again in August, 1272, and passed again by Sicily, where in January, 1273, he heard of his father’s death and his own consequent accession.  Paulin Paris supposes that Rustician was attached to the Sicilian Court of Charles of Anjou, and that Edward “may have deposited with that king the Romances of the Round Table, of which all the world was talking, but the manuscripts of which were still very rare, especially those of the work of Helye de Borron[7] ... whether by order, or only with permission of the King of Sicily, our Rustician made haste to read, abridge, and re-arrange the whole, and when Edward returned to Sicily he recovered possession of the book from which the indefatigable Pisan had extracted the contents.”

But this I believe is, in so far as it passes the facts stated in Rustician’s own preamble, pure hypothesis, for nothing is cited that connects Rustician with the King of Sicily.  And if there be not some such confusion of personality as we have alluded to, in another of the preambles, which is quoted by Dunlop as an utterance of Rustician’s, that personage would seem to claim to have been a comrade in arms of the two de Borrons.  We might, therefore, conjecture that Rustician himself had accompanied Prince Edward to Syria.[8]

[Sidenote:  Character of Rustician’s Romance compilations.]

40.  Rustician’s literary work appears from the extracts and remarks of Paulin Paris to be that of an industrious simple man, without method or much judgment.  “The haste with which he worked is too perceptible; the adventures are told without connection; you find long stories of Tristan followed by adventures of his father Meliadus.”  For the latter derangement of historical sequence we find a quaint and ingenuous apology offered in Rustician’s epilogue to Giron le Courtois:—­

“Cy fine le Maistre Rusticien de Pise son conte en louant et regraciant le Pere le Filz et le Saint Esperit, et ung mesme Dieu, Filz de la Benoiste Vierge Marie, de ce qu’il m’a done grace, sens, force, et memoire, temps et lieu, de me mener a fin de si haulte et si noble matiere come ceste-cy dont j’ay traicte les faiz et proesses recitez et recordez a mon livre.  Et se aucun me demandoit pour quoy j’ay parle de Tristan avant que de son pere le Roy Meliadus, le respons que ma matiere n’estoist pas congneue.  Car je ne puis pas scavoir tout, ne mettre toutes mes paroles par ordre.  Et ainsi fine mon conte.  Amen."[9]