The collected works of the English poet John Gower, who died in 1408, run to about 30,000 lines divided into Latin, Middle English and some form of French, at roughly a third each. Linguistically speaking he deserves to be called, as he often is, a bit of a fence-sitter, or a bet-hedger, 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’). Now, if indeed Gower, ‘fingens se auctor esse Philosophorem’, wrote that about himself, we have reason to take a somewhat greater account than we have yet 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 put each language. Although he never says specifically, in a theoretical way, what he is up to, Gower does come pretty close in the Prologue of the Confessio Amantis when he states that:

– or ‘king Richardes sake’, depending on the version. And Gower is, I think, making a similar statement, albeit not in so many words, when at the end of his life he seems greatly to prefer writing in Latin.