The Trees of the Sun and Moon

And beyond that river is a great wildernesse as men that have ben there say. In this Wildernesse as men saye are the trees of the Sonne and of the Mone that spake to Kyng Alexander and tolde him of his death, and men saye that folke that kepe these trees & eate of the fruits of them, they live foure or five hundred yeare through virtue of the fruite, and we woulde gladly have gone thyther, but I beleve that an hundred thousand men of armes shold not passe that wildernesse for great plenty of wilde beastes, as dragons and serpents that sley men when they pass that way. In this lande are many Oliphantes all white and blew without number, and unicorns & lyons of many maners.*

*‘maners’: varieties

from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (c. 1357)

as published in translation in 1568 by Thomas East and reprinted by John Ashton in 1887


There is an epitaph for Sir John Mandeville on a pillar in St Albans Cathedral, put up in the early seventeenth century. If ‘Mandeville’ is wholly a literary creation, as nowadays he is generally presumed to be, then it may be the only ecclesiastical monument anywhere to a character from fiction.


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