8 THE KING'S MIRROR 



didactic type. The German Sachsenspiegel is an instance 

 of the title employed for a work in a vulgar idiom. There 

 was also a Speculum Regum, or Mirror of Kings, and a 

 century later an English ecclesiastic wrote a Speculum 

 Regis, but the writer knows of no other work called the 

 Speculum Regale. 



It is an interesting question whether the King's Mir- 

 ror was inspired by any earlier work written along simi- 

 lar lines. Originality was a rare virtue in the middle ages, 

 and the good churchmen who wrote books in those days 

 cannot have regarded plagiarism as a mortal sin. The 

 great writers were freely copied by the lesser men, 

 thoughts, titles, statements, and even the wording being 

 often taken outright. It is, therefore, difficult to deter- 

 mine the sources of statements found in the later works, 

 as they may have been drawn from any one of a whole 

 series of writings on the subject under discussion. The 

 writer has not been able to make an exhaustive examina- 

 tion of all the didactic and devotional literature of the 

 centuries preceding the thirteenth, but the search that 

 has been made has not proved fruitful. There is every 

 reason to believe that the author of the King's Mirror 

 was an independent thinker and writer. He was doubtless 

 acquainted with a large number of books and had drawn 

 information from a great variety of sources; but when 

 the writing was actually done he had apparently a few 

 volumes only at his disposal. In the region where the 

 work seems to have been composed, on the northern 

 edge of European civilization, there was neither cathe- 

 dral nor monastery nor any other important ecclesias- 

 tical foundation where a collection of books might be 



