In his prologue to the late fourteenth-century romance, the Destruction of Troy, John
Clerk of Whalley negotiates between his roles as translator, historian and alliterative
poet to introduce his account of the fall of Troy for medieval English readers.
Professing to tell the true story of Britain’s ancient ancestors, he invokes the fiction
of translatio imperii, in which the power of empire passes from Troy to Rome to
Britain. According to Clerk, his translation of Guido delle Colonne’s Historia
destructionis Troiae provides vernacular readers access to historical truth that had not
previously been available to them. Clerk’s assumption of Guido’s history separates
his romance from the historiographic tradition of the vastly influential Geoffrey of
Monmouth, whose Historia regum Britannie celebrates Britain’s Trojan ancestry and
promises future glory to the Britons. Rather than venerate Troy as a font of imperial
power, Guido condemns the martial policy of the Trojans that causes their defeat,
characterizing Troy as a tainted origin of Western civilization. By comparing Clerk’s
text with another translation of Guido’s Historia, John Lydgate’s Troy Book, I argue
that Clerk’s translational method, which he calls a ‘linking of letters’, reflects a
commitment to connecting a destructive past with an English present.