HISTORY AND STORY both were more or less imported into Middle English from the same Old French root, and the division between them has always been very porous. Thus, John of Trevisa, in his 1387 translation of Higden’s Polychronicon, calls Herodotus “þe writer of stories,” and John Gower, in Confessio Amantis (composed around the same time), writes of “an old histoire, /The which comth nou to mi memoire.” The line of separation remains unstable today, as seen in the uneasy usage of “story” to refer to journalists’ writing: supposedly the first draft of history, but also accounts designed to delight and to teach.
