Chronicles by Jean Froissart

First transcribed:Chroniques de France, d’Engleterre, d’Éscosse, de Bretaigne, d’Espaigne, d’Italie, de Flanders, et d’Alemaigne, 1373-1410 (English translation, 1523-1525)

Type of work: History

The Work:

Jean Froissart, by being so much of his age, became a writer for all time. This unpriestly priest, this citizen celebrator of chivalry took such an intense joy in chronicling his times that he devoted an entire half century to traveling, interviewing, writing, and rewriting. He interviewed more than two hundred princes in various courts from Rome and the Pyrenees to Edinburgh, and with such zest that he was a favorite of the nobles on both sides in the Hundred Years’ War. In his own time his works were widely copied and illuminated.

Although he recorded the Hundred Years’ War on a colorful and unprecedented scale, he is not a reliable historian. Born in Valenciennes, now a city in France but at that time in the Low Country countship of Hainaut, Froissart was a Fleming who shifted his allegiance from one side of the conflict to the other, depending on the court that offered him patronage at the moment. Relying mostly on hearsay evidence from partisan observers, he never consulted official documents, many of which are still extant. As a result his history abounds in anachronisms, erroneous dates, garbled names, and impossible topography. Froissart was also, understandably, unaware that the fourteenth century marked the waning of the Middle Ages and that he was the last of the medieval innocents. The histories that follow his reflect a realism and disillusionment that are in startling contrast to Froissart’s chivalric naïveté.

Froissart’s purpose was clear: He wrote “in order that the honorable and noble adventures and feats of arms, done and achieved by the wars of France and England, should notably be registered and put in perpetual memory.” His remarkable career was auspiciously launched in 1361, when he went to England as Queen Philippa’s secretary and court historian. There he thoroughly ingratiated himself with the aristocracy and began a pro-English account of the wars from the time of Edward III in 1316 to the death of Richard II in 1399. Curiously enough, he makes no mention of English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, a rival at court. Chaucer reciprocated the slight. After the queen’s death in 1369, Froissart returned to Valenciennes, went into business, and completed book 1 of the Chronicles under the patronage of Robert of Namur, Philippa’s nephew. A very large proportion of that version was directly plagiarized from his pro-English predecessor, Jehan (or Jean) le Bel, but Froissart’s fame was such that Guy II de Chatillon, comte de Blois gave him first a prosperous living at Lestinnes and later a sinecure as a private chaplain. Under Guy’s patronage Froissart traveled through France, making an especially fruitful trip in 1388 to Gaston de Foix in Orthez. During this period, he rewrote book 1 and completed books 2 and 3, adopting a pro-French perspective on the wars. “Let it not be said,” he lies, “that I have corrupted this noble history through the favor accorded me by Count Guy de Blois, for whom I wrote it. No, indeed! For I will say nothing but the truth and keep a straight course without favoring one side or the other.”

In 1397, Count Guy, a drunkard who had sold his patrimony, died. Froissart gained a new patron in the duke of Bavaria, who sent him again to England. Although Richard II, the new king, did not receive him cordially, it is interesting to note that the chronicles again took on a somewhat pro-English turn, whether subconsciously or by design, when Froissart retired to his hometown eighteen months later.

Froissart more than returned the favors of his patrons by immortalizing them as heroes and heroines of chivalry, and he took immense delight in doing so:

I have taken more pleasure in it than in anything else. The more I work on these things, the more they please me, for just as the gentle knights and squires love the calling of arms and perfect themselves by constant exercise, so I, by laboring in this matter, acquire skill and take pleasure in it.

What Froissart loved most was the resplendent panoply and pageantry of jousts and battle, and the Chronicles are really a pastiche of anecdotes, great and small. His knights are invariably “noble, courteous, bold, and enterprising” and his ladies are eternally noble, beautiful, and gentle. It is no wonder that Sir Walter Scott said of Froissart, “This is my master!”

The Chronicles abound in dramatic vignettes: the Black Prince graciously submissive to his own prisoner, King John; the duke of Brabant’s envoy sick almost to death of the treachery he has unwittingly performed; King Henry IV meditatively feeding his falcons as he deliberates on the murder of deposed Richard; Gaston de Foix discovering a purse of poison on his treacherous son’s person and unwillingly killing him; the blind king of Bohemia found dead in battle surrounded by the bodies of loyal guardsmen. In these narratives Froissart’s style occasionally soars above the conventional rhetoric of the medieval romance. Froissart can range from the crude language of peasants and soldiers to the lofty rhetoric of the bishop of St. Andrews. A knight storming battlements in Spain leans over the wall to see the defenders, “ugly as monkeys or bears devouring pears.” The earl of Derby greets Pembroke after the Battle of Auberoche: “Welcome, cousin Pembroke, you have come just in time to sprinkle holy water on the dead!” “Where is that son of a Jew’s whore?” demands de Trastamara before the murder of Don Carlos.

Perhaps one of the finest little dramas concerns Edward III’s love game of chess with the countess whom he has rescued from a Scottish siege.

When the chessmen arrived, the King, who wished to leave some possession of his with the Countess, challenged her, saying: “My lady, what stakes will you play?” And the Countess replied: “And you, Sire?” Then the King placed on the table a very fine ring, set with a large ruby, which he was wearing on his finger. The Countess said: “Sire, Sire, I have no ring as valuable as that.” “Lady,” said the King, “put down such as you have, it is indeed good enough.”

The countess, to please the king, takes from her finger a gold ring, which is not of great worth. Then they play at chess together, the countess playing as well as she can, in order that the king should not consider her too simple and ignorant, and the king makes wrong moves and does not play as well as he might. There is hardly a pause between the moves, but he looks so hard at the countess that she loses countenance and fumbles her game. When the king sees that she has lost a knight, a rook, or whatever it might be, he too loses to keep the countess in play.

Froissart is by no means always so delicately perceptive. He can describe in gruesome detail the dismemberment of Hugh Despencer, the heart thrown into the fire, the head sent to London, and the pieces of his quartered body carried off to be displayed in other cities—and then calmly proceed with the narrative of the queen’s joyous arrival for feasting in London. One feels a bizarre sense of the grotesque when Froissart asserts matter-of-factly that Galeas Visconti murdered his uncle “by bleeding him in the neck, as they are wont to do in Lombardy when they wish to hasten a person’s end.” He laments when captives are killed because they would have brought a good ransom. There are dozens of accounts of towns sacked and women and children murdered, all related without the least trace of compassion. Perhaps this detachment is explained by the fact that in Froissart’s time, violence, death, and murder were common, or by Froissart’s evident commitment to the Boethian philosophy of the wheel of fortune, dramatically presented in one of the illuminated miniatures of an early manuscript.

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, who was a touchstone of the Renaissance just as Froissart was of the Middle Ages, said of the Chronicles that they were the “crude and unshapen substance of history.” If he meant that they lacked any profound philosophical perspective, he was right. The simplicity of Froissart’s mind can be seen in his obtuse declaration that “Mankind is divided into three classes: the valiant who face the perils of war . . . , the people who talk of their successes and fortunes, and the clerks who write and record their great deeds.” Froissart could report, without realizing the significance of his account, that French king John’s Round Table of three hundred knights, who were to meet annually to tell their tales and have their heroism recorded, lasted only one year because all the knights perished.

Nevertheless, the Chronicles are rich in sheer entertainment value. Froissart’s account of the blazing day when Charles VI went mad is illustrative. As the troupe rode along, a page accidentally struck another’s helmet with his spear.

The King, who rode but afore them, with the noise suddenly started, and his heart trembled, and into his imagination ran the impression of the words of the man that stopped his horse in the forest of Mans, and it ran into his thought that his enemies ran after him to slay and destroy him, and with that abusion he fell out of his wit by feebleness of his head, and dashed his spurs to his horse and drew out the sword and turned to his pages, having no knowledge of any man, weening himself to be in a battle enclosed with his enemies, and lifted up his sword to strike, he cared not where, and cried and said: “On, on upon these traitors!”

Of greater horror are the descriptions of Sir Peter of Be’arn haunted by the ghost of a bear, or of the king of France at a marriage feast almost burned to death when five of his squires dressed in pitch-covered linen for an entertainment brush against a torchlight and are consumed in the flames.

Bibliography

Ainsworth, Peter F. Jean Froissart and the Fabric of History: Truth, Myth, and Fiction in the “Chroniques.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Examines Froissart’s Chronicles as a literary work. Explores how Froissart crafted his historical subject matter in literary terms to attempt to reconcile the realities of war with the ideals of chivalry.

Coulton, G. G. The Chronicler of European Chivalry. London: The Studio, 1930. Relates Froissart’s biography, using the Chronicles to provide information about his life. The illustrations of illuminations from two manuscripts of Froissart’s Chronicles add vivacity to the events that Froissart recounts.

Froissart, Jean. Chronicles. Rev. ed. Selected, translated, and edited by Geoffrey Brereton. New York: Penguin Books, 1978. The most accessible English translation of Froissart’s Chronicles. Contains a concise, informative introduction about Froissart, the composition of the Chronicles, and the manuscript versions of this work. Includes a helpful glossary, map, and index of persons.

Greene, Virginie, ed. The Medieval Author in Medieval French Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. This collection of essays examining authorship of French medieval literature contains two essays focusing on Froissart: “The Experiencing Self and the Narrating Self in Medieval French Chronicles,” by Sophie Marnette, and “Neutrality Affects: Froissart and the Practice of Historiographic Authorship,” by Zrinka Stahuljak.

Maddox, Donald, and Sara Sturm-Maddox, eds. Froissart Across the Genres. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. Collection of essays analyzing Froissart’s works, including several analyses of the Chronicles. Some of the other essays discuss Froissart and his contemporaries, Froissart and Geoffrey Chaucer, and the illustrations in book 1 of the Chronicles.

Palmer, J. J. N., ed. Froissart: Historian. Woodbridge, England: Boydell Press, 1981. A collection of essays by ten historians. Addresses aspects of Froissart’s writings in the Chronicles. Evaluates his contribution as a source for modern historical study of the Hundred Years’ War.

Shears, F. S. Froissart, Chronicler and Poet. 1930. Reprint. Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1972. A literary biography of Froissart. Focuses on the Chronicles in the context of Froissart’s life and experiences of English and French culture in the late fourteenth century.