Akademik

   by Jean Froissart

(1369–1404)

   The most important work of French prose from the 14th century, Jean Froissart’s Chroniques (“Chronicles”) provide a vivid account in four books of roughly the first half of the Hundred Years’War between England and France. Froissart, a poet and courtier at the English court until the death of his patron, Queen Philippa of Hainault (wife of King EDWARD III), was with their son, the Black Prince, during the prince’s campaign in Gascony, and therefore could give a firsthand account of many of the events he describes.When Queen Philippa died, Froissart took service with Robert de Namur of the royal family of Flanders, for whom he began Book I of what became his Chronicles. Froissart later gained a new patron, Guy de Châtillon, count of Blois, through whose influence he was made a parish priest at Estinnes-au-Mont in Brabant. For Guy and a third patron, Wenceslaus of Luxembourg, Froissart wrote Book II of the Chronicles.

   Froissart was able to rely on his own experiences and on the secondhand eyewitness accounts of people he knew for much of the story of the war, but for events prior to 1360, he relied on an earlier version by a knight named Jean Le Bel, who had fought in the war under John of Hainault. Thus most of the first part of the Chronicles is simply a redaction of Le Bel’s work. The first version of Froissart’s Book I, written for the pro-English Robert de Namur, is clearly biased on the side of the English. But Froissart revised his first book at least twice, expunging the English partisanship, presumably to please his new pro-French patrons Guy de Chátillon and Wenceslaus of Luxembourg. Still, only a few passages of Book I are truly Froissart’s own composition, most famously the account of the Black Prince’s stunning victory over the French—and capture of the French king Jean II—at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356.

   Book I is the longest of the four books, and covers the years from 1322 to 1378. It contains accounts of Edward III’s ascension to the throne, his establishment of the Order of the Garter, the great English victory at the Battle of Crécy, the BLACK DEATH, the peasants’ Jacquerie revolt in France, the death of Pedro the Cruel of Castile, the Black Prince’s brutal sack of Limoges, and other events. It is important to remember when reading Book I, though, that for the most part you are actually reading Le Bel’s account of events. Book II of the Chronicles was probably written between 1387 and 1388, and covers the years of 1375–85. In it Froissart relates the Great Schism of the Western church, in which rival popes were established at Rome and Avignon. He gives his famous account of the PEASANTS’ REVOLT OF 1381 in England, relates the affairs of Flanders and the disastrous Flemish defeat by the French at the Battle of Roosebeke, and describes the marriage of the French king Charles VI to Isabella of Bavaria in 1385.

   Froissart’s Book III covers the period 1386–88, and was likely composed about 1391 and revised a few years later. Here, Froissart describes the splendor of the famous court of Gaston Phoebus of Foix, which he had visited himself. He also describes plans made for a French invasion of England, the campaign of JOHN OF GAUNT in Spain, and the beginning of RICHARD II’s difficulties with his uncle, the duke of Gloucester. It contains Froissart’s account of the 1388 Battle of Otterburn, in which the Scots defeated the English forces and captured their leader,Harry Percy (Hotspur). This book also contains a fascinating account of a trial by combat in which Sir Jean de Carrouges killed Jacques Le Gris after Carrouges’s wife accused Le Gris of raping her. The final book of the Chronicles was completed in about 1400, and deals with events from 1389 to 1400, including the death of the count of Foix, the madness of Charles VI, and, most famously, Froissart’s detailed account of the downfall and deposition of Richard II by his cousin,Henry Bolingbroke. The Chronicles end with Richard’s death and the progress of his hearse through London. Although Froissart’s goal was doubtless to record the most important events of his lifetime, particularly military but also political and cultural events, historians are reluctant to take Froissart’s narratives at face value. Although he has the general outline of events right, he is often demonstrably wrong about details. In part the reason for this is his desire to create a very readable narrative, which leads him to depict events with dialogue that brings his narrations to life—but which presents conversations he cannot possibly have overheard. In part Froissart’s unreliability stems as well from his clearly aristocratic bias. As a spokesman for chivalry and the noble class (who were, after all, his audience), he cannot be expected to give an objective account of the peasant uprisings in France or in England, although his account of John BALL’s sermon to the peasants in 1381 is in fact surprisingly fair. It is best to see Froissart as a social historian, giving a clear sense of the attitudes, motivations, and material world of the nobility of his day. He is also a popularizer of history, presenting memorable narratives of the greatest events of his time. His Chronicles survive in some 100 manuscripts, and the magnificent illuminations of some of them manifest the respect in which his narratives were held by the aristocratic audiences who read them.

   Bibliography

   ■ Ainsworth, Peter F. Jean Froissart and the Fabric of History: Truth, Myth, and Fiction in the Chroniques. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.

   ■ Brereton, Geoffrey, ed. and trans. Froissart: Chronicles. New York: Viking, 1978.

   ■ Figg, Kristen Mossler. The Short Lyric Poems of Jean Froissart: Fixed Forms and the Expression of the Courtly Ideal. New York: Garland, 1994.

   ■ Wimsatt, James I. Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1991.