Froissart, the first of the great war reporters
Froissart has been described as the most accomplished composer of prose in the Late Medieval period. His accounts of battles, tournaments, marriages, murders, plagues, treaties and rebellions are among the finest passages in 14thcentury literature. But Froissart was not a normal chronicler or historian; he was a pioneer of the form and is considered by some scholars to be Europe’s first war journalist.
Born in Valenciennes in 1337, Froissart grew up in the Low Countries. At the age of 24, he entered the service of Philippa of Hainault who was to become Queen of England and the consort to England’s most impressive medieval king – Edward III. He arrived in England in 1361 to find London filled with unransomed French princes and barons who had lost their freedom after the devastating Battle of Poitier and, quickly, he acclimatised to English courtly life.
In 1368, he accompanied the King’s son, Lionel of Clarence, to Italy for the Duke’s marriage to Violante of Milan. Geoffrey Chaucer was also in Clarence’s retinue and the poet Petrarch attended several celebratory feasts as an honoured guest. Within that single room sat three of the most formidable literary minds in Christendom but no serious interaction seems to have transpired between them. Queen Philippa unfortunately died the year after, and Froissart was forced to find fresh employment in various other noble households.
Under the patronage of Robert of Namur Froissart received the commission to write his most famous and important work – a chronicle of the Hundred Years War. Froissart wanted to produce any easily readable narrative of “the great wars of France and England” so he absorbed the accounts of older writers like Jean Le Bel, who knew veterans from campaigns like the Battle of Crecy and the Siege of Calais. Bel’s historical writings were subsumed by Froissart for the sake of his first chapters, but thereon Froissart took it upon himself to amass a huge array of sources for his own work. He travelled widely through England, Scotland, Wales, France, Italy and Spain and, like a war correspondent who tracks down witnesses and conducts interviews to acquire an authentic insight into events of interest, Froissart found as many observers as possible to enrich his output with their vivid testimonies.
Namur, who had fought for England against the French, soon withdrew his sponsorship and Froissart was thereafter engaged by two final benefactors who were allied to France – Wenceslas of Bohemia and Guy de Chantillon. With Chantillon’s help, he took holy orders and revisited England where he was welcomed by the young Richard II. He recorded the bloody downfall of his royal host five years later and was in the midst of revising the fourth book of his magnum opus when he died c.1410.
From the failed reign of Edward II to the deposition of Richard II, Froissart offers a full history of the 14th century. The deeds of daring warriors like the inimitable Sir John Chandos, of courageous kings like John the Blind of Bohemia, of unforgiving tyrants like Peter the Cruel of Castile, find their permanent place in posterity on the illumined pages of Froissart.
Froissart remained neutral, in terms of factions, throughout his chronicle, bestowing praise on both French and English figures. He continually celebrated chivalric virtues and seems to have seen the knightly orders as both a stabilising and destabilising force for medieval society. To write up the great story of the century, a feat which today would require a team of journalists and researchers, Froissart read every source he could, intercepted important individuals and referred to the heralds who knew the complex relationships between dynastic houses and the events that determined those intricate dynamics.
There were three prevailing approaches to writing history in Froissart’s time. The use of eyewitness accounts which could be limited and biased, the citation of official clerical records which could lack detail and a sense of life, and the poetic sagas which regularly abandoned facts to emphasise themes. Attributes of all three are to be found in Froissart’s work.
His exciting conversational style is eloquent and engaging, his description of battlefield inventories and the numbers of those present are detailed, but crucially his exposition of the medieval mind gives the modern reader a real sense of the beliefs, behaviours and concerns of our strange and distant ancestors. Wars and pageants provided the salient episodes of his century, but quotes from conversations with Kings, courtiers, priests and peasants affords us an unusual understanding of medieval psychology as well as the origins of our own outlook.
He of course made some serious mistakes and is treated as unreliable by many historians, but it hardly detracts from the uniqueness of the text or the ambition of the project. Perhaps it is Froissart’s skill as a dramatist that should be lauded rather than his adroitness as a historian. They are traditionally the better tellers of tales. Translator and WWII journalist George Brereton called Froissart “the first of the great war reporters” and compared his Chronicles to the books written after wars by the best correspondents. Whether it is right or wrong to see Froissart as a kind of medieval Max Hastings is unimportant. Like his contemporaries Chaucer and Petrarch, he satisfies a curiosity for a vanished world.
The history of the 14th Century is an exceptional story of betrayal, penitence, superstition and love and no one tells it better than Jean Froissart.