CHAPTER

    I. Of Degrees of People
   ii.  Of Cities and Towns
  III.  Of Gardens and Orchards
   IV.  Of Fairs and Markets
    V. Of the Church of England
   VI.  Of Food and Diet
  VII.  Of Apparel and Attire
 VIII.  Of Building and Furniture
   IX.  Of Provision for the Poor
    X. Of Air, Soil, and Commodities
   xi.  Of Minerals and Metals
  XII.  Of Cattle Kept for Profit
 XIII.  Of Wild and Tame Fowls
  XIV.  Of Savage Beasts and Vermin
   XV.  Of Our English Dogs
  xvi.  Of the Navy of England
 xvii.  Of Kinds of Punishment
XVIII.  Of Universities

THE CHRONICLES OF FROISSART

BY

JEAN FROISSART

Historical narrative of many of the battles of the hundred year’s war between England and France.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Jean Froissart, the most representative of the chroniclers of the later Middle Ages, was born at Valenciennes in 1337.  The Chronicle which, more than his poetry, has kept his fame alive, was undertaken when he was only twenty; the first book was written in its earliest form by 1369; and he kept revising and enlarging the work to the end of his life.  In 1361 he went to England, entered the Church, and attached himself to Queen Philippa of Hainault, the wife of Edward III, who made him her secretary and clerk of her chapel.  Much of his life was spent in travel.  He went to France with the Black Prince, and to Italy with the Duke of Clarence.  He saw fighting on the Scottish border, visited Holland, Savoy, and Provence, returning at intervals to Paris and London.  He was Vicar of Estinnes-au-Mont, Canon of Chimay, and chaplain to the Comte de Blois; but the Church to him was rather a source of revenue than a religious calling.  He finally settled down in his native town, where he died about 1410.

Froissart’s wandering life points to one of the most prominent of his characteristics as a historian.  Uncritical and often inconsistent as he is, his mistakes are not due to partisanship, for he is extraordinarily cosmopolitan.  The Germans he dislikes as unchivalrous; but though his life lay in the period of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, and though he describes many of the events of that war, he is as friendly to England as to France.

By birth Froissart belonged to the bourgeoisie, but his tastes and associations made him an aristocrat.  Glimpses of the sufferings which the lower classes underwent in the wars of his time appear in his pages, but they are given incidentally and without sympathy.  His interests are all in the somewhat degenerate chivalry of his age, in the splendor of courts, the pomp and circumstance of war, in tourneys, and in pageantry.  Full of the love of adventure, he would travel across half of Europe to see a gallant feat of arms, a coronation, a royal marriage.  Strength and courage and loyalty were the virtues he loved; cowardice and petty greed he hated.  Cruelty and injustice could not dim for him the brilliance of the careers of those brigand lords who were his friends and patrons.