Next to waging war, the heroes of Jean Froissart, from his compendium of the first half of the Hundred Years War, appeared to like nothing better than a well run joust. For true chivalric spirit, few tournaments matched the jousts of St. Inglevert, near Calais, held because three French knights undertook ”to maintain the lists against all comers” in the charming month of May”, 1390. ”Desirious of renown,” scores of English knights crossed the channel to tilt with the French champions, who unhorsed several, bloodied a few, and gave every Englishman his turn. According to Froissart, the notable success of one of the Frenchmen was due to his being ”smitten with love for a young lady that made all his affairs prosper”.
Jean Froissart, Chronicles
However, the gallant deeds that Froissart documented in his ”Chronicles” were mere pinpoints of light in a dark era of anarchy and rapine. Bonds berween men were breaking. Armed knights, throwing off the ties of fealty to their lords, formed themselves into ”Free Companies”, private militias, and pillaged and sacked on their own. At times, said Froissart, it was impossible for anyone to travel without being attacked. All social classes were at loggerheads. In Flanders the townsmen of Ghent, calling themselves ”white hoods”, created an army to fight the Count of Flanders, besieging their nominal lord at Dendremore, and burning and looting his castles. In a few years, said Froissart, ”well cultivated” Flanders was laid to waste.
”Froissart’s Chronicles depicts the intrigues, battles, and competition of one nation against another; it traces the Hundred Years’ War and the numerous smaller conflicts that developed between and within nations. However, national identity plays a surprisingly minor role in the work. On the whole, battles are depicted as conflicts between individuals who have a loose and often changing national affiliation rather than as struggles between nation states. In fact, the most striking division between individuals in his account is not nation, religion, or ethnicity. Instead, the deepest rift between groups is social class, but the changing makeup of armies and growing restlessness of the lower classes are creating a change in the perception of national identity.”
Anointing of Pope Gregory XI
Thus, Froissart’s imagery in prose and illuminated manuscripts was gay and brilliant; but there was a certain smell beneath the bedizement. A professional jouster could make a very good thing of conflict. The winner of a joust took his opponent’s horse,often his arms; sometimes he held the loser for ransom. Chivalry involved a good deal of pretense and self interest. Froissart indicates that knights, in their idle conversation, talked mostly of money and good tricks, including murder, to gain it. A knight poor in land and without high patronage had no means of support except pillage, ransoming captives, and even accepting bribes for disloyalty. Most of these opportunities occurred in a state of war. peace was a calamity for a gentleman.
But for a commoner the times were evil. After a series of bad harvests in the early fourteenth century the peasants reaped only famine. The bubonic plague, the Black Death, disembarked in Italy and France in 1348, and killed a third of Europe’s population before it receded. Froissart averted his look from the ugly plague; he barely mentions it.
''The last two volumes, which are in general finer, were worked on by the anonymous illuminators known as the Master of Anthony of Burgundy (identified by some writers with Philippe de Mazerolles), the Master of Margaret of York, and the Master of the Dresden Prayer Book, the last as an assistant to the Master of Anthony of Burgundy. ''
War declared no holiday. The devastation of war added to the devastation of plague; abandoned, infected villages, untilled fields, where horrid flies rose from the bloated bodies of farm animals. The destruction of villages was a legitimate act of war. Pillage was the soldier’s right, indeed his necessity for he was expected to ”live off the country”. Savage soldiers added torture and rape to mere destruction. If the victims complained, they were beaten or killed.
Atrocities were normal.The marauding armies had no facilities for guarding and feeding prisoners; the sure and simple procedure was to kill them, unless they looked ransomable. A city guilty of long resistance was punished by the murder of all survivors, men women and children. A favorite trick of besiegers was to decapitate the prisoners before the walls and catapult the severed heads into the city. The common theme was that ” a man must be feared and dreaded, even renowned for cruelty”, opined a Flemish despot, Pierre du Bois.
''Richard II meets the rebels in 1381, in the lively if pedestrian style of Loiset Lyédet''
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