Jean Froissart

Jean Froissart was a clerk from Hainault who served Queen Philippa of England, travelled through Scotland, France, Italy and Spain gathering stories from knights and squires, and wrote the Chronicles of the first half of the Hundred Years’ War, from Crécy and Poitiers to the Peasants’ Revolt and the deposition of Richard II. He cared for chivalry rather than accuracy, and the battles, jousts and feasts are told as the participants told them to him. The illuminated manuscripts are the picture of the fourteenth century that later ages inherited, and Lord Berners’s Tudor translation is an English classic in its own right.