THE PALADIN, the thug, and the soldier: with a touch of hyperbole, one could describe as such the three images which the French and Burgundian chroniclers of the later part of the Hundred Years War offer of the knight, the major actor of the Anglo-French wars. Beyond this, it was the chroniclers' whole outlook on warfare which varied extensively, from the heroic vision of the Burgundian Georges Chastelain to the denunciation of the horrors of war by the Bourgeois de Paris, or the pragmatic perspective of the Berry Herald, alias Gilles Le Bouvier. These authors are exponents of three genres of chronicling wars which emerge when examining the historiographical scene in the Kingdom of France and the Duchy of Burgundy throughout the first sixty years of the fifteenth century. I propose to delineate these three groups, with reference to the chroniclers' treatment of the period between Agincourt (1415) and the days of Joan of Arc, in 1429. We shall see how some of the men who witnessed these dramatic times of civil war and invasion approached them in writing, recording them for posterity.

The Chivalric Chronicles of Burgundy

The school of historiography which developed under the aegis of Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy may be the genre with which we are most familiar, as it exemplifies a favourite theme of modern scholars: the reverence professed by the nobility and the ruling class towards the ideals of chivalry at the close of the Middle Ages, in times when the evolution of tactics and the increasingly murderous character of war rendered this ideological decorum somewhat obsolete.