INTRODUCTION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
Summary
‘True Chronicles’
This title is not Le Bel's own. It's a quote from the far more famous chronicler Jean Froissart, who in his very first pages acknowledged his debt to Le Bel by declaring:
I wish to base my work on the example of the true chronicles previously written and assembled by that venerable and astute gentleman Jean le Bel, canon of Saint-Lambert at Liège. He applied great care and diligence to the task, which he continued throughout his life with all the precision that he could. It cost him a good deal to acquire the information, but he neither cared nor complained about the expense, for he was a man of wealth and power and was perfectly able to meet the cost, and he always spent his money freely, being a man of generosity, courtesy and honour. Moreover, he was a dear and close friend of that most noble and respected lord Sir John of Hainault, who is rightly well remembered in this book, for he was a driving force and principal player in many illustrious events and very closely connected with kings, so that in his company the aforementioned Jean le Bel was able to witness and learn directly of many of the exploits that follow.
It's only right that Froissart should have acknowledged his debt, for many of the early passages in his Chronicle for which Froissart is justly praised were lifted directly from Le Bel. Indeed, the main reason why Le Bel’s work was for a long while little known and little copied – only one manuscript survives, and it wasn’t found until the second half of the nineteenth century – is that Froissart absorbed sections of it into his own Chronicle which, because he then went on to recount the events of later years, made Le Bel’s work seem redundant.
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- Information
- The True Chronicles of Jean le Bel, 1290-1360 , pp. 1 - 18Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2011