uke de Berri and his
officers with Aymerigot Marcel and Geoffrey Tete-Noire, they are much
less characteristic of Froissart. The literary instinct of Scott enabled
him (in a speech of Claverhouse[136]) exactly to appreciate our author.
Some of his admirers have striven to make out that traces of political
wisdom are to be found in the later books. If it be so, they are very
deeply hidden. A sentence which must have been written when Froissart
was more than fifty years old puts his point of view very clearly.
Geoffrey Tete-Noire, the Breton brigand, 'held a knight's life, or a
squire's, of no more account than a villain's,' and this is said as if
it summed up the demerits of the free companion. Beyond knights and
ladies, tourneys and festivals, Froissart sees nothing at all. But his
admirable power of description enables him to put what he did see as
well as any writer has ever put it. Vast as his work is, the narrative
and picturesque charm never fails; and in a thousand different lights
the same subject, the singular afterglow of chivalry, which the
influence of certain English and French princes kept up in the
fourteenth century, is presented with a mastery rare in any but the best
literature. He is so completely indifferent to anything but this, that
he does not take the slightest trouble to hide the misery and the
misgovernment which the practical carrying out of his idea caused.
Never, perhaps, was there a better instance of a man of one idea, and
certainly there never was any man by whom his one idea was more
attractively represented. To this day it is difficult even with the
clearest knowledge of the facts to rise from a perusal of Froissart
without an impression that the earlier period of the Hundred Years' War
was a sort of golden age in which all the virtues flourished, except for
occasional ugly outbreaks of the evil principle in the Jacquerie, the
Wat Tyler insurrection, and so forth. As a historian Froissart is, as
we should expect, not critical, and he carries the French habit of
disfiguring proper names and ignoring geographical and other trifles to
a most bewildering extent. But there is little doubt that he was
diligent in collecting and careful in recording his facts, and his
extreme minuteness often supplies gaps in less prolix chroniclers.

[Sidenote: Fifteenth-Century Chroniclers.]

The last century of the period which is included in this chapter is
extremely fertile in historians. These range them