ABSTRACT
The most glowing description of the world of the English courts comes from Jean Froissart, the man who, o f all men, was most enamoured o f the brilliance and romance o f fourteenth-century chiv alry. Unlike Chaucer, he was a professional man-of-letters, rewarded by gifts from patrons and by sinecures in the Church. But his career offers some interesting parallels to that of Chaucer, who must have known him, and who certainly copied his verse. Froissart’s early days are even more obscure than Chaucer’s. First, we note that in his poetry he makes three references to his age, and thereby gives us the choice o f three different birth years — 1333, 1337, 1338. Froissart was a Fleming and, like Chaucer, seems to have been bom to a wealthy middle-class family and to have early moved in courtly, aristocratic circles. He began Latin at 12, which was later perhaps than an English boy would have done. But, he says with un-Chaucerian complacence, he was more interested in the little girls, and in fighting the other boys, than in his lessons. In 1362 he came to England, to find as his patron his feUow-countrywoman, Edward’s Queen Philippa, whose praises he so warmly tells wherever he finds occasion.
