ABSTRACT
The friendships revealed by the Lisle papers are different in that they constitute perhaps some of the earliest evidence in Anglo-French history of purely personal friendship in the Sixteenth Century. The French texts fall into a number of categories. The most formal are the letters received by Lisle himself from French military commanders who were neighbours of the Calais Pale, most notably Oudart du Biez but also his deputies and the governors of Ardres. These are as one might expect couched largely in terms of the necessary exchanges between frontier commanders and deal with questions of border raids, frontier disputes, extraditions and diplomacy. The origin of the Lisle connection with their French friends remains obscure. The letters reveal incidentally a great deal about the preoccupations of the women, particularly private anguish of one kind or another, expressed essentially in concise terms familiar from the diction of the sieur de Gouberville.
