difficult country. They go up hills and down dales, not knowing whither they
go nor where the enemy is, and this not in an enemy's country but in their
own. They leave all the baggage and provisions behind them at midnight in
a wood, to be picked up by any one who may chance to find them. When they
at length discover the enemy, they cannot bring him to an engagement, and he
comes and goes as he pleases. Finally he departs unfought with, and they con-
sider the campaign at an end, having suffered terribly for weeks from hunger, wet
and weariness. All this is told in the most graphic manner and without a word
of blame to any one. Or again, as characteristic of that combination of pitiless
cruelty with knightly sport, of which the most chivalrous characters were capable
in that age, take the story told by Froissart of the sack of Limoges. 'It was
great pity to see the men, women and children that kneeled down on their knees
before the prince for mercy, but he was so inflamed with ire that he took no
heed to them, so, that none was heard, but all put to death as they were met
withal, and such as were nothing culpable: there was no pity taken of the
poor people, who wrought never no manner of treason, yet they bought it
dearer than the great personages, such as had done the evil and trespass';
and then shortly afterwards it is related how the prince passing by in his litter
stayed to see the gallant defence made by three French knights, 'and beheld
them gladly and appeased himself in beholding them,' and granted them their
lives when they surrendered. There is pity expressed by the chronicler for
the poor people who had done nothing and made no resistance, but the prince
is still for him 'the flower of chivalry.' These examples are types of his
representation of war, and we cannot doubt that they are true types. And it
is the same with every other department of human action. His pages breathe
the spirit of the times to which they belong, and let them contain what inac-
curacies they may, they are a truer picture of the period than any modern
historian with all his researches, or any modern historical novelist with all his
genius and imagination could present to us. In reading Froissart we are
reading the true history of the fourteenth century and breathing the very air of
that age of infinite variety, in which the knight errant appears side by side
with the plundering adventurer, and in which the popular movements in
Flanders, France and England sounded the first notes of alarm to feudal
oppressors, while the schism of the papacy prepared the way for religious
revolution.

The difficulties which stand in the way of the reader of Froissart are, first,
the vast extent of the Chronicles and their rambling and disconnected
character, and secondly, so far as the English reader is concerned, the want
of a satisfactory translation; for though the language of the original is by no
means difficult, yet it is not every one who is prepared to face the unfamiliar
forms and spelling of fourteenth-century French. The existing English ver-
sions are two in number, one of the early sixteenth and the other of the early
nineteenth century. The first is vigorous and spirited, but full of inaccuracies
of text and translation and of irregularities of style, and also disfigured by
many misprints and by the utter corruption of many proper names; the other
is respectable and commonplace, with far fewer blunders, though by no means
faultless in this respect, but certainly not in any sense alive with the spirit of
the original. A new translation is evidently desirable; but on the whole it
seems safer to attempt the task of editing a portion of the older of the exist-
ing versions, which can hardly be said as yet to have been even corrected for
the press.

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