Chronicles

“In one sense, Froissart was the first of the great war-reporters. To say this is to compare his work less to the day-to-day despatches filed for a newspaper deadline than to the books written afterwards by the best of modern correspondents, based on a combination of personal experience, reflection and research.”

For Geoffrey Brereton, Froissart’s value as a primary source comes from his journalist-like characteristics. Froissart does draw heavily from his conversations with prominent individuals. However, he is also, in many ways, a storyteller.

“Froissart’s aim in the Chronicles was to record all the important events which had occurred in Western Europe in his lifetime, and one or two decades before. These events were predominantly military, but also political and social, as seen from the viewpoints of the courts in which he lived.”

If Froissart’s Chronicles has a thesis, it is to record “for posterity” (37) the events of his time. However, as Brereton notes, Froissart’s view is also filtered through that of the nobility.

“Although he had attached himself to the nobility, Froissart was a product of the merchant middle class in a region where it was especially powerful and militant. It is not easy to determine the part which this played in his work. His constant references to money values reflect an obsession which was common to both the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, and to which only the very greatest (and not always they) were immune. He writes with a fuller understanding and warmth of the citizenled revolts in the Netherlands than a purely aristocratic chronicler would have done, though generally careful to show that ultimately he is not on that side… Ethically, his conscience can be seen to be middle class, sentimental and not hierarchical – as, over the next three or four centuries, the whole conscience of Western Europe was to become. The germs of both protestantism and humanism are in his work, unrecognized naturally by himself, but detectable in retrospect.”

In spite of Froissart’s pro-nobility slant throughout the Chronicles, Brereton argues that Froissart’s middle-class background informs his writing. This is even to the point that he reflects the growing rise of the middle class at the expense of the noble rural landowning class that will shape European history.