By name Jean Froissart, aged 22 or 23, he succeeded in pleasing the Queen and, with her encouragement, began collecting material for the chronicle that was to make him the Herodotus of his age. Consciously the celebrator of chivalry, he wrote with intent that “the honorable and noble adventures and feats of arms, done and achieved by the wars of France and England, should notably be inregistered and put in perpetual memory.” Within those confines, no more complete and vivid chronicle exists. Crystallized in the “perpetual memory” Froissart achieved for them, the nobles of his time forever
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By name Jean Froissart, aged 22 or 23, he succeeded in pleasing the Queen and, with her encouragement, began collecting material for the chronicle that was to make him the Herodotus of his age. Consciously the celebrator of chivalry, he wrote with intent that “the honorable and noble adventures and feats of arms, done and achieved by the wars of France and England, should notably be inregistered and put in perpetual memory.” Within those confines, no more complete and vivid chronicle exists. Crystallized in the “perpetual memory” Froissart achieved for them, the nobles of his time forever ride, brilliant, avaricious, valiant, cruel. If, as Sir Walter Scott complained, Froissart had “marvelous little sympathy” for the “villain churls,” that was a condition of the context.
