(fl. 1350–1380)
The herald of the English knight Sir John Chandos wrote one of the most important firsthand accounts of the early years of the Hundred Years’ War, a verse chronicle in French called La Vie du Prince Noir (The Life of the Black Prince). Focusing on Edward, the Black Prince, eldest son of EDWARD III and hero of the Battle of Poitiers,Chandos Herald’s poem was one of the sources FROISSART used for the second edition of his Chronicles. We know virtually nothing of Chandos Herald, not even his name.His lord, Sir John Chandos, was one of the great friends of Prince Edward. Sir John had saved Edward’s life at Poitiers and was a hero in the prince’s Spanish wars.King Edward made him one of the founding members of the Order of the Garter before he was killed at the bridge of Lussac near Poitiers on New Year’s Day, 1370. His herald may have been a Fleming from Valenciennes, like Froissart himself. He probably entered Chandos’s service around 1360. Froissart mentions the herald twice in his Chronicles, once as carrying a message from Chandos to Prince Edward in 1369. It is unknown what happened to the herald after Chandos’s death, but it seems likely that this was when he completed his poem, sometime before about 1380.
The herald’s poem presents the Black Prince as an ideal chivalric hero, valiant, pious, and comparable to Arthur and Roland, though the poem contains little in the way of personal realistic detail. It seems that the Herald may not have known Prince Edward well personally. He does, however, make his own master, Chandos, a secondary hero of the poem. The text gives an account of the Battle of Poitiers, but is most valuable for its firsthand account of the Black Prince’s Castilian campaign of 1366–67, particularly the details of the Battle of Najera, where he describes fleeing Castilian knights leaping into and dying in a river red with blood.
The English victory is the high point of the herald’s poem, but he also describes the death of his master and the declining health and ultimate death of the Black Prince himself in 1376. The poem thus ends not with an optimistic tone after the victory, but with rather an elegiac tone of nostalgia over the loss of the flowers of chivalry.
Bibliography
■ Barber, Richard W., ed. and trans. The Life and Campaigns of the Black Prince: From Contemporary Letters, Diaries, and Chronicles, Including Chandos Herald’s “Life of the Black Prince.” London: Folio Society, 1979.
■ Gransden, Antonia. Historical Writing in England: c. 1307 to the Early Sixteenth Century. Vol. 2. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982.
■ Tyson, Diana B. La Vie du Prince Noir by Chandos Herald. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie, cxlvii. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1975.