Excerpt from The Chronicles of Froissart

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 51ons 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 ipg versions, which can hardly be said as yet to have been even corrected for 1 ie press.

The translation of Froissart by Lord Berners is established as an English classic, and many generations of Englishmen have made their acquaintance with the Chronicles through it. At the same time, though it has been re printed in the present century, it is only to be obtained at a rather high price and in a somewhat inconvenient form. An edition of the whole translation would require far more space than the single volume to which I am limited would afford, but there is some consolation for the omissions which the plan of this work renders necessary. Froissart is one of those authors of whom it may be said in a certain sense that the half is more than the whole. The student of history indeed would not willingly spare a single page, but the effect of the whole narrative will often gain considerably by the omission of the less important gests of arms, which interfere with the flow of the main current of the story, and we may perhaps also consent to spare from a popular edition the history of some of the events that lay remote from the chronicler's own field of observation, as the chapters relating to the English expedition to Portugal and Galicia, which are called by a good authority 'les plus confus et les plus inexacts de toute l'oeuvre historique de Froissart, ' and the events in England in the latter years of Richard II., in relating which he is admittedly very inaccurate. By such omissions as these the exuberant bulk of the Chronicles may be reduced, and the more interesting and important parts of them may be more satisfactorily presented to the reader. In many cases the omissions are such as to give greater continuity to the story; but in order to indicate clearly what has been omitted, as well as to supply any links that may be required for the understanding of the narrative, summaries have been inserted of that which is left out, varying in length according to the importance of the matter dealt with and its more or less direct bearing upon that which is given in full. Notwithstanding therefore the very considerable extent of the omissions, the result is not a series of extracts, but a continuous history. The fact that a larger proportion is omitted of the second volume than of the first is due to the greater diffuseness of the Chronicles in the later period the first volume includes the events of more than fifty years, the second those of only fifteen.

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