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.