An Accident of History: Lord Berners's Translation of Froissart's "Chronicles"

Author(s): George Kane

Source: The Chaucer Review , Fall, 1986, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Fall, 1986), pp. 217-225
Published by: Penn State University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25093996

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AN ACCIDENT OF HISTORY: LORD
BERNERS'S TRANSLATION OF
FROISSART'S CHRONICLES
by George Kane

The first historical prose in English with any intrinsic claim to liter
ary distinction appeared in the early sixteenth century. It is a chal
lenging question why the event was so long deferred, in view of the
early emergence of a tradition of vernacular prose historiography in
the closely related culture of France, and of other English literary
developments.
The claim has been made for two works, Sir Thomas More's En
glish version of his own uncompleted Latin History of Richard III,
which its editor dates 1514-1518,l and Lord Berners's translation of
the earlier, that is the pro-English version, of Froissart's Chronicles,
published in 1523 and 1525.2 The latter has, by reason of its date, an
accidental appearance: it ought to have been produced in the four
teenth century. By contrast More's work, at least in its Latin form,
appears with the advantage of hindsight (the main instrument, after
all, of literary history) a timely, predictable event.
More's Latin text is a humanist replication of classical Latin histori
cal writing, specifically that of Sallust, Suetonius, and Tacitus.3 With
the recovery of the ancient historians such a work waited upon the
right man with the right subject. The Historia Richardi Regis Angliae
Eius Nominis Tertii is a worthy mark of the conjunction, distinguished
in conception, organization, and execution.
The English text, although it does not correspond exactly in con
tent to the Latin, is its equal in the first two qualities. It is evidently
not a simple translation, and its editor's argument for "some sort of
simultaneous composition of both narratives, with neither Latin nor
English commanding an absolute priority"4 may be correct. What
ever actually happened, the relation of the two texts is intimate, and
the style of the English version at many points derives its character
from that intimacy.
It is as if More had been impelled to try the strength and the

THE CHAUCER REVIEW, Vol. 21, No. 2, 1986. Published by The Pennsylvania
State University Press, University Park and London.

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 218 THE CHAUCER REVIEW

capacity for effects of his vernacular against the Latin style he devel
oped for his subject. With that single subject, and a single plan of
treatment, he was actually translating himself, whichever language
he used first at any point. To what extent could his English match
the syntactic resource, the grammatical articulacy, the efficiency of
the case and number and gender signals of the Latin? There was the
further circumstance that his Latin style was itself a composite of the
varieties of writing in his models: the unpretentiousness of Sueto
nius, Sallust's mannered elegance, Tacitus's exaggeration of Sallust's
mannerisms. So More's conception of the learned, the appropriate
language for his Latin history, against which, even if only by himself,
his English would necessarily be measured, was already a compli
cated reflex of three distinctive modes of writing.
More's English style is not only larded with Latinisms of syntax
and word order, but also, on occasion, reflects idiosyncracies of his
models such as the crabbed and cryptic Tacitan manner. Also, it is
anything but uniform or consistent. It departs from or actually vio
lates contemporary English usage most often in the earlier portion;
presently the Latinisms become less conspicuous and obtrusive, and
More often falls into a natural manner, colloquial and clear and
powerful, as if, like Malory, he has taught himself now to write, or
else as if the grim story rehearsed in the remembered speech of his
informants has taken hold. But the transplanted ablative absolute
dogs him almost to the end.5
The importance of More's English History of King Richard HI is not
one of stylistic comparison with Berners's Froissart, which would be
profitless, since each text is sui generis, the one penetratingly cere
bral, the other an act of response. What matters is the time-scale
More's Richard asserts by its existence. The modernity of his huma
nistic achievement throws the freakishness of Berners's accidental
felicity into prominence. For what Berners did should have been
done in the 1380s, and the fact that it was not has some significance
for literary history.
There were no insuperable literary obstacles to the writing of
good English historical prose in the later fourteenth century. A
tradition of French prose history writing had been initiated with
distinction soon after 1204 by Villehardouin's Conquete de Constan
tinople* The social and political subjection of English was at an end.
With Langland's and Chaucer's poetic achievement, unmatched in
medieval Europe save by that of Dante, English had actually ac
quired an ascendancy: French poets of the fourteenth century read
and admired Chaucer, and one, Charles, Prince of Orleans, actually
imitated his lyrics in English with some skill and delicacy. English

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 GEORGE KANE 219

was evidently a medium apt without qualification for serious liter

ary works of art. As to prose, there had appeared at intervals works
which demonstrated the possibility of efficient prose composition in
English. In 1398 John of Trevisa produced a workmanlike and
serviceable translation of Bartholomew's De Proprietatibus Rerum; in
the mid-fifteenth century Reginald Pecocke was writing on contro
versial theological subjects in intricate and subtle prose; the fif
teenth-century prose of Sir John Fortescue's On the Governaunce of
England approaches distinction; the later style of Malory is marve
lous. From these works it is clear that the psychological obstruction
to prose composition that operated in the primitive stages of Euro
pean vernacular development, the one which Moliere obliquely il
lustrated in M. Jourdain's discovery that he had been speaking
prose for over forty years without knowing it, was no longer gener
ally effective. As for patronage, in the fifteenth century this was
more abundant and generous than at any time since the Conquest,
and history, especially that of England itself, was a popular topic.
In those circumstances it is remarkable that the appearance of his
torical writing in prose with any literary distinction was so long
deferred.7
An explanation may lie in the scope of the English chronicles,
which traditionally (following Geoffrey of Monmouth's fantasy) be
gin with the destruction of Troy, and purport to tell the whole
history of England. A first feature of that tradition is inordinate
length. A second is a division of subject matter into two parts with
characteristics so sharply distinguished as to obstruct any focus, to
deny the chronicler a single point of view, and to resist any overall
organization. The distinctiveness, incidentally, may even have been
accentuated by scepticism about the factuality of the Trojan connec
tion and its contingent prehistory of Britain, a state of mind detect
able already in the fourteenth century. Between them these features
may have had a discouraging effect.
The use of verse by Hardyng as late as the 1460s is worth a
moment's attention. It seems variously explicable: he may simply
have derived from the older chronicle tradition a notion of the ap
propriateness of verse to the early part of his topic, and so by exten
sion, to its whole; or he may have felt in the discipline of verse an
organizing principle, if only that of numbers and rhyme, to compen
sate for the absence of one in the material itself, and for his own
incapacity to supply one, or he might have felt the force of both
considerations. If so he represents a neat obverse of the French
situation where, as Jeanette Beer has shown, early chroniclers actu
ally rejected verse as a vehicle for historical writing because of its

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 220 THE CHAUCER REVIEW

association with manifestly fictitious narrative: en ces hystoires rimees

treuve on plentS de bourdes, "in such rhymed accounts one finds abun
dant nonsense,"8 and where, within a couple of generations, that
initial instinctive reaction received intellectual support in Brunetto
Latini's identification of the restrictive and distracting demands of
verse.9
The high literary achievement of the earliest French chroniclers is
a challenge to generalization about the combination of circumstances
needed to enable production of historical prose of intrinsic literary
merit. The first circumstance is, obviously, availability of a relatively
efficient prose, which itself implies some sense of prose tradition, of
the appropriateness of using vernacular prose for serious writing. A
second is a subject that contains or expresses an organizing principle
of some sort, or else provokes a sufficiently intellective presentation
to communicate a sense of organization or a viewpoint, so that the
account is not merely serial. A third is emotional response to this in
the writer, of sufficient strength to energize his language poetically,
so that the medium becomes an appreciable factor in the experience
of the text. And related to this is a fourth, awareness in him of the
reading of prose as an enjoyable experience.
These were the circumstances in the French situation. Villehar
douin in 1210 had at least a generation of competent vernacular
prose use as precedent. His subject was a circumscribed series of
actions with a governing motive, culminating in a naval assault by a
mixed force on a fortified harbor city, a specialized military opera
tion with its own logic. The occasion was of such interest and char
acter as to elicit from him "a consistently epic viewpoint."10 And he
was writing at a time when French prose was coming into its own as
the vehicle of Arthurian, that is, entertainment narrative, and would
be associated with enjoyment.
In the broadest sense Berners's situation meets these require
ments. Caxton's abundant output between 1475 and 1490 had estab
lished the conventional acceptability of English prose, and it is even
possible to discern some improvement in its use although this is not
consistent; huge errors of critical judgement like Skelton's in the
inkhorn style of his translation of Diodorus Siculus (ante 1490) were
still possible and would be for a good while. But the reduction of
English to an analytical language was by Berners's time practically
complete; word order had hardened, and the deficiency of early
English in modal conjunctions and the relative pronoun system was
as good as overcome.
As to the subject that Berners accepted in undertaking to translate
Froissart, this was first of all both chronologically circumscribed, in

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 GEORGE KANE 221

contrast with that of the traditional "English Chronicles," and second

differentiated by its immediacy. It represented a recognizably real
situation, in highly charged terms that had produced violent con
temporary reaction: on 12 December 1381 the Due d'Anjou, uncle
of the King of France, had ordered confiscation of 56 quires of
Froissart's work which he had left with an illuminator to be prepared
for presentation to Richard II.11 The political situation to which
Froissart's work refers has been luridly described: "all through the
fourteenth century, the nobility of France lived through a kind of
feudal honeymoon, learning nothing, forgetting nothing, and fore
seeing nothing."12 That condition would account for the partisanship
Froissart inherited from Jean le Bel and signifies in his first version
by habitual appellations, "the most noble Edward King of England"
and "the King of France." But it did not obscure the governing point
of view of Froissart in his descriptions, also a legacy from le Bel,
from which the actions reported generally appear, in le Bel's own
words, as notables proesses et merveilleuses aventures, les grandes apertises
et les beaulx fais d'armes.15 So the wars and manoeuvres are seen?
while admittedly from the English point of view?not as demonstra
tions of the flamboyant degeneracy of fourteenth-century France
but as splendid and heroic occasions. There is undoubtedly a quality
in the Chronicles that can be related to medieval romance, banners,
caparisons, great spectacles and lavish feasts, the honor of ladies,
young men blindfolding one eye with a silk scarf until they have
done some deeds of arms in France. But the essential organizing
principle is a set of values like those in heroic poetry, from which
indeed they may derive, where the quality of grandeur in action is
held superior to, or else to confer distinction upon, practical consid
erations, upon good common sense. To express that value in the
romance setting was largely Froissart's achievement, and the trans
mitted effect is a vital part of Berners's success. It represents an
insight by the French minor poet and author of indifferent ro
mances into a society in process of generating monstrous change
even while resisting it, typified by men like du Guesclin or Henry of
Lancaster, trying to relive a past that never existed except as an
idealistic reproach to a flawed present. To that insight, in the words
of Vgluspa, skinn of svevbi sol valtiva, "the sun is reflected from the
swords of the warrior gods"?and upon the end of their world.14
The organization of this matter is then a kind of partisanship, but of
an idea rather than of a faction.
As to the writer's emotional response that must energize his lan
guage, this is implicit in the organizing principle and its setting: the
or porroiz oir estrange proesce; Lor veissiez assault merveillox.15 A part of

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 222 THE CHAUCER REVIEW

the response which, because it is alien to our times must be specified,

is the cherishing of the past as a model, another kind of pietas than
that of Louis the Pious ordering his father's collection of Frankish
heroic poems to be destroyed, more in the manner of Isidore's in
junction to the young Visigothic nobles to value the carmina maiorum
quibus auditores provocati ad gloriam excitentur: what thyng was most best,
most laudable, and worthely done, we shulde putte before our eyes tofolowe.16
In Froissart's moment of composition the past was immediate, but
lovingly recorded, and presently cherished in his redaction, as in
response to issues still alive. By Berners's time there is antiquarian
piety in the writing: it is delectable to all humayne nature to rede and to
here these auncient noble hystoryes of the chyvalrous feates and marciall
prowesses of the vyctoryous knyghtes of tymes paste, whose tryumphaunt dedes,
yf wrytynge were not, sholde be had dene oute of remembraunce; specifi
cally, What pleasure shall it be to the noble gentylmen of Englande to se,
beholde, and rede the highe enterprises, famous actes, and glorious dedes done
and atchyved by their valyant aunceytours?17 From the nature of
Berners's style when he is actually translating Froissart that pleasure,
to use his simple term for a very complex response, extends to the
language: the clean lines, good simplicity, and clarity of Froissart's
French come across the language barrier as part of his experience, a
kind of comment, by the process of literature, upon the perceived
beauty of events, their capacity to move. Its exceptional character, if
evidence for Berners's response were needed, would appear from
his very different styles when writing independently, or when trans
lating other works. He achieves nowhere else anything like the com
pelling intimacy he responds to in, and derives from Froissart.
As to the last theoretically necessary circumstance, the customary
expectation of pleasure beyond mere information when reading
prose, this was established as much by Caxton's publication as by any
other single agency before 1525. Caxton's prose translations were of
mixed quality, but his publisher's instinct was good. His output, in
historical retrospect, was large, and it contained much literature of
entertainment, notably the prose romances Godfrey of Boulogne,
Charles the Great, Paris and Vienne, Blanchardyn and Eglantine, and The
Four Sons of Aymon; the classical legends History of Jason and Enydos;
the notable History of Reynard the Fox; and of course Malory's redaction
of romantic legend which we call Morte Darthur. Modern taste values
this last over Caxton's other publications, and there seems no doubt of
its literary superiority. Thrown upon his own resources by an evident
objective of condensing the material of his French originals, or when
transprosing English verse, Malory developed, in his later writing, a
narrative style that nowadays seems perfectly matched to his subject.

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 GEORGE KANE 223

But that is no warrant for assuming the same taste in the late fifteenth
or early sixteenth century: by 1525 Jason and Aymon had been
reissued or published as often as Morte Darthur; Paris and Vienne,
Blanchardyne, the Recuyell, and Reynard more often. The habit of read
ing for pleasure would in any event develop more from extended
repetition than from a single exceptional experience, so it is likely that
Malory had little to do with Berners's success.
In sum the excellence of Berners's translation of Froissart was
possible by virtue of the existence of conditions very like those in
which his original was created, given the indispensable accident of
the two personalities involved. Froissart is not my subject but I can
not forbear to admire his retrospective insight into the capabilities
which had enabled his work, and its limitation. "I had," he wrote,
"thank God, intelligence, a good discerning memory for past events,
a sharp, clear gift for understanding whatever I could be informed
of respecting my subject, and I was of the age and strength and
energy to sustain exertion";18 perhaps naturally he took his point of
view and capacity for response for granted, not realizing what an
asset to him as a chronicler had been his little gift of poetry.
The other personality, who in effect recreated Froissart's chronicle
as an English work of art, was of a world totally different from that
of the Hainault priest and court poet. Berners was an aristocrat,
descended through his great-grandmother from Edward III. He
came into his title at fifteen, and at that age was involved in the
abortive first attempt to put the Duke of Richmond, later Henry
VII, on the throne; he was a military commander under that king
and his son, in 1516 Chancellor of the Exchequer, and otherwise
active in the royal service. His translations, of which Froissart's Chron
icle was the first, were made to occupy himself when in his fifties he
was?so to speak?pensioned off as Governor of Calais. He was in
fact a total amateur.
That may be the very circumstance which made him the ideal
transmitter of Froissart into English. He was sensible of his limita
tions, had acquired no literary identity by independent work. He
had, apparently, no style of his own?his prefaces are in a turgidly
repetitious, otherwise nondescript prose that could have been writ
ten by almost anybody in his time, elevated, so far as that can be said
of it, only by inflation of vocabulary. He seems to have been entirely
without conceit about himself as a writer. He was not impeded by
translation theory: / have nat folowed myne authour worde by worde, yet I
trust I have ensewed the true reporte of the sentence of the mater.19 He was,
simply, faithful to his author. The errors that must be accepted in
his translation after allowance for scribally or typographically cor

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 224 THE CHAUCER REVIEW

rupt originals are not significant. His native vocabulary was rich; the
grammar of his English was equal to the grammar of Froissart's
French. He appears, without arrogance or preconceptions, to have
surrendered his individuality and answered the direction of his emo
tion and his ear as he wrote, so that his translation reproduced to a
remarkable extent the color and the rhythm of his original. Notwith
standing its dramatic language, W. P. Ker's observation is accurate:
"it is really Froissart in English, and in English that sounds like
Froissart."20
What matters for my argument is that Berners's Froissart is histori
cal writing of sustained literary excellence, the first in English of that
quality. It exists precariously, by virtue of deriving a frame and a
shape and its feeling, all developed in special circumstances, from
one source, and its Englishness from another.
Given that situation it is not surprising that some time passed
before other English historical writing of comparable excellence ap
peared. In a very real sense the English of Berners's Froissart was
already archaic when he wrote it, and as for his subject, his day was
probably the last in which an unmixed response to its feeling would
be possible. One of Berners's subsequent translations, of Guevara's
Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius, again in a close reproduction of the
style of its original, which anticipated that of John Lyly's Euphues,
was more representative of the contemporary trend, one hostile to
good writing, characterized by tastelessly exuberant mannerism even
while it was developing the capacities of English for syntactical coor
dination and subordination. Berners could not profitably have
learned from his success in translating Froissart because the lesson
there available was already obsolete, or in another sense too ad
vanced, premature. To correct the development that had produced
this condition, namely the euphuistic extravagance, there would be
needed the new education, the new grammar (John Lyly's grand
father, Berners's contemporary, had a part in promoting this), and a
new rhetoric. But with these would come also a new conception of
history, and presently the end of the chronicle tradition.
The intriguing factor in the freak creation of Berners's translation
is timing. To produce it Berners wrote in the 1520s an English prose
remarkably similar in grammatical arrangements and tone to the
best from fourteenth-century France. He had no influence and no
successor of quality until William Morris. Suppose that in 1378
Chaucer, instead of undertaking in the Book of the Duchess to outdo
Froissart's Paradys d'Amours and the other French stuff like it, or
even in 1390 instead of working on the Canterbury Tales, had sat
down to translate the Chronicles into prose. What would have been

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 GEORGE KANE 225

the subsequent course of English literature? There is sometimes ex

citement, and occasionally benefit, for the literary historian in con
templating the things that did not happen.

The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

1. The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, ed. Richard S. Sylvester (New Haven:
Yale Univ. Press, 1963), vol. 2. For the date see p. xc.
2. The Chronicle of Froissart Translated out of French by Sir John Bourchier Lord Berners
Annis 1523?25 With an Introduction by William Paton Ker (London: David Nutt, 1901,
rpt. New York, AMS Press, 1967).
3. Complete Works, 2: lxxx-civ.
4. Op. cit., p. lviii.
5. More may have been so far "inside his subject" that he did not appreciate to
what extent word order, especially the location of subordinate clauses, performed the
signaling functions of Latin inflections in his own language. There are some passages
in the History which on first reading become meaningful only after one has identified
the Latin syntactical substructure, or spotted the Tacitan mannerism. There is some
suggestion that the Latinisms may have become habitual with More. The nominative
absolute I had in mind above has no equivalent in the corresponding Latin (Complete
Works, 2: 73, English, lines 16, 17). And there are instances where the English sen
tence appears gratuitously complicated by comparison with its Latin equivalent (p. 33,
line 26-p. 34, line 5, for example).
6. See Jeanette M. A. Beer, Villehardouin Epic Historian (Geneva: Droz, 1968),
passim.
7. It is not as if the output were small. When the next volume of The Manual of the
Writings in Middle English appears the section on chronicles by my colleague Edward
D. Kennedy will show the extent of the activity, especially in the fifteenth century.
8. Beer, p. 2: "Nus contes rimes n'est verais" [No story in rhyme is true]. Froissart
came to hold a similar opinion. See Janet M. Ferrier, French Prose Writers of the
Fourteenth &f Fifteenth Centuries (London: Pergamon Press, 1966), p. 134. But appar
ently his first chronicle writing was in verse. (The Chronicle of Froissart, 1: xlv, xlvi.)
9. Ferrier, p. x.
10. Beer, pp. 31-56.
11. F. S. Shears, Froissart, Chronicler and Poet (London: Routledge, 1930), p. 40.
12. H. A. L. Fisher, History of Europe, quoted by Ferrier, p. 141.
13. "Notable deeds of prowess and remarkable events, the great skills and splendid
feats of arms." See The Chronicle of Froissart, 1: lix?lxv.
14. Snorri Sturluson, Edda: Prologue and Gylfaginning, ed. Anthony Faulkes (Ox
ford: Clarendon, 1982), p. 51, lines 40, 41.
15. "Now you will hear of exceptional bravery"; "Then you might have seen an
amazing assault." Beer, p. 9.
16. The Chronicle of Froissart, 1:4.
17. Ibid., pp. xviii, 6.
18. Quoted by Ferrier, p. 132.
19. The Chronicle of Froissart, 1:6.
20. Ibid., p. xii.

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