Jean Froissart was nothing if not a good storyteller, and in large part his talent for choosing compelling anecdotes underlies the power of his wartime narratives. A famous vignette from his account of the Battle of Poitiers in 1356 can serve as a good entry point for investigating the dynamics of class, language and the wartime practices of exchange that underlay ideas of governance and regimen between England and France during the Hundred Years War. On the battlefield at Poitiers as the French are being routed – even driven back to the city walls and slaughtered in the road before the main gate – the standard-bearer Geoffrey de Charny is killed and the French forces dissolve into chaos. The king’s division collapses and King John II himself, surrounded by hostile English, looks to surrender. As he is being jostled, he comes into range of ‘un chevalier de la nation de Saint-Omer que on clamoit monsigneur Denis de Morbeke’ [a knight from the region of Saint-Omer called Sir Denis de Morbecque],

Sir Denis’s bon françois gives the enterprising knight an advantage on the battlefield, as the king can understand and communicate with him to secure his own safety. Denis is another figure of exchange, serving in the court of the English king because of his banishment from his native lands in Artois. Thus, a French-speaking knight from Artois in the service of the English king secures (at least temporarily) the grandest prize to be won, his own French king.² He does so explicitly to deliver him to Prince Edward the Black Prince, as this exchanged knight himself was eager to profit from the aristocratic game of prisoner exchanges that provided the profits of war. King John was nobly received by his ‘cousin’ the Prince of Wales, and as the Chandos Herald notes, the two kinsmen resided amiably together that night in a tent on the battlefield, among the dead.³

And so, as Froissart famously declared, at Poitiers ‘Et fu là morte … toute li fleur de la chevalerie de France’ [there died the whole flower of French chivalry].⁴ The capture of King John precipitated the continued troubles in France for decades to come. The circumstances attending that surrender provide a good example of how the shared assumptions and class-determined practices of exchange made the whole episode play out as it did between warring nations, and as I will argue here, how that dynamic of exchange blurs the lines of interior versus exterior, of ‘national’ identity versus cross-class and cross-national allegiances. Sir Denis has made a home in exile in England and even in English royal service; King John scans the battlefield for his English cousin to properly surrender. Both men behave like family, communicating and sharing as kin even amidst the bloodiest conflict yet seen in the war. It is not just shared language and class but the shared language of class that makes the terms of exchange possible.

As I would like to argue in this analysis, it is also a shared language of governance and regimen, that is, a specific modality of regiminal understanding of proper behaviours which come to the surface as governing principles with both symbolic and pragmatic force, depending on ‘who one is’ in the stratified relations of language and social position. As much recent scholarship has made clear, these relationships were mediated by wartime literary practices, and they were further reinforced by exchanges of specifically regiminal and mirror-texts circulating between France and England with notable frequency. At the aristocratic and royally symbolic level, these sorts of exchanges were cultivated particularly in the second phase of the war under Richard II (r.1377–99), as the English attempted to imitate the Valois-inspired cult of divine kingship.⁵ At the lower levels of the social spectrum where the war was fought closer to the bone, we find remarkable expressions of class awareness that are as cognisant of their antagonistic distinctions as they are of their mutual dependence, expressions of both difference and solidarity that confuse the nationalistic boundaries supposedly driving the conflict. I would like to discuss here several examples of this exchange dynamic, in both poetry and prose, highlighting the sometimes occluded relation of sameness-in-difference specifically in contemporary idealisations and critiques of good governance.

Chronicle accounts from the time around Poitiers provide telling examples of the crossing of conflicts from exterior foreign war to interior civil war, and from one nationality to the other. In the chronicle of Jean de Venette, the Carmelite friar and Provincial Superior of France provides (with the benefit of hindsight) a foreboding account of the conflicts between the peasantry and aristocracy that would cross national borders in the wake of the French defeat at Poitiers:

Venette’s foreshadowing of the Jacquerie Revolt of 1358 is remarkable for its connection of the peasant uprising not just to the tax burdens imposed by the nobility ostensibly to pay for the war, but to the class antagonisms expressed during the war muster itself.⁷ The very name Jacques Bonhomme – apparently displacing the ‘lost name’ of rustici/paysan as ‘(fellow) countryman’ – was a pejorative identity-marker for the same peasantry who were serving in the war, indeed the ones who would die at the Battle of Poitiers alongside (or underneath) the ‘flower of French chivalry’. In this way the conflict of French versus English was mirrored by the conflict of low versus high class within the French nation and even within the military impressment. That specifically class-based conflict carried across national lines as the derisive name of ‘Jack Goodman’ became as much English property as French.

As Venette explains and Froissart also relates – and as Christine de Pizan would also later assert repeatedly – at its root this crossing of conflict resulted directly from the loss of proper regimen among the ruling classes of the nation which in turn prompted the breakdown of relations ostensibly justifying estates’ distinctions and governance in the first place. Froissart composed two remarkable pastourelles on the subject, one lamenting the violence of the routiers who pillaged the French countryside after the Battle of Poitiers, and another decrying that ‘a wolf has been set to guard the sheep’ (‘un lour pour garder les oeilles’), which probably refers to the peace treaties negotiated between France and England in 1359–60 that left the common people exposed to violence from both the English invaders and their own nobility.⁸ Far from defending the country, as Venette also laments, the nobility became the wartime enemy of their own peasants, and the peasantry could not distinguish the marauding forces of the English – both armies and free companies pillaging at will – from their own nobility.⁹ Even accounting for the chronicler’s biases, other sources attest to essentially the same dynamic of internalised war. This too has an interesting set of symbolic and ideological manifestations in the blurring of French and English national identities, as it becomes harder to say just who were the ‘fellow countrymen’ and who the ‘enemy’.

Froissart presents the popular uprising of the Jacquerie as an anti-chivalry: headless, animal and inhuman, anticipating and perhaps influencing John Gower’s later characterisation of the Great Rising of 1381. As such, military violence was easily turned inward, even as the rebellious constituency of the Jacquerie itself displayed a ‘remarkable degree of organizational and hierarchical leadership’, possibly drawn from military experience.¹⁰ Froissart recounts how the commander for the English, the Captal de Buch (Jean III de Grailly), together with the count of Foix, effectively turned their military skills against the rebellious peasants of Meux, ‘exterminat[ing] more than seven thousand’ [il en tuèrent ce jour plus de VII^m] and burning the town to the ground.¹¹ And another siege episode indicates how the violence of the war operated on two separate planes or levels. In 1359, at the town of Cormicy (just north of Reims), the English commander Bartholomew Burghersh successfully invested and undermined the castle controlled by the archbishop of Reims.¹² Rather than attacking, Burghersh brought the castle’s commander, Sir Henry de Vaulx, safely outside to see that his great tower had been completely compromised and would fall as soon as the English attacked. Sir Henry then surrendered his garrison peacefully and commended Burghersh for his honourable behaviour: ‘Certainnement, sire, vous avés bonne cause, et ce que fair en avés, vous vient de grant gentillèsce: si nous mettons en vostre volenté et le nostre ossi’ [Certainly, sir, you were quite right and it was really a gentlemanly act to do what you did. We put ourselves at your disposal with everything we have with us]. As the castle is destroyed, Froissart recounts Burghersh’s telling exchange with Vaulx:

This is another story of military surrender where again the wartime distinctions between ‘French’ and ‘English’ are almost completely blurred by the coordinate but orthogonal forces of social class. Like King John on the battlefield looking to surrender to his English cousin, the local French and English chivalry have more in common with one another than they do with their own countrymen, and their conduct in war is explicitly framed in this differential way.

At the same time, the Jack Goodmans/Jacques Bonhommes of both nations apparently formed a boundary-crossing estate as well, and this conflict, high versus low, also inflected the perception of the conduct of the war from a bottom-up perspective. Decades later a similar dynamic is evident in Froissart’s account of the English Uprising of 1381, which was motivated by English domestic wartime pressures but which Froissart presents as part of a transnational crisis. After telling how the English rebels forced some knights and nobles to join their ranks, he says of the Uprising:

Froissart’s account of the English Uprising is among the best known and most informative, both for the broad sequence of events and for some of the domestic details.¹⁵ Here, taking a wider view, Froissart connects the rebellion directly to the Maillotins Uprising of 1382 in Paris and (by implication) to the Harelle rebellion in Rouen just prior to it, as well as to the long Flemish peasant rebellion of 1323–28. Ostensibly both the English and French rebellions were motivated by abuses of taxation, but Froissart sees them as cross-channel expressions of organised anti-aristocratic violence and as revolutionary movements taking inspiration from one another. The disparate events are presented as de facto evidence of a kind of European community of bonhommes, a mirror-reversed version of the transnational self-awareness of the chivalric class itself. International chivalric war has its not-so-secret sharer in class war.

At other places Froissart also accounts for the class-based anger of the English community, expressed not by the bourgeoisie but explicitly by the agrarian and pastoral working segment:

Here, in another mirror-moment, the comparison between England and France is made explicitly to show that for the labouring classes – servants and agricultural labourers and workers of the wool trade, England’s tax staple – things really were not so different on either side. Since the nobility were fighting for their own ‘good(s)’, their relation to the nation is seen as a sectional and fundamentally different interest. They are the ones with something to lose, not the workers who labour for them. And yet the English labourers are now the ones being taxed for war and (at this point in the 1380s) with a severity finally beginning to approach the level of exploitation already felt in France for decades.

Froissart’s point is probably to condemn the disloyal and unchivalrous grumbling of the lower classes, but viewed overall, these several vignettes point to a larger insight. Taken in the context of the military events of the war and the conduct of war, what emerges from them is a complex set of exchanges across not just the national categories of ‘French’ and ‘English’ but also across the ideological divide of feudal versus seigneurial bonds and the manifestations of class identity. The feudal system of vassalage bound the aristocracy together but also exposed the contradictions and conflicts of material interest at stake in the ties of hereditary lordship, as well as in the political fault-lines not mapping neatly onto national divisions. Correlatively, the seigneurial system of material extraction and manorial dominance – the relentlessly local and regional exploitation of peasant and artisanal classes – emerges as a non-localised and rhizomatic vector of conflict that criticises, in a potentially revolutionary way, the transnational ideals of princely governance and regimen supposedly justifying the peasantry’s own subjection. Since the nobility were no longer fulfilling their duty of protection – indeed, since they were as bad as ‘the enemy’ in both violence and taxation – what good was obedience and service? And from the perspective of the narrative and genre-based expressions of these tensions, we might fairly ask how it is that at least some of the recorded events of the Hundred Years War indicate the mixture of stratified languages we see in this context of conflict?

The episodes discussed so far have highlighted the complex exchanges of French–English wartime identities at the practical but also conceptual or ideological level. They provide examples of the ambiguity attending questions of ‘national’ identity for both sides, perhaps more so for the French and their less precociously developed structures of nation statehood.¹⁷ At the same time, as these episodes make evident, the cross-class and cross-national tensions of identity were not unperceived, both between nations and within them. Explicit connections were drawn not just from chivalry to chivalry but also from peasantry to peasantry, and against the grain of the national boundaries that both sides tried to enforce. Practical notions of ‘good governance’ and its failure bespeak the kind of boundary-crossing awareness of regiminal ideals exchanged in the literature of governance across the temporal length of the Hundred Years War, and indeed both before and after it.

At first glance this may seem a strange genre-connection to make, from chronicles and imaginative writings to the supposedly practical writing of de regimine texts and mirrors for princes, in the context of war narratives that display this conflict-driven ideological mixture. As recent criticism has shown, regiminal texts were a shared currency specifically between French and English, and not just for the idealised portraits of the princely ruler or the personal ethical virtues of good governance.¹⁸ They were vehicles for the broader constitutional discourses of the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries which acted as a common language through which assertions of both identity and difference could be articulated in terms drawn from the war, as the genre was directly concerned with the practices of war. The genres and tropes of the regiminal mode were important enough for the attention of every major English courtly writer of the period: Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate and others all wrote or translated their versions of mirrors and de regimine texts, which provided a major vector for the recovery of Latin classical and post-classical writing. The French translation of the Livre de l’informacion des princes of Jean Golein from around 1379 found its way into English libraries at about the same time that John Trevisa was producing a complete English translation of Giles of Rome’s massive De regimine principum, which was also translated into French.¹⁹ A minor work such as Philippe de Mézières’s Epistre au Roi Richart (Letter to King Richard II) from 1395 exploited the tropes of the ‘regiminal letter’ as well as the symbolic alchemical, geomantic and medical lore that travelled closely with the de regimine genre in the tradition of the Secretum secretorum.²⁰ The French letter directly exhorted the king to reconcile the ‘marriage’ of French and English relations.²¹ The mirror-texts of Chaucer and Gower (the Tale of Melibee and Book 7 of the Confessio Amantis), although more artistically oriented, also fit into this larger pattern of genre-mixing and border-crossing. Simply put, the French and English were talking to each other extensively through this mode during the war, as a means of both chivalric exchange and national self-definition.

But if this process of literary exchange was taking place, it is also the case that the regiminal genre, specifically from its inception in English writing, provided a vector for the critique of lordship, in tropes that drew from the ideologemic figuration of the French monarchy for critical contrast and self-definition.²² French and English national identities were co-mixed here too, and the traces of that mixture are visible through different identificatory strategies. A Latin Fürstenspiegel from the early fourteenth century provides a good initial example. At the start of Edward III’s reign the cleric and author William of Pagula composed – and then apparently later re-composed – a mirror-text for his new sovereign, editorially titled Admonition to King Edward III or Mirror of the King. Both versions (of which there are several manuscripts) date from around 1331–32, just after the death of Charles IV and during the time Edward III was assessing his claim to the French crown.²³ The differences between the two versions are revealing. Both exhort Edward to good kingship and good policy, but ‘Version A’ invokes canon law, English statutes, legal charters (including Magna Carta) and the negative example of the recently deposed Edward II. The treatise also appeals strongly to class arguments and threats of conflict. It warns the young king that popular rebellion will rise if he does not observe the proper constitutional limitations on his power of purveyance. Because of his ‘rapinas et injusticias’, ‘robberies and injustices’,

Negative passages like this dot the treatise. As Pagula says elsewhere, quoting scripture, ‘et tu, domine rex, nisi aliter facias ordinari, timendum est, de amissione regni tui. Juxta illud Ecc. x: “Regnum a gente in gentem transfertur propter injusticias, et injurias, et contumelias, et diversos dolos”’ [and you, lord king, unless you ordain otherwise, the loss of your kingdom must be feared. According to Ecclesiasticus 10:8, ‘Kingdoms are transferred from people to people, on account of injustices, injuries, contumacies, and diverse harms’].²⁵ He asks rhetorically, ‘Nonne tu, rex, astrictus es obedire preceptis Dei sicut unus rusticus?’ [Are not you, king, required to obey the precepts of God as much as any peasant?], and he warns clearly that if the king’s household continues with unjust purveyances he risks resistance and rebellion: ‘in hiis enim, que sunt contra preceptum Dei, non est regi obediendum, sed resistendum, et qui sic fecerit grande premium sibi adquirit’ [for in these things that are against the precept of God, one must not obey, but rather resist, the king, and he who does this obtains reward for himself].²⁶ As Cary Nederman has noted, these are some of the most striking expressions of popular resistance to be found in any such work.²⁷

These radical criticisms of ‘Version A’ contrast starkly with the ‘Version B’ of the same treatise. In this other rendition, all of the legalistic citations of Gratian’s Decretum and English statue law are removed; almost all hints or direct threats of domestic rebellion are softened; and a clearer sermon-structure is provided for the text’s framework with a thema taken from Deuteronomy 32:29, ‘O Domine mi Rex: Utinam saperes et intelligeres ac novissima provideres’ [O Lord my God, that you would be wise and would understand, and would provide for your last end], which is repeated at every chapter head.²⁸ The criticisms are also largely reframed as moral and eschatological exhortations, not legal and constitutional, urging the king to ‘look to his end’. And while still English, this second version looks much more to France and the French. In a large addition, Chapter 11 inserts the entire text of ‘Les enseignements de Saint Louis à son fils’, a regiminal letter on good governance supposedly written by Louis IX to Prince Philip (Philip III ‘The Bold’) as recorded in Jean de Joinville’s Histoire de Saint Louis.²⁹ In approximately twenty-four sub-sections of this text within a text, Louis exhorts his son to avoid evil customs, unjust purveyances and all manner of moral temptations and failings of kings. For Pagula, St Louis exemplifies how the English king can avoid the harm of bad policies and thus escape ‘odium Dei, et odium populi tui anglicani’ [the hatred of God and the hatred of your English people].³⁰ At the end of the treatise he concludes: ‘Erroribus premissis correctis, et a te sancti Ludovici regis ammonicionibus inchoatis; te docebo qualiter Deo et populo complacebis et sic rectam viam ad celi gaudium ambulabis. [When you have corrected the errors previously mentioned and begun on the warnings of the St King Louis, then I will teach you how to please God and the people, and thus you will walk along the right path to the joy of heaven].³¹ The French king thus becomes a direct regiminal model for Edward and even a figure for mediating what was, in the first draft, one of the most vociferous critiques of an English king to come down to us from the period.

In generic content, Pagula’s criticisms are closer to what much of the de regimine tradition actually says about resisting tyrants. Every major work of that genre – books by John of Salisbury, Brunetto Latini, Vincent of Beauvais, Giles of Rome, Ptolemy of Lucca, John of Wales, the Secretum secretorum and others – condemn the oppressions of overreaching kings who exploit their subjects unjustly. Like Pagula, each one warns that discord, popular rebellion and overthrow are the inevitable fate of tyrants. As well there are other examples in the British de regimine tradition of writers appealing specifically to French models for a contrastive example of good governance, proper constitutionality and generally virtuous behaviour.³² So there was some prior experience in this mode of looking over the Channel and taking something good by which to judge the badness of a domestic king, and along with this, of framing that critique in explicit class terms. That is, political rebellion would not be only (or mainly) manifested by the resistance of the noble classes, but the commonalty and peasantry would rise up and resist and have justification for doing so. Even the eclectic Secretum secretorum, widely circulated and frequently adapted from French to English during the Hundred Years War, highlights the threat of popular uprising as a correlative to its vision of a balanced political order that both imitates and epitomises the harmony of the natural world and divine order.³³ English writers such as Gower, who read and adapted the Secretum (along with, in Gower’s case, the French-language Trésor of Latini), could not have missed these elements of popular resistance and peasant rebellion that are presented not simply as the lamentable collapse of authority, but as a homeostatic mechanism whereby a return to proper order is, in the natural course of things, more or less assured.³⁴

Looking at the genre with an emphasis on these elements of class rebellion and in the context of these chronicle accounts, it then becomes, if not necessarily more obvious, then certainly more understandable why contemporary writers betray such a conflicted consciousness not only of national identity but also of class conflicts. In his works Chaucer remained famously mum about the direct impact of both the Hundred Years War and the long-running class frictions attendant to it, although specific elements of his oeuvre give hints of critical awareness.³⁵ Gower repeatedly appeals to the vox populi as both a personal and institutional vehicle for the tenor of his public poetry: he insistently frames himself as the voice of traditional regiminal authority and the voice of ‘popular’ protest. At the same time, he strongly condemns the commons and peasantry for the violence of rebellion that he saw (like Froissart) as a direct product of the war and as an unacceptable challenge to the chivalric ideology underwriting it. Gower’s own engagement with the transnational de regimine mode thus both invokes and effaces this important coordinate aspect of subaltern class-consciousness, even as his linguistic practice moves from French to English (and draws French texts into English) in the most adroit way of any Anglophone writer. When he is most ‘French’ in language and influence he most vociferously asserts his Englishness, and in turns his expressions of Englishness – his insistent self-presentation as the critical vox clamantis – draw from the regiminal framework of ethical governance which was largely a French inheritance.³⁶

In the long Lancastrian period of the war, the most important exemplars of this dynamic of exchange were Thomas Hoccleve and Christine de Pizan, both in their persons and works. We might say that they formed, from an English point of view, something of a Christine–Hoccleve dyad, a female–male, French–English pair in which Hoccleve frankly leeched from Christine’s prior and trendsetting work as he mediated and legitimated it for English consumption. This exchange was largely filtered through the de regimine mode, even when the generic content was ostensibly courtly. As modern scholarship has noted, Christine de Pizan was a liminal figure in almost all ways: in gender, marital status, class, nationality (an Italian-Pisan with a strong adopted French identity) and as one of the vernacular French writers who most successfully fed the aristocratic appetite for both courtly and neoclassical regiminal works.³⁷ After 1400 almost all of her major works were composed under the broad aegis of regiminal and mirror-texts, including her influential adaptation of Vegetius, Le Livre de fais d’armes et de chevalrie, and the paired Le Livre de la cité des dames and Le Livre des trois vertus. Indeed, her career as a professional writer began with the same fraught dynamic of French–English hostage exchange that characterised the war as a whole. When her son Jean was detained by the usurper Henry IV after the deposition of Richard II, she promised to cross the Channel and take up residence as a writer in the English court if Henry agreed to allow Jean’s return to France. But once he was out of harm’s way, she declined to complete the exchange.³⁸ What was exchanged were her numerous books, which were extensively translated and imitated by Hoccleve and later in the 1450s by the scholar-soldiers of the Fastolf circle, making her one of the most prominent ‘English’ literary figures during that phase of the war.³⁹ For all his praise and ostensible debt to Chaucer, it was really Christine whom Hoccleve most imitated and emulated and who was his most significant contemporary interlocutor.⁴⁰ Although his own Regiment of Princes does not identify Christine’s writing as his immediate source (as it was for his Letter of Cupid), he clearly imitates her voice and literary practice in his dependence upon Giles of Rome and in his foray into the Fürstenspiegel genre, with a large personal element added to the political.

The text of Hoccleve’s Regiment addresses the French–English war most directly at the very end, the traditional textual spot in a de regimine for deliberations on the conduct of war.⁴¹ His fitful attempts at mediatory gestures, the explicit turn to the French–English conflict as a tragic example of ‘werre inward’, and his sorrow over the ‘agonye’ of France, all enact this conflation of inward versus outward through the recasting of foreign war as civil war, a war of self versus self:

Written after the main violence of the Burgundian-Armagnac feud in France (Hoccleve’s ostensible referent here), the Regiment goes on to declare it would be better if ‘France and Engeland’ were united ‘oon in herte’ for the good example of all Christian nations: ‘Yee hem ensaumplen, yee been hir miroures / They folwen yow’ (5321–9). In this way the major English mirror-text of the period presents the combatants, and the conflict itself, as both a mirror and a redoubling, even as Hoccleve is mirroring Christine by taking her field of vernacular literary practice and translating it across the Channel. The domestic troubles of France are ambiguously both those internecine upheavals and France’s refusal to acknowledge its external but ‘rightful’ sovereign in Henry. But again, the same laments could be made for England too, which had been no less riven by violent internal divisions during the war. This point simply could not have been lost on Hoccleve, as he spends the first two thousand lines of the Regiment cataloguing the endemic, class-crossing and bodily ills of the English nation and of the ‘Englissh man’ – Hoccleve himself – lamenting them. The crossings and redoublings are thus more complex than they might seem at first glance, as the frame of war is itself refracted in those mirror-texts which provide the ideologemes and figures necessary for understanding it in the first place.

In contrast, although there are no references to England as a double or mirror in Christine’s texts – and no idealisations of an English king in the way Pagula idealised St Louis – we do find expressions of class awareness combined with questions of regiminal virtue, governmental legitimacy and class conflict. Christine’s most traditionally structured de regimine is the Livre du corps de policie (c.1406), which was translated into English in the later fifteenth century.⁴² It is divided into three parts based on three estates: princes, nobles and knights, and ‘tout l’universel peuple’ [the common people]. Roughly following the pseudo-Plutarchan organicist model drawn from John of Salisbury, Christine includes in this third estate not just the bourgeois and artisanal classes but also, explicitly, the agricultural, labouring and peasant classes necessary for the health and regimen of the entire body politic.⁴³ She says she will describe the good governance of the universitas in France only. But in addition to her considerations of the French political scene, she includes criticisms of the fickle nature of elective and chartered governments elsewhere:

As in the Livre de l’informacion des princes, these general observations come at the end of the whole book, whereas in many Latin regiminal texts they are at the beginning. Throughout this and her later works she repeats many of the commonplaces characteristic of the regiminal mode. Most notable is the way these comparisons play out with their immediate class context. Why muse on the variability of constitutional forms at this point, in the part of the treatise that is devoted to the third estate and is most insistent that the universitas should be patient, obedient and loyal to France’s kings? Here as elsewhere in Christine’s work, the threat of popular rebellion suffuses her explication without being explicitly evoked.⁴⁵ The barely suppressed comparison is not just with the chartered city-states of Italy but also with the English neighbour to the north, that country so prone to upheavals and capricious depositions despite – or even because of – their powerful nobles and chartered liberties. Speaking of the need to tolerate bad princes, Christine goes on:

Given France’s well-known history of internal upheaval prior to the Burgundian-Armagnac civil war, and given the kinds of complaints that even aristocratic chroniclers like Froissart were able to voice, it seems fair to say that Christine is being disingenuous with this rosy picture of class relations in her adopted homeland.⁴⁷

Nonetheless it is the comparative popular-regiminal perspective that gives her argument its nativist point. However bad things may be here, the political systems of other countries are not any better, franchises or no. At the same time that Christine declares the unique regiminal virtues of the French and the honesty of her unbiased testimony, she also acknowledges that when it comes to the tribulations of governance, the French are, in fact, more or less in the same situation as everybody else:

Like her sincere praise of the labouring classes, this is an endearingly frank moment in Christine’s text. It is interesting how she lightly identifies herself as something of an armchair expert in comparative political systems. Still, this moment of supposedly disinterested comparison is surrounded by the nationalist chauvinism and class insensitivity characteristic of any deeply stratified political order. But this incongruity is the point, as with Hoccleve’s awkward attempts to use his de regimine to reconcile the relation of England to France as both self and other, enemy and family. Once again we see traces, in this specific generic context, of how the internal ideological polarities of nation and class can fit only roughly with the lived realities of sustained conflict and turbulent exchange as they were actually experienced across what Kate Langdon Forhan has so aptly called the ‘nightmarish companion’ of Christine’s entire life, the Hundred Years War.⁴⁹

That nightmarish context can perhaps sometimes recede into the background, obscured by the grace of such writers as Christine and Hoccleve and Froissart and his contemporaries, not unlike the subjected commons and Jacques Bonhommes who receded behind, or beneath, King John, the Black Prince or even Denis de Morbecque. But in these fascinating stories and border-crossing parallels – in writers such as Venette and Pagula, and even in Froissart – it, and they, are not completely submerged. Even accounting for their authors’ idealisations and opposed nationalist biases, in these episodes and mirrors we can nonetheless trace how the tensions between national and class identities provided the shared framework for formulating French and English self-conceptions of nation, of classes and of artistic practice that would be profoundly important for decades, even centuries to come. More than just the specific persons and books, then, this fraught dynamic of ideological mixture also helps us to understand how those participants tried to understand the web of relations that bound them in both war and peace, bonne gouvernaunce and its dissolution, and in its artistic representation.