The Diplomatic Context of the Franklin’s Tale

from William Askins, Community College of Philadelphia

What follows are some necessarily brief remarks about late fourteenth century diplomatic and literary exchanges between England and Brittany and their relationship to the Franklin’s tale. The specific Breton text on which I will focus here is a Latin work, the Chronicon Briocense, composed by Hervé le Grant between the mid 1380s and 1416. A notary attached to the court of John de Montfort, Duke of Brittany, the author was party to several diplomatic missions to England in the 1380s and 1390s and had direct contact with John of Gaunt and Richard II’s privy council. His work is not a straightforward chronicle but a collection of fables, saint’s lives, commentaries on the text of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannie, historical narratives laced with documents which he himself invented, and so forth, the whole framed by the intensely nationalistic views of its author, a Breton speaker given to pan-Celtic sympathies, nods in the direction of Cornwall, Wales, and Scotland as well as drool or flatly hostile remarks about England and France. For the Breton author, Geoffrey of Monmouth in particular was a person much like himself, not the “English” Geoffrey mentioned by Chaucer in The House of Fame. Furthermore, England, he claimed, had no right to call itself Great Britain and Brittany in turn “Little Britain” as the Franklin would have it. England was still the land of the Anglo-Saxons, he maintained, a country which has reduced his Celtic brothers to marginal figures.
While the Chronicon Briocense is the only other fourteenth century text I know of which mentions persons named Arveragus, Aurelius and Dorigen, I doubt that Chaucer knew it directly but would argue nonetheless that he might have known its author and was more certainly aware of both the political and cultural issues he raises. The grounds for this view are based, first, on the following passage from the Breton text, a rare example of literary table talk within diplomatic circles.

[Latin text and my annotated translation follow].

Angli prophetiam supradictam inclinant ad se et dicunt quod Merlinus hoc omnia propter illos prophetizauit, non propter Britones. Ego enim ahquando eram in societate cuiusdam domini, uiri fide digni, de Anglia et totam istam prophetiam Merlini, quac incipit sic: Cadualladrus vocabit Conanum. Crotenus sciebat et referebat litteraliter, et gratulabatur super prophetia ista, dicens quod Merlinus uerus propheta fuit, et quod secundum Prophetiam istam omnia quae fuerunt quondam in sesina Anglorum, adhuc redirent ad pristinum statum, et quod jam temporis instabat quod Cadualladrus lam uocauit Conanum. (Id est populus Anglorum qui significatur per Cadualladrum, quia Cadualladrus in terra in qua habitant Angli regnauit.) Vocauit iam Britones per conjugium sororis Regis Angliae, et lohannis Ducis Britanniae qui obiit in Lugduno, de quibus heres Britaniae — id est Arturus — futurus erat uel unus de fratribus eius qui nepotes sunt Odoardi Regis Angliae, et adiungabunt Anglos contra Regem Franciae — sicut ipsi Angli dicunt.

The English turn this prophecy to their advantage and say that what Merlin prophesied has everything to do with them and nothing to do with the people of Brittany. However, on the subject of the prophecy which begins Cadwallader will summon Conan, I myself have been in the company of a trustworthy English gentleman [or bishop] and [this man], Crotenus [i.e. Courtenay] knew this prophesy, repeated it word-for word and was delighted by it, saying that Merlin was a true prophet and that, according to this prophecy, everything the English possess will return to its original [i.e. Celtic] state and, when the time is at hand, Cadwallader will summon Conan. (Cadwallader represents the English people since he ruled the land where the English lived.) So it was [for example] that he summoned the Bretons by way of the marriage between the sister of the king of England [Edward I, i. e. Beatrice of Dreux (d. 1275)], and John [II] duke of Brittany who died at Lyon [in 1305] and whose heir to the throne of Brittany was Arthur [II, d. 1313 ], and so it came to pass that, like one of his brothers, those who were the nephews of Edward [III], king of England, allied themselves with the English against the king of France, as the English themselves acknowledge.

The leading candidate for the person named Courtenay in this passage is William Courtenay, the archbishop of London, a member of the king’s privy council, frequently engaged in Anglo-Breton negotiations of one sort or another in both England and the Pas de Calais. Other possibilities might include several of his brothers, Peter Courtenay especially, but it is well known that their mother, Margaret, owned several copies of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s works and that the Courtenay family were drawn to Galfridian texts well into the sixteenth century. At the Breton end of this conversation, it is I think clear that Hervé le Grant might have been drawn to Courtenay, but at bottom thought little of the English themselves.
At the heart of this animosity sat deep cultural and political differences between Brittany and England, despite the alliance mentioned in the final phrase of the passage I have cited, a novel account of the beginnings of the Hundred Years War. One sticking point was the Breton claim to the Honor of Richmond. Though Chaucer might have glanced in the direction of Richmond at the end of The Book of the Duchess, John of Gaunt’s custody of the Honor was temporary. Indeed it had been held by Breton dukes since the Conquest and the first persons to hold it were brothers, their mother a woman named Dorigen (q.v. The Complete Peerage), a figure Chaucerians have not taken into consideration. In 1372 Richmond was returned to the Duke of Brittany, Hervé le Grant’s employer, John de Montfort, but it was confiscated within the decade and became a source of continual disagreement and one aspect of larger questions about Breton rights in relationship to both England and France, both of whom wanted to reduce Brittany to a client state subject to the usual feudal arrangements. For his part, John de Montfort did everything he could to resist such ties in much the same way that his subjects, especially those in the Celtic regions of Brittany, did when they dealt with him. On the local level, the historian P. S. Lewis coined the term “Breton alliances” to describe the non-feudal elements that marked agreements within Brittany and, on the international level, another historian, Michael Jones, has spent a lifetime studying how all of this played when the Duke of Brittany dealt with the powers that were, the kings of England and France. Breton resistance to feudalism naturally provided considerable grist for the diplomatic set struggling with exactly the sort of issues that float across the surface of the Franklin’s tale: lordship, “maistrye,” thralldom, freedom, liberty and the rest of it.
Of course, the Franklin’s tale is supposed to be about marriage and it is the Duke of Brittany own marriage, especially his second, that I think corroborates my view that the Franklin’s tale has been shaped by it as well the political difficulties to which I have referred. John de Montfort, a few years older than Chaucer, had been taken to England as child, a ward of Edward III after his father had been killed on the battlefield by the French. In order to strengthen his control of this future duke of Brittany, Edward arranged a marriage between his daughter, Mary, and John de Montfort but the bride died within months. At this point, John Montfort won the right to the Duchy of Brittany on the battlefield and fought in a number of other campaigns led by various English commanders, including John of Gaunt. It while he was attached to the retinue of the Black Prince that his eye fell on the daughter and namesake of Joan of Kent, Joan Holland, and this time around, after what the Franklin might call “many a labor, many a great emprise,” John arranged his own marriage to an English girl, a clandestine arrangement like that of Dorigen and Arvergus (line 741: pryvely she fil of his accord) and like that too, incidentally, of Joan Holland’s mother whose marriage to the Black Prince was itself clandestine. This display of independence of the part of the Duke of Brittany prompted an angry response from Edward III, but the Duke had nonetheless wed the half-sister of Richard of Bordeaux, the future Richard II, and this seems to square with the note that Dorigen herself had “comen of such heigh kynrede” (line 735) as well as the suggestion that Arveragus has married somewhat above his station and has done so without the contractual fanfare negotiated by diplomats like Chaucer, himself no stranger to the negotiation of pre-nuptial agreements, the arrangement of high-end weddings. In any case, Joan Holland and John de Montfort spent several years after their marriage in one or another of John’s manors along the Breton coast, their marriage interrupted by John’s need to return to England in 1373. When he left Brittany, he left his Duchess behind, this the first of several separations that marked their childless marriage of eighteen years. While they were separated, they exchanged letters like Arveragus and Dorigen (see lines 837-840) and a full record of one of these exchanges survives in notes compiled by a Breton diplomat which make it quite clear their marriage was under considerable pressure. One of the reasons for this may have been that Joan Holland was rather publicly accused of, well, having fooled around with someone other than her husband.
That person was Olivier de Clisson, another Breton nobleman who, like John, had been taken to England as a child by his mother, his father having been executed for treason by the French. Clisson was a familiar figure at the English court and cut, according, to English chroniclers, a striking figure; he helped John de Montfort regain the Duchy of Brittany on the battlefield and initially enjoyed a relationship with his neighbors, the Duke and the Duchess, not unlike that which Aurelius maintains with Dorigen and Arveragus (q.v. lines 925-965). Things however changed. In 1378, in Paris, a squire in the employ of the King of Navarre confessed to the ministers of the King of France that his king had engaged in seditious activities and had encouraged others to do the same. His tales of betrayal included one in which he recalled having seen Clisson flirt with Joan Holland and, he said, “kiss her behind a curtain.” He went on to say that Joan’s husband had gotten wind of this and had planned to invite Clisson to a party at one of his manor houses and have some EngIish toughs murder him while he was (and again I quote) “dancing in the garden.” All of this and more was recorded by the royal histographer and included in Les Grandes Chroniques de France, repeated again by Jean Froissart in his chronicles, and then again by that daughter of an Italian astrologer, Christine de Pisan, in her biography of Charles V, composed 25 years after the facts, such as they are. Montfort never did have Clisson murdered, but it was shortly after this incident that the two men severed their ties and Clisson fell firmly into the French camp. As for Joan Holland, she returned to England when John returned to Brittany in 1378. They were eventually reconciled and Joan was taken to Brittany by one of the collectors at the port of London, John Philipot, in 1383. Their reconciliation was however brief. By 1384, Joan Holland’s life had come to an end, 18 years married but only 28 years old at the hour of her death.
As I have tried to suggest, Chaucer was quite familiar with not only the Duke and Duchess of Brittany but also dozens of persons with an intimate knowledge of their affairs. Both the poet and the duke participated in the Anglo-French diplomatic negotiations in the Pas de Calais in the late 1370s and persons like Richard Stury and Lewis Clifford might head a long list of Ricardian courtiers with close ties to both Chaucer and John de Montfort. Among London merchants and those associated with the port of London, William Walworth, Adam Frances (an Italian), and John Philpot had extensive financial dealings with the Duke and considerable interest in commercial ties with Brittany. If time permitted, I would also like to share some more details about other matters which bear directly on the fiction in question, bits about shipwrecks, the loss of hundreds of English soldiers and dozens of English ships bound for the coast of Brittany, and the contemporary activities of both Breton magicians and Breton lawyers which I think might throw fresh light on the Franklin’s performance. I also have much to say about the bearing of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia on the matters I have mentioned.
The best I can do now is to set the stage for a discussion of the larger interpretative problems raised by this tale. In general, I believe, as I have said, that Chaucer is exploring the issue of relationships, explicitly marital and implicitly political, imagined outside of the usual feudal constructs, freedom from those constraints and the risks such freedoms entail. Even more generally, I want to give voice to the sense that evidence matters and that very specific considerations of time and place have a critical bearing on how we respond to works of art, not only time and space but also the lives of those who initially shape both, artists and their immediate audiences. I want to conclude by illustrating that last point with a few fugitive remarks. First, William Courtenay might not have been able to hold up his end of that conversation described by the Breton diplomat I mentioned at the beginning of my remarks had not his mother, Margaret, tutored by a Sicilian Greek, put together a substantial library dominated by Arthurian texts which she might have read to her sixteen children as well as her blind husband. Second, when the same William Courtenay and the rest of Richard II’s privy council composed a letter in 1393 addressed to an group of English diplomats then at work in France, a group which included John of Gaunt and Lewis Clifford, they instructed those diplomats to tend to the matter of the Duke of Brittany’s alliance with England, an alliance described not in legal terms or by invoking treaties or charters, but an alliance based, they said, on marriages, specifically John de Montfort’s first marriage to Edward III’s daughter, by now dead for almost thirty years, and his second marriage to Richard II’s sister, by now dead for almost ten. Finally, for those like myself still interested in the old game of identifying models for the Canterbury pilgrims, I offer a fresh name to put on the face of the Franklin, a provincial soldier with extensive military and administrative experience in Brittany, who, when he quit the battlefields, married into the English aristocracy, held all of the offices held by the Franklin in turn, served as MP and JP for Kent with Chaucer, and, at the moment when the poet was composing the general prologue to The Canterbury Tales, essentially made his living as a “vavasour”. This would be Sir John Devereaux (or, more properly, Deverose), a gentleman who, when he returned to England, was appointed by the Duke of Brittany to oversee the Sussex and Lincolnshire manors which formed part of the Honor of Richmond. The principal residence of Deverose was Penshurst, Kent, its great hall famously the largest of any to be found in contemporary manor houses. When he died suddenly in 1393, Deverose is also known to left behind a massive collection of plate which has struck students of fourteenth-century wills as unprecedented, the better perhaps to hold the meat and the drink that must have “snewed” at his table too.