10 - The Black Prince in Gascony and France (1355–56), According to MS78 of Corpus Christi College, Oxford

Summary

In 1928, Victor H. Galbraith noted that there is much valuable information to be gleaned from the unpublished variants and continuations of the Historia Aurea of John of Tynemouth, the Polychronicon of Ranulph Higden, and the various forms of the Brut chronicle (French, Latin and English), and that “it is difficult to see how it can be printed except in disjointed extracts.” In support of this observation, Galbraith published several such extracts, including two taken from the first of two independent Brut continuations in MS78 of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Although this work continued to 1377, Galbraith considered the portion dealing with the reign of Edward II to be the only section of it with original historical value. In fact, however, the narrative of the reign of Edward III also contains some significant passages. The valuable section of the text dealing with the Scottish invasion of 1346, for example, was published in Northern History in 1998, along with the closely related text of a chronicle contained in Cottonian MS Tiberius A. VI of the British Library, ascribed to William Pakington, the treasurer of the Black Prince's household in Gascony. An article published in conjunction with the new texts showed how these passages could add to our understanding of important events of the Neville's Cross campaign.

Another section of MS78 that has long been recognized as significant is the narrative it provides of the Black Prince's expedition to Aquitaine in 1355–57. This text may also ultimately be derived from Pakington; in any case, it certainly appears to be based on eyewitness accounts, particularly in the detailed description it gives of the negotiations between the prince and the French, via the mediation of Cardinal Talleyrand of Périgord, just prior to the battle of Poitiers. These negotiations were widely reported in the contemporary and near­contemporary chronicles. The already-published texts largely agree with each other and with MS78 on the basic course of these discussions, while differing enough on the details to assure the reader that we have multiple independent testimonies to work with.