Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-07T07:04:10.557Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chivalric Entertainment at the Court of Henry IV: The Jousting Letters of 1401

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2023

Meg Twycross
Affiliation:
Lancaster University
Sarah Carpenter
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Elisabeth Dutton
Affiliation:
Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
Gordon L. Kipling
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Get access

Summary

Phebus la principall planet du ffirmament. A tresexcellent Princesse Dame Blanche ffile au trespuissa[nt] Prince Roy Dalbion saluz &tresparfaite dileccion.

Phoebus, the principal planet of the firmament, to the right excellent Princess Lady Blanche, daughter of the most mighty Prince, the King of Albion, greeting and sincere affection.

This greeting opens the first of a series of vivid imaginative letters initiating jousts for the 1401 New Year’s Day celebrations at Eltham Palace. The combats proposed formed part of the spectacular Christmas entertainment offered by Henry IV to the visiting Emperor of Byzantium, Manuel II Palaeologus. The thirteen letters are miniature fictions, written in the court language of Insular French, acting in some sense as a script and storybook for the performance; they not only help us to understand what was staged, but also give insight into some of the complex ways in which chivalric performance could be deployed in late medieval courtly culture. The princess to whom the letters were addressed was the King’s eight-year-old daughter Blanche, who, since Henry was at that time a widower, was acting as the lady of the jousts. In each letter, an imaginary patron – a God or Goddess, an allegorical Virtue, or mythological figure – recommends a worthy young combatant to a match in a joust with a member of Blanche’s court. As theatrical texts for the entertainment, they suggest that it combined martial arts with theatrical role-play, spectacle and celebration, political compliment and ceremonial festive gift-giving.

The Letters

The original manuscript copies of the letters themselves do not appear to have survived in court records, but it is clear that they soon attracted heraldic attention: over the next century they were copied in at least six known manuscripts, all collections of material associated with officers of arms. At least three of them are in early-fifteenth-century hands, and there are suggestions in the British Library catalogue that one of these, Additional MS 34801, may have been, as Sydney Anglo reports, ‘written in the time of, and possibly for, John Mowbray, Earl Marshal 1405’. Although the letters have been acknowledged by historians of heraldry and tournament for some time, they have had very little close attention. Anglo, however, did point out that they ‘constitute perhaps the earliest surviving fanciful challenges for an English tournament and suggest a fourteenth-century allegorical tradition of which practically all traces have disappeared’.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×