It is evident that Hoccleve, Kempe, and Audelay each had to work hard in order to secure the attention of the audiences to whom they directed their work; they wrote from positions that had been compromised by the social fallout associated with illness and public scandal. The case of the last author examined in this study is different. Charles of Valois, duke of Orléans, stands far apart from Hoccleve, Kempe, and Audelay on the grounds of his rank. Grandson to one king of France, Charles V, and father to another, Louis XII, Charles did not have to work to establish his right to his audience's attention in the ways that the other writers addressed in this study did. A considerable portion of his oeuvre was, however, like theirs, produced under pressured conditions. Dragged half alive from beneath a pile of dead bodies on the battlefield at Agincourt in 1415, Charles was taken to England by Henry V and endured twenty-five years of captivity there before arrangements for his repatriation could be made. Nor was this the only hardship that the duke faced in a career that, even by medieval standards, was unusually thick with tragedy. On 23 November 1407, the day before his thirteenth birthday, his father was brutally murdered by their cousin, Jean de Bourgogne; the death of his mother in 1408 was followed by that of his first wife in 1409; and his second wife passed away during his English captivity, some time in the early 1430s. These setbacks have traditionally been held to influence Charles's poetry, which is characterized by its frequent – but not exclusive – exploration of such themes as loss, separation, and despair. This chapter proposes a more cynical reading of the duke's verses, arguing that, like Hoccleve, Kempe, and Audelay, Charles used the opportunity afforded by writing in order to shape his reputation and to ameliorate his social and material situation.

Whereas Hoccleve’s, Kempe’s, and Audelay's autograph or authorially supervised copies of their works appear to have been unique productions, Charles oversaw the making of at least two manuscripts of his work simultaneously during the final months of his English captivity. These two books constitute the central focus of this chapter.