The image of history as a mirror, in which the past reflected, guided and justified the present, and against which the virtues and the vices of contemporary society could be measured, was a familiar one to moralists, chroniclers and political thinkers in the Middle Ages. In recent years, historical writing has been studied not only in its own right, but also as a source of reflection on attitudes towards the medieval state. It therefore seems appropriate to link two themes on which Peter Lewis has contributed his own particular insights: the complex realities of political relationships and ‘power distribution’ between the king and his subjects; and historiography in late medieval France.

The title of this chapter was inspired by Peter Lewis’ article entitled ‘The Centre, the Periphery and the Problem of Power Distribution in Later Medieval France’, published in 1981.

‘Centre’, therefore, may, but does not necessarily have to, be geographical: it is, above all, political. Parts of the kingdom may be ‘isolated’, particularly in time of war, but have contact, through a ‘multiplicity of agents’. One such line of moral and affective communication could be found in historiography: this, too, has been seen in terms of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. But which is which?

According to recent studies, the ‘centre’ is epitomised by the Grandes Chroniques de France. To summarise a complex problem, this composite historical text stems from a late thirteenth-century vernacular translation of a corpus of Latin chronicles initially collected or composed at the abbey of Saint-Denis; the vernacular text was continued to the late fourteenth century using material produced within and outside the abbey (the ‘vulgate’ or ‘edition of 1380’), and, with the addition of further material taking it into the fifteenth century, was among the first vernacular texts to be published in Paris (1477). Although the influence of this particular text has not been systematically studied, it can none the less be detected in later histories of France.