In the previous chapter I argued that the chroniclers of the Hundred Years War, responding to the ways in which kings and politicians singled out language as an ideological object of aggression, made their language into a mimetic front: a metacommentary, enacting and performing the conflict they described. But it is in the poetry of the conflict that this linguistic foregrounding is most acute. It employed the same performative lexis that was the stylistic habitus of the chronicles (into which it was often incorporated), and the salience of the phenomenon in the poetry furnishes a strong corroborating argument for its function within the historiographical genre more widely.

Chronicles were the receptacle in which medieval political verse was preserved; in fact, the frequency of its inclusion bespeaks a generic penchant for seeking out contemporary poetry, either to furnish sources for new continuations or simply to incorporate wholesale. Boffey and Edwards, in their article ‘Middle English Verse in Chronicles’, conclude that poetry was often ‘incorporated randomly with no real suggestion that it possesses any distinct identity as verse’ (especially apparent ‘from the difficulties that its recovery can often pose when it is embedded without differentiation into larger prose works’). This osmotic relationship between the two forms is apparent in many places: Lydgate's The Kings of England referred to chronicle historiography nine times in fifteen stanzas (‘tus seith the Cronycleer’, ‘te cronycle ye may reede’); in one manuscript the poem was subtitled ‘Cronycles of alle Kyngys of Englonde’. The carol Enforce we us, which narrates how Henry V ‘frightened all France … At Agincourt’, likewise added the remark ‘the chronicle you read’. Nearly all of the poems discussed in this chapter are preserved in chronicles, and often the overlap between them is seamless: the scribe of BL MS Cotton Cleopatra C.iv used the poetic Battle of Agincourt as the source for his prose, but became increasingly tired of paraphrasing and started to copy the verse verbatim, before giving up the pretence and lineating it.