CHRONICLES, HISTORIES, MEMOIRS. 



47' 



Chateau do Joinville, only a few copies being circulated at the French court, 

 and amongst the noblemen who possessed a library. Yet the Sire de Join- 

 ville had written these Memoirs at the request of Queen Jeanne, wife of 

 Philippe le Eel, and when they were printed in the sixteenth century the 

 original manuscript was no longer to be found. Other statesmen and soldiers 

 also compiled their Memoirs, which, remaining buried in the archives of their 

 castles, were destroyed, like so many other manuscripts, during the wars of the 

 fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Latin Chronicles in the monasteries 

 and the churches suffered less from the pillage and burning which became 

 the fate of so many castles and fortified towns. Thus there remain a 

 number of these Latin Chronicles, most of which have never been published, 



Fig. 364. The Envoys from the Soudan, having at their head a little old Man walking on Crutches, 

 come to propose Terms of Ransom to the captive Crusaders. After a Miniature from the 

 " Credo," by Joinville. Manuscript of the Thirteenth Century, formerly belonging to the 

 National Library, Paris, hut at present in England. 



but the existence of which proves how the taste for history had spread since 

 the twelfth century. The clerks, monks, priests, savants, and doctors would 

 have considered themselves disgraced if they had written in any other 

 language than Latin ; the nobles, the warriors, the politicians, the poets, and 

 the middle classes only used the vulgar tongue to narrate events in which 

 they had taken part, or which they had witnessed. It may, therefore, be 

 considered as certain that from this period there was a very marked distinc- 

 tion between general histories and personal memoirs, the latter being nearly 

 always in French, and the former in Latin. 



