Burgundian period. From Hainault came Jean Froissart, perhaps the most celebrated and influential of the later medieval chroniclers of war and chivalry, followed in the fifteenth century by Georges Chastellain at the court of Burgundy. Froissart was a clerk, rewarded by a canonry in the church of Chimay, but he was among the last of his kind and his writing--both verse and prose--is extremely secular in character. Burgundian taste in the fifteenth century was not only for prose romances and histories, but for didactic treatises which were often stoic in nature, drawing upon ancient (especially Roman) history for edifying or cautionary examples. These were written by courtier-nobles (such as Guillebert de Lannoy) who provided instruction for their peers in the arts of persuasion and influence in the ducal council. The universities of the Burgundian lands (and of Germany) were also receiving a larger number of students described as nobiles (noblemen) in their matriculation registers. Princes were now served by a more educated and literate nobility, vying with the clerical and legal counsellors whose eloquence and rhetoric they sought to emulate.
The language which they used, however, was not clerical or legal Latin, but the vernacular. In England, northern France, and the Low Countries an increasing tendency to draw up documents and keep records in a vernacular language developed after c. 1250. This was paralleled by the growth of a courtly vernacular literature and by the popularity of fraternities, or puys, in which verse competitions took place as they did in the German lands. The grands rhétoriqueurs of the Burgundian dominions, such as Chastellain and Molinet, were in part a product of these developments. In England the emergence of Middle English as a literary language, acceptable to the Frenchspeaking (or Anglo-Norman) nobility, began in the fourteenth century. It owed a great deal to French forms and influences, most marked in the verse of Geoffrey Chaucer. By 1500 the language of the English court was no longer French, although acquaintance with that language was considered a necessary accomplishment for a nobleman. There can be little doubt that many princes and nobles of this period were multilingual-René of Anjou was proficient in five languages, while the
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