LEBEL, JEAN (d. 1370)

This article appears in Volume V16, Page 350 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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LEBEL, JEAN (d. 1370) , Belgian chronicler, was born near the end of the 13th century. His father, Gilles le Beal des Changes, was an alderman of Liege. Jean entered the church and became a canon of the cathedral church, but he and his brother Henri followed Jean de Beaumont to England in 1327, and took part in the border warfare against the Scots. His will is dated 1369, and his epitaph gives the date of his death as 1370. Nothing more is known of his life, but Jacques de Hemricourt, author of the Miroir des nobles de Hesbaye, has left a eulogy of his character, and a description of the magnificence of his attire, his

retinue

RETINUE (O. Fr. retenue, from retenir, Lat. retenere, hold back, retain)

and his hospitality. Hemricourt asserts that he was eighty years old or more when he died. For a long time Jean

Lebel

LEBEL, JEAN (d. 1370)

(or le Bel) was only known as a chronicler through a reference by Froissart, who quotes him in the prologue of his first book as one of his authorities. A fragment of his

work

WORK

.
in the MS. of Jean d'Outremeuse's Mireur des istores, was discovered in 1847; and the whole of his chronicle, preserved in the library of Chalons-sur-Marne, was edited in 1863 by L. Polain. Jean

Lebel

LEBEL, JEAN (d. 1370)

gives as his reason for writing a desire to replace a certain misleading rhymed chronicle of the wars of

Edward

EDWARD

III. by a true relation of his enterprises down to the beginning of the Hundred Years' War. In the matter of style Lebel has been placed by some critics on the level of Froissart. His

chief

CHIEF (from Fr. chef, head, Lat. caput)

merit is his refusal to narrate events unless either he himself or his informant had witnessed them. This scrupulousness in the acceptance of evidence must be set against his limitations. He takes on the whole a similar point of view to Froissart's; he has no concern with national movements or politics; and, writing for the public of

chivalry

CHIVALRY (O. Fr. chevalerie, from
Late
- LATE
Lat. caballerius)

, he preserves no general notion of a campaign, which resolves itself in his narrative into a

series

SERIES (a Latin word from serere, to join)

of exploits on the part of his heroes. Froissart was considerably indebted to him, and seems to have borrowed from him some of his best-known episodes, such as the death of Robert the Bruce,

Edward

EDWARD

III. and the countess of

Salisbury

, and the devotion of the burghers of Calais. The songs and virelais, in the art of writing which he was, according to Hemricourt, an expert, have not come to light.
See L. Polain, Les Vraies Chroniques de messire Jehan le Bel (1863) ; Kervyn de Lettenhove, Bulletin de la sociele d'emulation de Bruges,

series

SERIES (a Latin word from serere, to join)

ii. vols. vii. and ix.; and H. Pirenne in Biographie nationale de Belgique.

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