John Edgar
Published: 2014-06-08
Total Pages: 160
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From the preface: ""Ivanhoe," picturing the days of Richard C ur de Lion, leapt over all but a couple of centuries to draw upon Froissart. The present romance of Edward the Black Prince's time is well within the barriers of the best of all the romantic chroniclers, and perhaps its chief merit is that it is both historically and romantically an avowed Froissart book. Its author, J. G. Edgar, who was of course not a Walter Scott, wrote and was content to write for "Beeton's Boys' Own Magazine" in its palmy days, between forty and fifty years ago, when its editor had a very distinct idea of bringing English history into holiday range. Edgar was one of his chief contributors, and wrote some capital stories and histories, of which three or four are still in favour, and this story of "Cressy and Poictiers" is the best of them. Edgar, being a minor and not a major romancer, gave less rein to his fantasy than Scott, and kept closer to his originals. He conceived in this story the happy idea of accommodating the Black Prince with an adventurous and vain-glorious page, whom he calls Arthur Winram, who is, as a necessity of fiction, bound to be of nobler birth than that name would seem to say, and to be subject to the wicked designs of those who would keep him from his birthright. Through the eyes of this page are viewed the martial events and pageantry in the career of the Black Prince, leading up to the fields of Crecy and Poictiers, and so to the Prince's death. Thus there are three chief fortunes at stake: that of the page and hero, that of the Black Prince, and that of England herself. This is enough to show how close the martial passes and exchanges in the story keep to the picture seen by Froissart. One of the drawbacks of the story as a piece of history, as something more than a picture, is that it does not make us realise the daring-the merciless, impressive personal effect of the Prince; or the tragedy then of the last illness pursuing this man of force all through the final campaign; for his end in this book is a casual matter, treated in a postscript or little more than that. But the romance carries us through an extraordinary and overwhelming series of events, and serves to stimulate-although Edgar's manner is staid comparatively with other romancers of history-a new delight in the heroic and chivalric colours of the time. Sir John Chandos and the Cardinal of Perigord, as they pass through Edgar's story, do not leave you at all satisfied to know them only there. It is of the nature of good romance to suggest and not to complete, offering an oblique reflection of great affairs and huge figures; and if Edgar's mirror in this is a fainter one than Scott's, one is still grateful to him for holding it up to the fourteenth century as he did. Read him with Froissart in reserve, and you have a very good idea of that fighting time which was at once so valiant and so meagre, so adventurous and so mortal for the soldiers and captains, and often so terrible for the poor folk-men, women, and children, who, like those of Caen, were massacred because their masters were pleased to be militant. One other point remains, which has perplexed the historians and is of extreme interest in romance, and that has to do with the Black Prince's proverbial colour. Was it his armour, or the terror he caused, that made men call him "Black"? Froissart never uses the label at all; but there is evidence of his black armour, and romance dare not now change his coat."
