JEAN

See also:

• JEAN LEBEL (d. 1370)

LEBEL (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 and his hospitality . Hemricourt asserts that he was eighty years old or more when he died . For a long time Jean Lebel (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 . 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 gives as his reason for writing a desire to replace a certain misleading rhymed chronicle of the wars of 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 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, he preserves no general notion of a campaign, which resolves itself in his narrative into a series 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 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 ii. vols. vii. and ix.; and H . Pirenne in Biographie nationale de Belgique .