Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III FROISSART AND THE ENGLISH CHRONICLES During the first eighty years of the sixteenth century the presses poured forth upon the Elizabethan public a flood of rival chronicles exalting England's illustrious past, all of them differing from one another, but all purporting to be authentic histories. The rivalry between chroniclers was often intense and bitter, and the clamor so great that rival compilers brought out new editions of their Summaries, Manuals, Surveys, or Chronicles at intervals on an average of every three years. Each new issue gave its writer his opportunity to sneer at the work of his rival and to reply in full to the acrimonious charges of plagiarism, or falsification that they had published against him in the prefaces of their editions. After 1580, although the chronicles still continued in demand, they had given birth to the brilliant series of chronicle plays that crowned the stage during the last two decades of Queen Elizabeth's reign. The development of chronicle writing in England, as has been noted, was as slow as the development of English prose; and the standards throughout the period remained about the same. Almost every English chronicle is a compilation from innumerable chronicle sources and narrates sometimes baldly, sometimes literally what had been previously recorded. As the narrative descends to contemporary events the writer usually takes a new interest and handles his narrative in a more personal and graphic way. But rarely does he attempt anything more than adescription of events in bald chronicle form; and too frequently he shows no power of selection or perspective, and no historical sense. He fills the work with long descriptions of royal or city feasts, entertainments, processions; with fabulous tales, scraps of poetry; or ...