Welsh Journals

LETTER to RICHARD II (1395). By Philippe de Mézières. Edited by G. W. Coopland. University of Liverpool Press, 1975. Pp. 146. £ 10. WAR, LITERATURE AND POLITICS IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF G. W. COOPLAND. Edited by C. T. Allmand. University of Liverpool Press, 1976. Pp. 189. £ 10. George William Coopland died on 31 March 1975, ninety-nine days short of his hundreth birthday. The books reviewed here were at the print- ers at the time of his death. Coopland was a modest man, as A. R. Myers shows in the memoir which forms the first chapter of War, Literature and Politics in the Late Middle Ages, a valuable collection of essays edited in Coopland's honour by C. T. Allmand. The veteran scholar, whose career was remarkable if not unique, would have been delighted with this volume. At the age of thirteen Coopland was a pupil-teacher in Preston. Eight years later, after qualifying through University College, Liverpool, he was in charge of a form of 121 under-privileged children in Leeds. His doctorate came at the age of thirty-nine and was published in the famous green-bound Vinogradoff series. In 1913 Coopland was appointed lecturer in History at Liverpool and there he had tenure (including a personal chair in 1937) until 1945. His Muse expressed itself in print only occasionally-six articles between 1916 and 1949. In that year, aged seventy-four, he translated Honore Bonet's (or Bouvet's) Tree of Battles into English. His concern with literary sources was already deep-seated and in due course (1969) there followed an excellent edition and translation into English of Le Songe du Vieil Pelerin by Philippe de Mezieres, whose biography had been written by a French scholar in 1896, but little of whose profuse writings in French and Latin was then available in print. One of a school known as les grands rhetoriqueurs, de Mézières belonged to a period which scholars of French literature have generally neglected. De Mézières (1327-1405) had a fasci- nating career which had taken him to several countries. When he was nearly seventy, he wrote a Letter to Richard II which, at the behest of Charles VI of France, was sent to the English court. We cannot tell whether Richard II, with his dilettante literary interests, read it or heard it read. If we skim through the obfuscations of The Letter-the product of a literary conven- tion which proliferated in metaphor, imagery, allegory and symbolism- there is an eloquent core of argument. The Schism was a wound in Christ's body; Anglo-French hostilities had sapped and cheapened Christian blood when the infidel was destroying the Catholic heritage in the Holy Land. A lasting peace between England and France, cemented by a marriage alliance with a French bride, albeit she was years away from puberty, might usher in a rebirth among the faithful, and reconquest from the heathen. The Letter runs to about 30,000 words and de Mézières apologises for his wordiness. He had reason to do so; purple passages came easily to him and he enjoyed writing them. It is a virtue of Coopland's translation that he catches the nuances and smoothes the tediums of his author. The introduc- tion, on the other hand, though helpful, lacks the historical acuity which Dr. Palmer has brought to his study of Anglo-French negotiations in the 1390s. Dr. Palmer has suggested, and Coopland agrees, that The Letter was sent to Richard II in May 1395. It had been written, de Mézières claimed, under the supervision of the French king, who was then twenty-five. De Mezieres,