The chronicle sources: Persecution texts?
Before approaching the Grandes chroniques and the Chronique metrique as persecution texts, it will be useful first to lay out all of the information about the affair
as it is presented in other roughly contemporary chronicles.
In fact, although all these examples can be considered persecution texts according to Girard’s definition, they are usually very brief and lacking in detail. Still, some offer important bits of information.Three of the early texts containing the story offer very similar accounts: the continuation of the Chronique latine of Guillaume of Nangis (d. 1300), monk at St. Denis, the continuation of Guillaume of Nangis’s brief Chronique abregee des rois de France2 and the continuation of the chronicle of Domincan friar Girard of Frachet (d. 1271), the Chronicon Girardi de Fracheto et anonyma ejusdem ope- ris continuation6 They explain that Marguerite, young Queen of Navarre, and Blanche, wife of Charles, the King of Navarre’s younger brother, were imprisoned for committing adultery with two brother knights, Philip and Gautier of Aunay. The two knights, who confessed their guilt, were considered more to blame than the younger and more susceptible women. On Friday of Easter week the knights were skinned, castrated, and dragged to a gallows in Pontoise, hanged there and quartered. The doorkeeper of the queen, complicit in the crime, was hanged beside the men. Jeanne, Blanche’s sister, was initially assumed to have been complicit, but within the year she was cleared in a session of the Parlement of Paris at which the counts of Valois and Evreux were present.[29] [30] [31] Along with a sketch of the scandal, the continuation of Guillaume of Nangis’s Chronique latine mentions that a certain mendicant friar accused of being an accomplice and aware of the outrage escaped from authorities. Affaire de la Tour de Nesle in Contemporary Chronicles | 15 continuation reports that the brothers were strung up with “many nobles and non-nobles.”[33] Both of these texts report the death of Marguerite and claim that Blanche of Burgundy became pregnant during her incarceration, either by her custodian or her own husband.[34] In addition to these three versions of the episode, the chronicle of Jean of Paris or St. Victor, known as Excerpta e Memoriali historiarum, auctore Johanne Parisiensi, Sancti Victoris Parisiensis canonico regulari, repeats the same information but adds that Marguerite bewailed her sin while Blanche refused to recognize hers; this version also reveals that just before dying, Marguerite, who expressed maximum devotion, had a letter passed along to her former husband, the new King Louis X. The letter’s contents were secret, but they damaged the standing of Philip IV’s unpopular favorite, Enguerrand de Marigny. As we will see, Jean drew on the Chronique metrique for the story of this letter.[35] Bernard Gui’s Efloribus chronicorum seu catalogo Romanorum pontificum, necnon e chron- ico regum Francorum notes only the date of Marguerite’s death, adding that the young woman had been imprisoned because of adultery but no further detail. Although Bernard follows this information with the story of Marigny’s fall, he draws no connection between Marguerite and this event.[36] Nor does the anonymous chronicle of the kings of France, Ex anonymo regum Franciae chronico, circa annum M.CCC.XLIIscripto, discuss the scandal, mentioning only that the former queen had died, that she had been imprisoned for adultery, and that she left only a daughter.[37] Extracts from the Anciennes Chroniques de Flandre do not mention the adultery at all, announcing only that when Louis X returned from his coronation in Rheims, madame his wife, who had been imprisoned in the Chateau Gaillard, had died, leaving a very beautiful daughter named Jeanne.[38] The chronicle of the monastery of St. Catherine of Rouen, E Chronicle Sanctae Catharinae de Monte Rotomagi, offers the barest outlines of the event and, a few paragraphs later, notes the passing of Marguerite, adding that she left a daughter.[39]