This greeting opens the first of a series of vivid imaginative letters initiating jousts for the 1401 New Year’s Day celebrations at Eltham Palace. The combats proposed formed part of the spectacular Christmas entertainment offered by Henry IV to the visiting Emperor of Byzantium, Manuel II Palaeologus. The thirteen letters are miniature fictions, written in the court language of Insular French, acting in some sense as a script and storybook for the performance; they not only help us to understand what was staged, but also give insight into some of the complex ways in which chivalric performance could be deployed in late medieval courtly culture. The princess to whom the letters were addressed was the King’s eight-year-old daughter Blanche, who, since Henry was at that time a widower, was acting as the lady of the jousts. In each letter, an imaginary patron – a God or Goddess, an allegorical Virtue, or mythological figure – recommends a worthy young combatant to a match in a joust with a member of Blanche’s court. As theatrical texts for the entertainment, they suggest that it combined martial arts with theatrical role-play, spectacle and celebration, political compliment and ceremonial festive gift-giving.

The Letters

The original manuscript copies of the letters themselves do not appear to have survived in court records, but it is clear that they soon attracted heraldic attention: over the next century they were copied in at least six known manuscripts, all collections of material associated with officers of arms. At least three of them are in early-fifteenth-century hands, and there are suggestions in the British Library catalogue that one of these, Additional MS 34801, may have been, as Sydney Anglo reports, ‘written in the time of, and possibly for, John Mowbray, Earl Marshal 1405’. Although the letters have been acknowledged by historians of heraldry and tournament for some time, they have had very little close attention. Anglo, however, did point out that they ‘constitute perhaps the earliest surviving fanciful challenges for an English tournament and suggest a fourteenth-century allegorical tradition of which practically all traces have disappeared’.