It would, however, be a mistake to imagine that Joinville’s book is exclusively or even mainly a chronicle of small beer. If he is not a Villehardouin or a Carlyle, his battlepieces are vivid and truthful, and he has occasional passages of no small episodic importance, such as that dealing with the Old Man of the Mountain. But, above all, the central figure of his book redeems it from the possibility of the charge of being commonplace or ignoble. To St Louis Joinville is a nobler Boswell; and hero-worshipper, hero, and heroic ideal all have something of the sublime about them. The very pettiness of the details in which the good seneschal indulges as to his own weakness only serves to enhance the sublime unworldliness of the king. Joinville is a better warrior than Louis, but, while the former frankly prays for his own safety, the latter only thinks of his army’s when they have escaped from the hands of the aliens. One of the king’s knights boasts that ten thousand pieces have been “forcontés” (counted short) to the Saracens; and it is with the utmost trouble that Joinville and the rest can persuade the king that this is a joke, and that the Saracens are much more likely to have got the advantage. He warns Joinville against wine-bibbing, against bad language, against all manner of foibles small and great; and the pupil acknowledges that this physician at any rate had healed himself in these respects. It is true that he is severe towards infidels; and his approval of the knight who, finding a Jew likely to get the better of a theological argument, resorted to the baculine variety of logic, does not meet the views of the 20th century. But Louis was not of the 20th century but of the 13th, and after his kind he certainly deserved Joinville’s admiration. Side by side with his indignation at the idea of cheating his Saracen enemies may be mentioned his answer to those who after Taillebourg complained that he had let off Henry III. too easily. “He is my man now, and he was not before,” said the king, a most unpractical person certainly, and in some ways a sore saint for France. But it is easy to understand the half-despairing adoration with which a shrewd and somewhat prosaic person like Joinville must have regarded this flower of chivalry born out of due time. He has had his reward, for assuredly the portrait of St Louis, from the early collection of anecdotes to the last hearsay sketch of the woeful end at Tunis, with the famous enseignement which is still the best summary of the theoretical duties of a Christian king in medieval times, is such as to take away all charge of vulgarity or mere commérage from Joinville, a charge to which otherwise he might perhaps have been exposed.
The arrangement of the book is, considering its circumstances and the date of its composition, sufficiently methodical. According to its own account it is divided into three parts—the first dealing generally with the character and conduct of the hero; the second with his acts and deeds in Egypt, Palestine, &c., as Joinville knew them; the third with his subsequent life and death. Of these the last is very brief, the first not long; the middle constitutes the bulk of the work. The contents of the first part are, as might be expected, miscellaneous enough, and consist chiefly of stories chosen to show the valour of Louis, his piety, his justice, his personal temperance, and so forth. The second part enters upon the history of the crusade itself, and tells how Joinville pledged all his land save so much as would bring in a thousand livres a year, and started with a brave retinue of nine knights (two of whom besides himself wore bannerets), and shared a ship with the sire d’Aspremont, leaving Joinville without raising his eyes, “pour ce que le cuer ne me attendrisist du biau chastel que je lessoie et de mes deux enfans”; how they could not get out of sight of a high mountainous island (Lampedusa or Pantellaria) till they had made a procession round the masts in honour of the Virgin; how they reached first Cyprus and then Egypt; how they took Damietta, and then entangled themselves in the Delta. Bad generalship, which is sufficiently obvious, unwholesome food—it was Lent, and they ate the Nile fish which had been feasting on the carcases of the slain—and Greek fire did the rest, and personal valour was of little avail, not merely against superior numbers and better generals, but against dysentery and a certain “mal de l’ost” which attacked the mouth and the legs, a curious human version of a well-known bestial malady. After ransom Acre was the chief scene of Louis’s stay in the East, and here Joinville lived in some state, and saw not a few interesting things, hearing besides much gossip as to the inferior affairs of Asia from ambassadors, merchants and others. At last they journeyed back again to France, not without considerable experiences of the perils of the deep, which Joinville tells with a good deal of spirit. The remainder of the book is very brief. Some anecdotes of the king’s “justice,” his favourite and distinguishing attribute during the sixteen years which intervened between the two crusades, are given; then comes the story of Joinville’s own refusal to join the second expedition, a refusal which bluntly alleged the harm done by the king’s men who stayed at home to the vassals of those who went abroad as the reason of Joinville’s resolution to remain behind. The death of the king at Tunis, his enseignement to his son, and the story of his canonization complete the work.
The book in which this interesting story is told has had a literary history which less affects its matter than the vicissitudes to which Froissart has been subjected, but which is hardly less curious in its way. There is no reason for supposing that Joinville indulged in various editions, such as those which have given Kervyn de Lettenhove and Siméon Luce so much trouble, and which make so vast a difference between the first and the last redaction of the chronicler of the Hundred Years’ War. Indeed the great age of the seneschal of Champagne, and his intimate first-hand acquaintance with his subject, made such variations extremely improbable. But, whereas there is no great difficulty (though much labour) in ascertaining the original and all subsequent texts of Froissart, the original text of Joinville was until recently unknown, and even now may be said to be in the state of a conjectural restoration. It has been said that the book was presented to Louis le Hutin. Now we have a catalogue of Louis le Hutin’s library, and, strange to say, Joinville does not figure in it. His book seems to have undergone very much the same fate as that which befell the originals of the first two volumes of the Paston Letters which Sir John Fenn presented to George the Third. Several royal library catalogues of the 14th century are known, but in none of these does the Histoire de St Louis appear. It does appear in that of Charles V. (1411), but apparently no copy even of this survives. As everybody knows, however, books could be and were multiplied by the process of copying tolerably freely, and a copy at first or second hand which belonged to the fiddler king René of Provence in the 15th century was used for the first printed edition in 1547. Other editions were printed from other versions, all evidently posterior to the original. But in 1741 the well-known medievalist La Curne de St Palaye found at Lucca a manuscript of the 16th century, evidently representing an older text than any yet printed. Three years later a 14th-century copy was found at Brussels, and this is the standard manuscript authority for the text of Joinville. Those who prefer to rest on MS. authority will probably hold to this text, which appears in the well-known collection of Michaud and Poujoulat as well as that of Buchon, and in a careful and useful separate edition by Francisque Michel. The modern science of critical editing, however, which applies to medieval texts the principles long recognized in editing the classics, has discovered in the 16th-century manuscript, and still more in the original miscellaneous works of Joinville, the letters, deeds, &c., already alluded to, the materials for what we have already called a conjectural restoration, which is not without its interest, though perhaps it is possible for that interest to be exaggerated.
For merely general readers Buchon’s or Michaud’s editions of Joinville will amply suffice. Both include translations into modern French, which, however, are hardly necessary, for the language is very easy. Natalis de Wailly’s editions of 1868 and particularly 1874 are critical editions, embodying the modern research connected with the text, the value of which is considerable, but contestable. They are accompanied by ample annotations and appendices, with illustrations of great merit and value. Much valuable information appeared for the first time in the edition of F. Michel (1859). To these may be added A. F. Didot’s Études sur Joinville (1870) and H. F. Delaborde’s Jean de Joinville (1894). A good sketch of the whole subject will be found in Aubertin’s Histoire de la langue et de la littérature françaises au moyen âge, ii. 196–211; see also Gaston Paris, Litt. française au moyen âge (1893), and A. Debidour, Les Chroniqueurs (1888). There are English translations by T. Johnes (1807), J. Hutton (1868), Ethel Wedgwood (1906), and (more literally) Sir F. T. Marzials (“Everyman’s Library,” 1908). (G. Sa.)
JOIST, in building, one of a row or tier of beams set edgewise
from one wall or partition to another and carrying the flooring
boards on the upper edge and the laths of the ceiling on the lower.
In double flooring there are three series of joists, binding, bridging,
and ceiling joists. The binding joists are the real support of the
floor, running from wall to wall, and carrying the bridging
joists above and the ceiling joists below (see Carpentry),
