A Monk of Fife | Page 4

he wrote, in French, the narrative which follows,
decorating it with the designs which Mr. Selwyn Image has carefully
copied in black and white.
Possessing this information, we need not examine Mr. W. F. Skene's
learned but unconvincing theory that the author of the fragmentary
Latin work was one Maurice Drummond, out of the Lennox. The
hypothesis is that of Mr. W. F. Skene, and Mr. Felix Skene points out
the difficulties which beset the opinion of his distinguished kinsman.
Our Monk is a man of Fife.
As to the veracity of the following narrative, the translator finds it
minutely corroborated, wherever corroboration could be expected, in
the large mass of documents which fill the five volumes of M.
Quicherat's "Proces de Jeanne d'Arc," in contemporary chronicles, and
in MSS. more recently discovered in French local or national archives.
Thus Charlotte Boucher, Barthelemy Barrette, Noiroufle, the Scottish
painter, and his daughter Elliot, Capdorat, ay, even Thomas Scott, the
King's Messenger, were all real living people, traces of whose existence,
with some of their adventures, survive faintly in brown old manuscripts.
Louis de Coutes, the pretty page of the Maid, a boy of fourteen, may
have been hardly judged by Norman Leslie, but he certainly abandoned
Jeanne d'Arc at her first failure.
So, after explaining the true position and character of our monkish
author and artist, we leave his book to the judgment which it has tarried
for so long.

CHAPTER I
--HOW THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN, AND HOW NORMAN
LESLIE FLED OUT OF FIFE

It is not of my own will, nor for my own glory, that I, Norman Leslie,

sometime of Pitcullo, and in religion called Brother Norman, of the
Order of Benedictines, of Dunfermline, indite this book. But on my
coming out of France, in the year of our Lord One thousand four
hundred and fifty-nine, it was laid on me by my Superior, Richard,
Abbot in Dunfermline, that I should abbreviate the Great Chronicle of
Scotland, and continue the same down to our own time. {1} He bade
me tell, moreover, all that I knew of the glorious Maid of France, called
Jeanne la Pucelle, in whose company I was, from her beginning even
till her end.
Obedient, therefore, to my Superior, I wrote, in this our cell of
Pluscarden, a Latin book containing the histories of times past, but
when I came to tell of matters wherein, as Maro says, "pars magna fui,"
I grew weary of such rude, barbarous Latin as alone I am skilled to
indite, for of the manner Ciceronian, as it is now practised by clerks of
Italy, I am not master: my book, therefore, I left unfinished, breaking
off in the middle of a sentence. Yet, considering the command laid on
me, in the end I am come to this resolve, namely, to write the history of
the wars in France, and the history of the blessed Maid (so far at least
as I was an eyewitness and partaker thereof), in the French language,
being the most commonly understood of all men, and the most
delectable. It is not my intent to tell all the story of the Maid, and all
her deeds and sayings, for the world would scarcely contain the books
that should be written. But what I myself beheld, that I shall relate,
especially concerning certain accidents not known to the general, by
reason of which ignorance the whole truth can scarce be understood.
For, if Heaven visibly sided with France and the Maid, no less did Hell
most manifestly take part with our old enemy of England. And often in
this life, if we look not the more closely, and with the eyes of faith,
Sathanas shall seem to have the upper hand in the battle, with whose
very imp and minion I myself was conversant, to my sorrow, as shall
be shown.
First, concerning myself I must say some few words, to the end that
what follows may be the more readily understood.
I was born in the kingdom of Fife, being, by some five years, the
younger of two sons of Archibald Leslie, of Pitcullo, near St. Andrews,
a cadet of the great House of Rothes. My mother was an Englishwoman
of the Debatable Land, a Storey of Netherby, and of me, in our country

speech, it used to be said that I was "a mother's bairn." For I had ever
my greatest joy in her, whom I lost ere I was sixteen years of age, and
she in me: not that she favoured me unduly, for she was very just, but
that, within ourselves, we each knew who was nearest to her heart. She
was, indeed, a saintly woman, yet of a merry wit, and she had great
pleasure in reading of books, and