The French Resistance played a significant role in facilitating the Allies' rapid advance through France following the invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944, and the lesser-known invasion of Provence on 15 August, by providing military intelligence on the German defences known as the Atlantic Wall and on Wehrmacht deployments and orders of battle. The men and women of the Résistance came from all economic levels and political leanings of French society, including émigrés academics, students, aristocrats, conservative Roman Catholics (including priests) and also citizens from the ranks of liberals, anarchists and communists. Résistance cells were small groups of armed men and women (called the Maquis in rural areas), who, in addition to their guerrilla warfare activities, were also publishers of underground newspapers, providers of first-hand intelligence information, and maintainers of escape networks that helped Allied soldiers and airmen trapped behind enemy lines. (5) What they do reveal about Lans 380, however, is that since they alternate regularly throughout the manuscript, the manuscript was essentially.The French Resistance (French language: La Résistance française) is the name used to denote the collection of French resistance movements that fought against the Nazi German occupation of France and against the collaborationist Vichy régime during the Second World War. Although these watermarks occur quite commonly throughout Europe during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, it has not been possible to establish a corresponding match for either of them in the main sources for identifying watermarks of the Middle Ages. There are two main watermarks to be found throughout Lans 380: a bull's head with surmounting 'X,' and a forked, barred, Gothic letter 'P' crowned by a fleuron. (3) It will be useful to give his brief comments in full: The manuscript Lansdowne 380 is a small, paper volume, written in France by several hands during the second half of the fifteenth century it was already in England in the first half of the sixteenth century, since there is written, on the first flyleaf, in a handwriting of that time: 'by the leysurles hand de nouster pover serviteur Thomas Kendall.' (4)Īs will be seen, there are problems with Champion's assessment, although it is probably true that the manuscript was written during the second half of the fifteenth century.Ī single bifolium serves as protective flyleaves at the beginning of the volume following this, there is a succession of thirty-four fascicles of lengths varying from six through ten leaves in the resulting collation:, , 3-:, 6-:, 9-:, ,, , 15-: 17-: 19-:, ,, ,,.

One of the most extended discussions of Lans 380 in the secondary literature is a brief description of the manuscript by Pierre Champion in 1913, as part of a larger discussion of the influence that the poetry of Charles d'Orleans had on the creation of song poetry during the fifteenth century. (2) That inventory is really only a listing of the longest items occurring in the manuscript, however, and in many cases simply reiterates the rubric given for an item, which is not always enlightening. (1) Very little else, however, is actually known about the manuscript, since no study of it has ever appeared in print, and the only inventory of its contents appears in the British Library catalog of its holdings of the Lansdowne collection. Scholars interested in the poetry of Charles, duc d' Orleans (1394-1465), have long known of the manuscript, and it has also been of interest to musicologists studying the secular French chanson of the fifteenth century, since in 1929 Norbert Hardy Wallis published an edition of a selection of its sixty song texts. It is of unknown provenance and date, although it is generally assumed to have been written somewhere in France during the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. It was re-bound in 1970, so the original binding, which might have given some clue to the manuscript's provenance, is now lost. The British Library manuscript Lansdowne 380 (hereinafter Lans 380) is a quarto volume comprised of 280 paper folios, measuring 210 cm x 145 cm.

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