LEBEL, JEAN (d. 1370), Belgian chronicler, was born near the end of the 13th century. His father, Gilles le Beal des Changes, was an alderman of Liege. Jean entered the church and became a canon of the cathedral church, but he and his brother Henri fol lowed Jean de Beaumont to England in 1327, and took part in the border warfare against the Scots. His will is dated 1369, and his epitaph gives the date of his death as 1370. Jacques de Hemri court, author of the Miroir des nobles de Hesbaye, has left a eulogy of his character, and a description of the magnificence of his attire, his retinue and his hospitality. Hemricourt asserts that he was eighty years old or more when he died. For a long time Jean Lebel (or le Bel) was only known as a chronicler through a refer ence by Froissart, who quotes him in the prologue of his first book as one of his authorities. A fragment of his work, in the ms. of Jean d'Outremeuse's Mireur des istores, was discovered in and the whole of his chronicle, preserved in the library of Chalons sur-Marne, was edited in 1863 by L. Polain. Jean Lebel gives as his
reason for writing a desire to replace a certain misleading rhymed chronicle of the wars of Edward III. by a true relation of his en terprises down to the beginning of the Hundred Years' War. Lebel's chief merit is his refusal to narrate events unless either he himself or his informant had witnessed them. Writilig for the pub lic of chivalry, he preserves no general notion of a campaign, which resolves itself in his narrative into a series of exploits on the part of his heroes. Froissart was considerably indebted to him, and seems to have borrowed from him some of his best-known epi sodes, such as the death of Robert the Bruce, Edward III. and the countess of Salisbury, and the devotion of the burghers of Calais.
See L. Polain, Les Vraies Chroniques de messire Jehan le Bel (1863) ; Kervyn de Lettenhove, Bulletin de la societe d'imulation de Bruges, series ii. vols. vii. and ix.; and H. Pirenne in Biographie rationale de Belgique.