Jean de Werchin

Jean III de Werchin (1374 – 25 October 1415), called the Good (le Bon), was a knight errant and poet from the County of Hainaut in the Holy Roman Empire. In 1383 his father died and he inherited the baronies of Werchin, Walincourt and Cysoing, as well as the hereditary office of seneschal of Hainaut, which had been in his family since about 1234.

Knight Minority and the war with Frisia Shortly after her first husband's death, Jean's mother, Jeanne d'Enghien, married Jacques de Harcourt, lord of Montgomery, who in 1385 was granted the mundeburdis (legal guardianship) for Jean, his two sisters and their patrimony.

Jean made his first public appearance in arms in 1396, when he joined William's invasion of Frisia. He distinguished himself alongside the lords of Ligne and Jeumont. Afterwards, William knighted him. In 1398 he was fighting in Frisia again alongside the lord of Ligne, leading a company of thirteen knights and sixty lances. Between July and November 1404, he was at Brest with an army preparing to cross over to Wales to aid the Welsh rebels against England. A Debat au Seneschal de Haynnau, probably from 1404, is lost. With Guillebert de Lannoy he also composed a series of ballades. According to the Livre des faits de Jacques de Lalaing, he was one of the most valiant warriors of Hainaut and la fleur de chevalerie (the flower of chivalry). Several of Jean's ballades and the Songe de la barge, 3500-line allegorical poem, date from his time at Brest, which he and several other members of the cour amoureuse (probably Jean de Garencières and Lourdin de Saligny) passed in writing poetry. To the Monk of Saint-Denis he was la fleur des braves (the flower of the brave).

Achille Caulier provides a fond remembrance of Jean in Hôpital d'amour (1430), putting him in the company Tristan and Lancelot. Contemporary and posthumous assessments of Jean's life and writing vary. Christine de Pizan praised him in a ballade for his chivalry and eloquence and dedicated her Livre des trois jugemens to him. Centuries later, Voltaire regard him in his Essai sur les Moeurs as a ridiculous Don Quixote and Arthur Piaget considered his poetry mediocre. As Charity Cannon Willard has observed, Jean was one of a generation of noblemen who took seriously the precepts of chivalry and courtly love, but "there were few aristocratic poets after 1415, when nearly a whole generation of knights perished."