The anonymous author of a rhetorical treatise known as Les règles de la seconde rhétorique, written in northern France sometime between 1411 and 1432, opened his work with a list of poets, in which he included Jean Froissart. He mentioned him as an important writer of poetry in French, but he reminded his readers that Froissart ‘wrote all his works in honour of the English’. Although principally meant as a remark about Froissart's poetic œuvre, the comment may also have been applicable to his historical output. Both Froissart's poetry and his Chronicles were begun in the 1360s when the young author considered himself to be in the service of the English Queen Philippa of Hainault. Froissart crossed the Channel in 1362 to offer Philippa a manuscript of a chronicle in rhyme, after which he became ‘her clerk and served her’.

The queen's service seemed to have consisted mainly of the writing of poetry of various sorts, in both long narrative and short lyric forms, and Froissart's earliest surviving poetic works can indeed be dated to this period. Although the collection of historical information also seems to have occupied Froissart in the 1360s, none of his historical works, in the form in which they survive today, can be dated to this decade. The Amiens version of Book I of the Chronicles probably dates from 1378–9, and all the other versions of Book I – as well as the other Books of the Chronicles – must be more recent.