The French king had been captured at Poitiers in 1356 by the English, and held for a massive ransom. He was released in 1360 on promise of the ransom payment, but other high ranking French prisoners were retained as surety. Unfortunately one of them, the king's own son, absconded. The king returned to England in 1363 to repair the bad faith, where he had a high old time wining and dining and partying with his French compatriots, as well as the English royal family, at least according to Froissart. It was a funny old war. The king died in England in 1363.

A letter close is simply a letter sent folded and sealed, rendering it private, as opposed to, for example, letters patent which were delivered open as a public document. The illustration above shows how it looked when folded for delivery. The seal has been removed as it has been opened. On the outside is the address. Of course, it is not in the form as we know it in these days of the (rapidly disappearing) postal service. It would have been personally hand delivered by messengers. They knew where to take it. We will check out the message inside in the rest of this exercise. The address was sometimes written on the dorso of the document, where it could be read without opening it, or, as in this case, written on the separate strip of parchment which was wrapped around the document and attached to it by the seal.

The script is a cursive French Secretary style as used in the royal chancery; not so formal and stilted as the scripts used for charters, but still very neat and correct, as befits a letter from the king. Even though it is a closed letter, it would not have been by his own hand. Like all men of might, he probably just bellowed "Take a letter, scribe!" (in French, of course). The French of the 14th century is not so difficult for us, although there are archaic words and spellings, but there are no accents on letters and no apostrophes, so some words seem to be run together.

As is often the case with single documents, it is not entirely clear what is going on here, as one document may be part of a string of communications or legal processes. If the whole paper trail,or rather parchment trail, is not known, the whole thing may remain a bit of a mystery.