He took part in a successful crusading expedition to Smyrna in 1344 and shortly after his return from this King Philip VI appointed him a royal councillor and bearer of the Oriflamme, the sacred battle-standard of France.

This role, one in which he continued under King Jean II, made its holder an automatic target for enemy forces on a battlefield, and it was thus that he met his end during the closing moments of the Battle of Poitiers on 19 September 1356.

He was one of a very select band of knights led by Edouard de Beaujeu whom Avignon Pope Clement VI, on learning of their efforts from his on-the-spot legate Patriarch Henri d’Asti, specially commended for their bravery.

Charny duly found himself once again a prisoner, chafing in an English jail for over a year before the newly succeeded King Jean II paid off the huge ransom that was demanded for his release.

Shortly after his return to France Charny found the castle where Aimery was staying, captured him, and carried him off to his military base at Saint-Omer, where he ordered him to be publicly executed as a traitor to the sworn word.

During the spring of 1356, King Jean II and Charny collected the Oriflamme from the abbey of St. Denis and set off with the French army to try to dislodge a well-entrenched enemy garrison that was holding the northern town of Breteuil.

Rightly anticipating bloodshed on the scale of what had happened at Crécy ten years earlier, Charny urged that the two sides’ differences might better be resolved via a ‘trial by combat’ with limited numbers rather than by full-scale battle.

[15]In the event, due to the French commanders’ over-confidence of victory, Charny’s advice was ignored, and King Jean successively launched all three divisions of his army against Edward the Black Prince’s well-placed English forces in what became known as the battle of Poitiers.

Following the battle Charny’s body was given a makeshift burial at a nearby Franciscan convent, however in 1370 his remains were exhumed, transported to Paris, and solemnly reburied in the city’s prestigious church of the Celestines.

Recently, however, this assumption has become seriously challenged by the discovery of two other Charny manuscripts, one in Oxford,[18] the other in Madrid,[19] both self-evidently prepared for practical use by the Company of the Star, the French counterpart to England’s Order of the Garter.

Via the Brussels manuscript Geoffroi II de Charny arguably sought to honour and preserve his father’s abandoned chivalric works by including them along with his own brand-new ‘Book of Chivalry’.

Though the tediously lengthy Act of Foundation for this still exists in the local archive office at Troyes,[22] curiously it makes not the slightest mention that he had entrusted Christ’s shroud to the Lirey church.

[24] Apparently Troyes’ then bishop Henri de Poitiers had investigated these authenticity claims and angrily shut the displays down on finding the purported ‘shroud’ to be a cunning fake concocted by a contemporary artist.

[25] Though partly damaged, this badge depicts two clergy holding out a herringbone twill-weave piece of cloth bearing the very same distinctive double imprint of a crucified body as on Turin’s Shroud, with the coats of arms of the Charny and Vergy families immediately below it.

There has long seemed to be no explanation for this dichotomy, until 2009 when metal detectorists exploring a field in Machy, the next-door village to Lirey, turned up a casting mold for a Shroud pilgrim badge which although partly damaged is clearly of a type similar to that found in Paris, yet with certain very significant differences.