Which library houses the oldest known Valentine's Day message?

Which library houses the oldest known Valentine’s Day message? The answer is the British Library.

The British Library holds the earliest surviving Valentine traditionally identified as a romantic Valentine message: a poem written by Charles, Duke of Orléans, while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London after the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. He addressed the poem to his wife and used “Valentine” as a term of affection.

The wording can cause confusion because historians distinguish between the oldest surviving Valentine in any language and the oldest surviving Valentine written in English. The 1415 poem is in French. A later letter written by Margery Brews to her fiancé John Paston in February 1477 is often described as the oldest surviving Valentine’s Day letter in English, and it is also associated with the British Library’s collections.

The message was not a modern printed greeting card. It was a handwritten medieval poem created during a period when aristocratic correspondence and courtly-love poetry shaped Valentine customs. Printed cards became widespread much later, especially after nineteenth-century postal and printing advances.