Le «clerc d'armes» : un mythe ?

Surprisingly enough, most famous modern dictionaries, e.g. Littré, Larousse (both 19th and 20th Centuries) and, of late, the Trésor de la Langue Française, record the phrase "clerc d'armes" and define it in much the same way. The definition comes from Furetiere's Dictionary and is taken up again later by Trevoux's Dictionary. Apparently the phrase, at first glance paradoxical, never fitted any social reality. It rests on a literal misconstruction (of de) which originated, as early as the 16th century, in such sentences as : "Il en parle comme un clerc d'armes", which was first an elliptical formulation of : ...comme un clerc (parle) d'armes" (i.e. : incompetently). The examples quoted and analyzed by Huguet in his Dictionnaire de la Langue du XVIè siècle offer convincing evidence.