by David Boyle
No nymph my heart can wound
If favour she divide,
And smiles on all around
Unwilling to decide;
I'd rather hatred bear
Than love with other's share.
Actually, Blondel wrote in Old French not Occitan, and this song is a mixture culled from various sources, with five verses, some of which are taken from Blondel's Chanson III ('A l'entree de la saison') and some from Richard's own song, which he wrote later in prison (see Chapter 8).
It was these verses that were quoted by Thomas Percy in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, the 1765 collection that some claim marked the beginning of the Romantic movement in England, and it was then used by the composer and song collector Charles Burney in his influential General History of Music (1776— 89). Percy, the son of a grocer, became Bishop of Dromore. He claimed that most of his collection came from a seventeenth-century document — now in the British Museum — that he acquired from a friend in Shropshire, having saved it from destruction when he found it 'being used by the maids to light the fire'. Burney recognized that the source for 'Domna vostra beutas' was the introduction to Mademoiselle L'Heritier de Villandon's novel, but says that the English translation came from there, when actually it didn't.
Oddly enough, The Dark Tower actually included a completely different song in the story itself, and this one has also filtered through into tradition, though its eighteenth-century roots are obvious. It was translated into English in 1896 for Frederick Crowest's book The Story of British Music, under the title 'Fierce in me the fever burning':
Fierce in me the fever burning
Strength and confidence unmanned
Eyes, though dark their sight is turning,
Yet discerning
Through the gloom Death's pallid hand
Grimly stretched across from out the spectral land;
Then came my Love so bright and true,
And Death and fever quickly withdrew.
That is what Richard is supposed to have sung, to which Blondel replied:
I know with full assurance
The Woman's gentle care
Brings comfort, hope, endurance
In time of deep despair.
There then followed three more verses along the same lines, after which the two of them are supposed to have improvised another one. The Dark Tower imagined a major duet through the walls of Diirnstein.
This is all fantasy of course. There is no evidence for the song itself as a historical event, apart from the unreliable Minstrel of Reims, and even the successors of romantics like Prosper Tarbe have had to give way to the overwhelming silence of all the contemporary sources. None of them, not the English, French or German contemporary chronicles, mention Blondel's role in Richard's imprisonment. But it is an unforgettable story, and rich enough in its mythic symbolism to stand for a whole variety of ideals in recent history. That is reason enough to cling to the tale. But there are also good historical justifications for taking a second look at Blondel and his part in finding the king.
A visit to the castle where Richard found himself at Christmas 1192 might make anyone think afresh about the story. It is fascinating, for example, that twentieth-century versions focus on the north tower of Diirnstein, where Richard was probably held. There is even a path along the rocks under the trees far below where it is still possible to imagine a troubadour creeping at dead of night. Of course this is not evidence that Blondel actually sang under thenorth wall. On the other hand, there is good reason to believe that Leopold chose Diirnstein as Richard's prison simply because it was so remote and inaccessible, so that nobody would know where he was. Yet somehow William Longchamp and the abbots of Boxley and Robertsbridge were able to find out enough to stumble upon him on the road to Speyer in the middle of March. Richard spent only three months in Diirnstein, and part of that time being ferried to Leopold's meetings with the emperor, but someone revealed to the English where he was. Blondel's story was at least a convenient tale that successfully obscured the question of how they knew.
To understand the meaning of the legend in a little more detail, we have to step back and look at the role played by troubadours and trouvères in Richard and Blondel's generation. It was of course primarily to write songs that would be taken up by minstrels and jongleurs, and to entertain in court circles, but there were other, more subtle roles which have only become clear over the last century since scholars have rediscovered their work. The truth is that trouvères had an important political role to play as the propagandists of the twelfth century. That is why, the moment Richard ran into trouble with his reputation, he settled down and wrote a song about it. When the French disapproved of his decision not to attack Jerusalem, Hugh, Duke of Burgundy, wrote a vitriolic song that was then sung around Outremer and presumably taken home by the minstrels in the crusader camps to France to sing there. When Richard heard it, he spent precious time away from negotiations and military preparations to write his own in reply.
His generation was steeped in this musical culture, where music made things happen by moulding opinion. Leopold wrote songs, and so did the Emperor Henry VI, into whose hands Richard was about to fall. Longchamp was constantly commissioning songs that praised his own uniqueness. In prison later, Richard would be writing songs about his situation. This was a generation where the song contests, so beloved of the troubadours, extended into theworld of court politics and diplomacy.* 'I wouldn't give a fig for your arm, because it looks like a goat's leg,' sang the Catalan troubadour Guillem de Bergueda against a rival. He later composed a cycle of songs against the Bishop of Urgel, accusing him of being a eunuch, a lecher, a rapist and a sodomite. It made sense for lords to welcome troubadours, and to put the most lavish hospitality at their disposal, otherwise it might be them lampooned in the next song.
Songs with a political or satirical purpose were known in Occitan as sirventes, and the doyenne of the sirventes style was the troubadour Bertran de Born, the minor nobleman from Perigord who had dubbed Richard Oc et Non (Yes and No). It was Bertran whom Raymond V of Toulouse turned to in order to commission a war song to rally his friends in 1181, and whose enthusiastic paeans of praise for war earned him a place in Dante's Inferno a century later. Bertran had been a close friend of Richard's elder brother, Henry the Young King, and, though he was reconciled with Richard later in life, he was his bitter opponent for much of his career. This is how he introduced his gentle goading:
When I see in the gardens, waving silk
Of banners, yellow, indigo and blue,
And with delight the neighing horses
And the merry songs of the jongleurs,
As they play their viols, tent by tent,
With trumpets, horns and clarions —
Then I want to write a powerful song,
Enough for even King Richard to hear.
The reason troubadours and their equivalents in other parts of Europe were welcomed at courts anywhere across the Continentwas not just to ask them to sing, but for their hosts to give them something in exchange: their own news, their achievements, their vitriol against their neighbours and opponents — knowing that the troubadour could turn these into a song that would be taken up by the minstrels in his or her circle, and sung widely down through society and at other courts, to the discomfort of their enemies. Troubadours were collectors, editors and pedlars of gossip, opinion and news. They could inform or provoke, they could make or break reputations — and they did. Troubadours were inveigled into drumming up support for the Third Crusade, and many of them accompanied the Third and Fourth Crusades themselves — in fact some of Blondel's fellow trouvères never came home.
Blondel was therefore one of an elite group of musicians and songwriters who used popular culture to broadcast their news and their own informal links — right across Europe — to pass on information. So it is not a peculiar juxtaposition, having a mere minstrel search for a king. That was the role that Blondel and his colleagues wo
uld have played, listening and gossiping, and Richard was, after all, one of their own — not the only troubadour prince in Europe, but the most celebrated and the most generous patron of others like him.
But there is another clue about the meaning of the story of Blondel's song. It is the Archbishop of Rouen's informal networks that so efficiently produced a copy of a private letter between the emperor and the king of France, copied to every member of the Great Council of England. The archbishop, the Cornishman Walter of Coutances, was at the time acting as chief justiciar of England — Richard's first minister of the realm — and intelligence was his responsibility. He needed to know Richard's whereabouts, and needed to know urgently, so it seems reasonable to expect that he used what networks he possessed to find out.
Espionage is the unspoken element of the story of Richard's arrest that historians have left out until now, partly because they dismiss the story as a tale for children and partly because there is so little evidence about medieval spying. Yet you can read theclues throughout this story. They are there in the tale that Richard disguised himself as a bedouin in order to spy on Saladin's troops. They are there in the immense care that Richard took to sail from Acre without being seen, and in his realization that every port on the north coast of the Mediterranean had watchers who would recognize him and pass the news to those who wanted to do him harm. We can read into his behaviour, and that of his companions, in their disguise and precautions, just how widespread these networks of watchers were. Richard was particularly adept at military espionage, using scouts to intercept Saracen caravans on their way to Egypt, just as his father's justiciar Ranulf Glanville successfully used them to outwit the king of Scotland and his forces in 1174. We might not quite be able to call them spies at this stage in history, we might not know how they were organized, who they reported to or how they were paid, but the story strongly implies their presence nonetheless.
Then there was the mysterious business of the capture of one of the copies of the emperor's letter to Philip, presumably seized by a paid agent sent by the archbishop to watch for imperial messengers on the road. It is impossible eight centuries later to know what kind of secret organization he managed, how informal and how freelance it was, but we can assume they had some arrangements at their disposal. Richard's reign saw the beginnings of the official royal messenger service, known as Nuncios Regis. Within a generation, they were a paid service attached to the court and wearing a uniform of blue and russet.* They may well have employed more freelance servants, listening in foreign ports and in the courts of foreign princes, or watching on the potholed roads.
By the reign of Edward I, two generations later, the English court was recording payments to large numbers of people on secret missions, and we can only assume they were doing so without formally recording it in Richard's day. Later the same year that Richard spent in prison, in 1193, Philip's invasion plans for England were captured on the road by messengers in the same way. Two decades later, in 1213, there are records of John rewarding two sailors from Seaford who captured messengers with letters sent to England by Philip Augustus, and then setting about the very modern business of forging replies from those they were addressed to and sending them back to mislead the French. 'Diplomacy and theft were almost synonymous,' wrote Richard Deacon in his History of the British Secret Service*Walter of Coutances was clearly not above a little diplomacy on the muddy road from the Rhine to Paris. This kind of activity took place below the radar of history, and we can only guess what happened to the unfortunate imperial messenger.
Blondel's story seems to be an alternative version of how the news of Richard's whereabouts was discovered. It is a tale that may originally have been designed to obscure espionage or perhaps it is all that remains of a genuine story of espionage. Either way, Blondel's song has spying at its heart and that is how we should now understand it. The first of these alternatives is that the story was a myth deliberately constructed to hide the real story of intelligence and betrayal that allowed the English government to discover what had happened to the king, and his movements afterwards, so that Longchamp and the two abbots could run across him so coincidentally on the road. In this version, it was perhaps a story told half jokingly, half seriously, to avoid the truth.
If the Blondel story was fabricated, it was at least a tale that borrowed from traditions that were already in circulation and attached to other names. You can find elements of it in the myth of Orpheus, another musician who used the power of music to find the one he loved in the underworld, but it was also there in a contemporary story about Richard's illegitimate brother William Longspee and a knight called Talbot. When her father died on crusade in 1196, the wealthy eight-year-old heiress of the Earl of Salisbury was hidden away with relatives in Normandy. Talbot, who may have been Longspee himself, is said to have searched for her for two years disguised as a troubadour. His beautiful singing opened the doors and, when he returned to England, he brought Ela with him and presented her to King Richard. She married Longspee, who became the new Earl of Salisbury.
Then there was the story of the Duke of Lothringe, Ferry III, kidnapped and imprisoned in a castle a long way from home. When he heard a roofer singing a song about his disappearance, he identified himself with the aid of his ring, and the message reached his wife, who raised the alarm. Then there was the medieval baron Von Geroldseck, taken prisoner while hunting and forced to travel to a strange castle, where he eventually heard the sound of a familiar horn blown by a servant. The servant turned out to be one of his old faithful retainers, and they escaped together. Both are stories recorded in the fifteenth century that were supposed have happened in the twelfth century.
They may have been versions of a much older folk tale that became attached to the story of Richard's imprisonment to fill an obvious gap. There is a Japanese fairy story about an emperor of Japan called Takakura and his favourite concubine, Kogo, who was a gifted singer and musician. The jealous empress had her father kidnap Kogo and hide her away, and the emperor became ill with worry. A knight called Nakakuni, who loved both emperor and concubine, searched the whole country, playing her favourite melody on his flute. Finally, outside one house, he could hear a stringed instrument echoing the same tune from inside and knew she was there. If the same story was told about Richard's brother Longspee — and maybe about others — then minstrels and troubadours, or those disguised as them, had the power in contemporary stories to find hidden people, just as they had the power to tell the truth in song. It would have been a useful device to hide the messier business of finding out where Richard was in prison. The Japanese story suggests that the original folk version of the Blondel story had Blondel singing first, and using the power of music. In fact, the existence of a different version the other way aroundimplies that there was after all some kind of historical event that eventually metamorphosed into a more traditional story.
This is the second possibility: that it was not just a story that obscured espionage but one that is based on some kind of real event involving a troubadour or minstrel. If so, it would have been possible because of the unique social position enjoyed by troubadours and minstrels to go anywhere and ask anything. They would be welcomed into the dourest and most distant castles, like Diirnstein, with relief — bringing the promise of song and entertainment after months of kicking the dogs by the hearth on wintry evenings — where almost any other visitor might be treated with great suspicion. They would be there by the fire as the local lord and his family and servants discussed their hopes, plans and local events. All they needed to do was to listen: troubadours were stateless wanderers who often provided valuable intelligence to princes. There was even a tradition that Richard was allowed to receive them during his imprisonment.
Blondel may not have sung under the castle walls, but the story might still be all that remains of the real role that he actually played, making his own way home across Europe from Palestine — maybe even via Diirnstein — listening and watching and s
ending messages back to Rouen, London or Winchester. Blondel was from Picardy, after all, in the critical border region between the He de France and Normandy. He may have paid homage to the French king during his time in Paris. Maybe his role in undermining the machinations of the king of France needed to be disguised. But then Philip was well known for his disapproval of and meanness to minstrels and jongleurs, so perhaps Blondel intervened on Richard's behalf as a blow struck for the European community of troubadours and musicians. Either way, the source of the intelligence might actually have been a minstrel, who might even have been Blondel. And even if the moment of mutual recognition was not at the foot of a tower, it might have been across a great hall some time in the New Year of 1193.
*
There is one more thought that provides a little confirmation that Blondel's story is based on a real but forgotten event. Christmas was not the same feast in the Middle Ages that it is today. It lasted twelve days and presents — if they were exchanged at all — were given in the New Year. But medieval Christmas was still a time of festivity and feasting, and it was especially linked with mystery plays and minstrels. The best houses always had minstrels at Christmas, and chanting carols, but it was also the time of year when people wore disguises, when men dressed as women and vice versa, and when the Lord of Misrule was unleashed. Medieval Christmas was an upside-down world, where masters served servants, sexes exchanged dress, everyone dressed up in disguises, where boys were appointed as bishops for the season and you could even imagine a topsy-turvy story like a king imprisoned in a tower.