by David Boyle
The first sign that the story was coming back into fashion was the publication in 1705 of Marie-Jeanne L'Heritier de Villandon's anonymous novel, The Dark Tower, the source for both versions of the song that Blondel and Richard are supposed to have sung. She understood how to reinject the mythic power into the dry bones of the tale. It was she who moved the events to Linz and added in the romantic twist with blossoming love between Blondeland the jailer's daughter. It was also this book that was used as the source for the Blondel story in the Bibliothèque Universelle des Romans in 1776, probably written by the Marquis de Paulmy. His version in turn fell into the hands of the composer Andre Ernest Modeste Gretry, who exclaimed that 'never was a subject more proper for musical treatment'.
The French Revolution just five years after the first performance of Richard Coeur de Lion, and the execution of Gretry's royal admirer, should have nipped the old legend's revival in the bud. When one contemporary writer argued that the Blondel story never really happened, he was proclaimed a revolutionary hero. Yet the story survived in popular culture, because there was another message in Sedaine's plot, along with rescuing royalty, and it chimed in with the first glimmerings of the romantic movement. Richard was portrayed as a noble, poetic figure — an artist king liberated by the power of music. Even in Sedaine's libretto, it is clear that Blondel's achievement was not just about faithfulness and loyalty — though it certainly was that:
Un troubadour
Est tout amour,
Fidelite, Constance,
Et sans espoir de recompense.
'And without hope of reward,' sang Blondel, but the opera was not just about the servile business of sacrificing yourself for the good of a king. It was also about the sheer power of music. Sedaine's Richard was a creative force that must be freed. So when the revival of royalty in turn made a revival of the opera possible, it was still remembered with some passion, and Richard Coeur de Lion was staged again with enthusiasm in 1806, when Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself emperor. His empress, Josephine, even adopted le style troubadour herself, and it infused French women's clothing with a medieval swagger for a generation, creating a widespread taste for gold bracelets, puffy sleeves, lace veils and outrageous collars.
For the Victorian antiquarians who searched for the real Blondel for the next two generations, the story retained this ambiguity — on the one hand about old-fashioned faithfulness, on the other hand about the power of art and creativity. For the Picardy song-collector Prosper Tarbe in the 1860s, it was a story of friendship as much as anything else between France and England. Tarbe was writing in a period of thawing relations between the old enemies — France was about to suffer the indignities of the Franco-Prussian War — and the love between a French minstrel and an English king was important to him. Perhaps this was why he devoted so much of his time to proving that it was a true story, clinging to the hope that L'Heritier de Villandon's mythical 1308 document — which she claimed to have used to write The Dark Tower but which has never come to light — was real. Tarbe imagined Richard and Blondel 'under the sky of Palestine, united together by heart and by mind'.
The twentieth century shifted the emphasis of the story back on to love, as musicians and musicologists began to rediscover the literature and music of the troubadours and trouvères. The term 'courtly love' was only coined by Gaston Paris as recently as 1883, a n d the rediscovery of the Courts of Love fed through into a series of collections of Blondel's songs with long commentaries in French and German — for some reason, the trouvères have not appealed so far to English antiquarians. This time there was no expression of regret, as there had been from Fauchet's generation, that the song that Blondel must have sung was missing from the manuscripts.
Manly love, faithfulness, friendship and determination were also what the story meant for the contemporary English children's writers of the early twentieth century. This was the Middle Ages as if they had been written by Lord Baden-Powell. In fact, his classic 1908 Scouting for Boys uses Blondel's story as his prime example of self-sacrifice — not just on Blondel's part, but on Richard's too, for leaving 'his kingdom, his family, and everything to go and fight against the enemies of the Christian religion'. The passage appears right next to his 'Knight's Code', which enjoinsnew scouts to 'be always ready with your armour on, except when you are taking your rest at night'. But inevitably what had seemed to the Edwardians an innocent, though passionate, friendship between minstrel and king became evidence for Richard's homosexuality — an idea first put forward in our own day by the historian J. H. Harvey in 1948 as 'breaking the conspiracy of silence'. The story's loss of innocence, so to speak, is the main reason why Blondel and his song have been dropped from children's literature in recent generations.
But the other romantic meaning behind the story remains, and it is more closely related to themes that Blondel himself might have understood — faithfulness to love itself, and a determination to sing despite the consequences. In Gretry and Sedaine's opera the romantic theme is apparent in the references to Orpheus, who took his lyre into Hades to rescue his wife from the Underworld. 'Impelled by love, Orpheus opened up Hades,' Sedaine has Blondel sing. 'Perhaps the gates of these towers will open to the tones of friendship.' Richard here was not so much a king who has been unjustly imprisoned as an artist whose genius demands his release.* It was the romantic theme repeated in Byron's Lament for Tasso a generation later — that genius must be set free — and which became developed in the Blondel story over the following century. Soon searching for your king became a metaphor for seeking out your own creativity or conscience. For the American poet James Russell Lowell, writing in Atlantic Monthly at the height of the American Civil War, the Blondel story was about finding your own nobility in the midst of war, compromise and self-seeking politicians. It was not Blondel's role in rescuing the king that was praised, it was his commitment to values beyond himself and beyond the business of ordinary politics, wrote Lowell:
Yes, I think I do see: after all's said and sung,
Take this one rule of life and you never will rue it,
'Tis but do your own duty and hold your own tongue,
and Blondel were royal himself, if he knew it!
Later versions of Blondel's song, like this one, more selfconsciously refer to the situation they are in. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Viennese poet Johann Gabriel Seidl, author of what was originally the Austrian national anthem and is now the German one, wrote his own romantic version with the chorus 'Seek in faith and you will find'. This was a neat summary of the Romantic movement's understanding of the meaning of the Blondel legend, and it was later set to music by Robert Schumann:
Peering through the metal railings,
In the pale moonlight's shine,
Stands a minstrel with his zither
Next to Castle Diirrenstein.
He gently tunes it, picks his words,
And then begins to sing, though blind,
His instincts tell him gently:
Seek in faith, and you will find!
King Richard, hero of the East,
Are you lost below the wave?
Must your sword rust in the sea,
Or you decay in a distant grave?
Seeking you down every road,
Your minstrel wanders unresigned,
For instincts tell him gently:
Seek in faith, and you will find!
We can never know for certain what the story of Blondel's song meant to Blondel himself, if indeed he ever knew anything about it. It is a tale so rich in meaning that every generation has understood it slightly differently. They warm to its evocation of faithful friend- ship, its echo of the Parable of the Lost Coin, but at its heart there still remains the kernel of something else: the idea that creativity and music have their own power — to reveal genius, and disclose secrets and hiding places, and to make the truth clear. It is that ambiguity in its meaning, those conflicting messages about the meaning of greatness and the purpose
of life, that perhaps have given it such resonance so many generations later.
Strangely enough, this message — that our duty is to our own inner spark of creativity — would also have been understood by the author of 'Ma joie me semont', who wrote eight centuries ago that his heart urged him to sing 'and I dare not ignore/the wishes of my heart'.
*In Blondel's day, 'genius' was simply the Latm for 'daemon', our personal guardian through life, sometimes understood as a psychic animal companion. By the Romantic movement, 'genius' had become our inner creative gift. In a sense, in this story, Blondel was playing the role of Richard's daemon.
Appendix: Richard's Prison Song — Written in Captivity, Summer 1193
No one who is in prison sees his fate
With honesty; for all he feels is sad —
But he can still compose a hopeful song.
I am so rich in friends, but poor in help:
They should be ashamed if, for my ransom,
I lie here one more year.
They know this all too well, my home, my lords,
The English, Norman, Poitevin, Gascon:
I never had a friend who was so poor
That I would leave them in their prison cell.
I do not sing these words to criticize -
Yet I am still in prison here.
The ancient saying I now know too well:
In prison, death: no family nor friends.
Because they leave me here for lack of wealth,
I grieve my fate, but grieve for them still more —
When I am dead, they will have their remorse
If I am too long here.
It's no wonder that my heart is sad
When my own overlord torments my lands.
If he remembered what we both agreed
And held back, knowing what we swore,
You would not see me held in chains so long,
Nor stay in prison here.
They know this well, Tourains and Angevins -
Those youthful gentlemen so strong and rich -
That I am far away, in hostile lands.
They loved me so, but have not loved enough —
There'll be no tournaments held on their fields
While I'm in prison here.
Comrades I loved, and those I still do love,
My lords of Perche and also of Caieux:
Tell them, song, that they have not proved friends.
My heart was never false or vain to them.
But they'll be criminals if they still fight me
While I am lying here.
Sister, Countess, your sovereign right
May God preserve, and guard the one I claim
For whom I suffer here.
I do not speak of the lady of Chartres,
The mother of Louis.
Notes and Sources
Prologue: The Legend of Blondel
There are many different versions of even the 'classic' Blondel legend. The story entitled 'Richard and Blondel' in Agnes Grozier Herbertson, Heroic Legends (London, 1911), gives perhaps the best Edwardian account. The past half-century has become more wary, though the story was still to be found in its most popular form in the Ladybird children's series in L. Du Garde Peach, Richard the Lion Heart (Loughborough, 1965), which points out that 'unfortunately the story is not true'. It rather depends what you inean by 'true'.
The manuscripts with Blondel's songs are in the Burgerbibliotek in Bern (No. 389), the British Library in London (Egerton 274), the Biblioteca Estense in Modena (No. 45 R 4, 4), the Bodleian Library in Oxford (Douce 308), the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal in Paris (no. 5198), the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (Nos. 844-847, 1591, 12615,20 050 and 24 406 and nouv. acq. 1050), the Biblioteca Comunale in Siena (H X 36), the Vatican Library (No. 1490) and in Leiden (BPL 2785, fragments). There is a reproduction of'The Manuscript of the King' (Bibliothèque Nationale No. 844) in Johann Beck, Les Chansonniers des Troubadours et trouvères, publies en facsimile, Vol. II, Le Manuscrit du Roi (London, Oxford and Philadelphia, 1938).
1: The Courts of Love
By far the most comprehensive modern study of Richard's life and generation is John Gillingham, Richard I (Yale, 1999), which is unequivocally on Richard's side in the long academic dispute about whether Richard deserved to overshadow his brother John in traditional history. I have relied heavily on his books, others of which are listed in the Select Bibliography. For a more traditional view, but from the same standpoint, see Kate Norgate, Richard the Lionheart (London, 1924). For the opposite point of view, strongly expressed, see Terry Jones and Alan Ereira, Medieval Lives (London, 2004).
'To leap up on errands . . .': see C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love:A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford, 1936).
'Were the whole world . . .': see the translation from the Carmina Burana in Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World: Europe 1100-1300, trans. Janet Sondheimer (London, 1962). The Carmina Burana includes some of the earliest recorded melodies by the minnesingers: see also translation in Helen Waddell, The Wandering Scholars (6th edn, Har-mondsworth, 1954).
The classic account of the feudal system and how it worked is in Paul Vinogradoff, Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 3 (Cambridge, 1924), but a more up-to-date version is in S. Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals (Oxford, 1994). The system tended to be more flexible on the Continent at this time — especially in Aquitaine, where the old Roman laws of property still prevailed. The dukes of Normandy managed to claim that Normandy was not a fief and they were not vassals, and it was an argument over his homage to the king of France for Normandy that eventually led John to lose it altogether in 1204. It was Philip Augustus, king of France from 1180, who managed to establish a more unambiguous position for himself as overlord of the lands in what is now France. In this he was building on the propaganda of his grandfather Louis the Fat, who set out the principle that the king was nobody's vassal, because he was a vassal of the long-dead St Denis. On the spread of manorialized agriculture, see R. Bartlett, The Making of Europe (London, 1993).
'it was openly said . . .': The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, trans, and ed. G. N. Garmonsway (Letchworth, 1953).
Eleanor of Aquitaine has been very well served by recent biographers: see Amy Kelly, Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings (Harvard and London, 1950); Marion Meade, Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Biography (London, 1977); Alison Weir, Eleanor of Aquitaine, by the Wrath of God, Queen of England (London, 1999); and, most recently, Douglas Boyd, Eleanor: April Queen of Aquitaine (Stroud, 2004).
'I give my pride . . .': this was recorded by Giraldus Cambrensis, and there is a discussion of it in Gillingham, Richard I,
'He was bad to all . . .': this comes from the anonymous author of the Gesta Henrici Secundi. Alison Weir collects a useful selection of historians' contradictory opinions about Richard: see her Eleanor of Aquitaine,
Slightly overweight: the evidence for this comes from the trouble Richard's doctor had extracting the crossbow bolt that eventually killed him from his shoulder in 1199 — see Gillingham, Richard I.
'While thus almost continually trembling . . .': see Giraldus Cambrensis, The Topography of Ireland, ed. J. O'Meara (Harmondsworth, 1982).
'By the grace of God . . .': Giraldus Cambrensis, The Autobiography of Giraldus Cambrensis, trans, and ed. H. E. Butler (London, 1937).
William the Marshal: see David Crouch, William Marshal: Court, Career and Chivalry in the Angevin Empire 1147—1219 (London and New York, 1990).
'When two nobles quarrel . . .': see Morris Bishop, The Penguin Book of the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, 1971).
The Twelfth-century Renaissance: see, for example, Christopher Brooke, The Twelfth Century Renaissance (London, 1969); and R. N. Swanson, The Twelfth Century Renaissance (Manchester, 1999). The first major work on this subject was C. H. Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1927).
'Greece had the first renown . . .': see Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual 1030-1200 (London, 1972).
Peter Abelard: see M. T. Clanchy, Abelard: A Medieval Life (Oxford, 1997).
Bernard of Clairvaux: see B. James, St Bernard of Clairvaux (London, 1957).
Peter the Venerable: see Swanson, The Twelfth Century Renaissance, . The scholars in Toledo in Spain, one of the most international and open-minded cities in Europe, were Robert of Chester (English) and Herman of Carinthia (Austrian). 'By his coming': see Waddell, The Wandering Scholars,
'That we may fulfil . . .': see Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual 1030—1200 (London, 1972).
'God knows that I never wanted . . .': ibid.
Catharism and women: this was not universal. Some Cathars said that women were entirely the creation of the demiurge and were polluting to any of their so-called parfaits (perfects) if they so much as touched them.
Black madonnas: see Ean Begg, The Cult of the Black Virgin (London and Boston, 1985).