Terry Jones' Medieval Lives

by Alan Ereira

  According to his own account,*2 Rahere was a low-born character who managed to infiltrate himself into the court of Henry I on the basis of his entertainment value. While it is not clear what this means, and it has been suggested that he may have held a clerical position, the language he uses suggests that he performed as a jongleur or jester. He evidently made a significant sum of money – given the rewards available some years later for a leap, a whistle and a fart, it is likely that minstrelsy was the best way for a poor boy to do this. But there was obviously more to him than that; a ‘Rahere’ is listed at the time as a canon of St Paul’s Cathedral.

  For some reason he made a penance-pilgrimage to Rome where he fell seriously ill, and vowed that if he recovered he would build a hospital for the poor. On his return journey he had a delirious vision of hell, then one of St Bartholomew who instructed him to build a church in the London suburb of Smooth Field (Smithfield), where there were horse and cattle markets.

  Henry I gave Rahere a licence to build a church and hospital on land to the east of the market; most of it was marsh but there was a firmer piece of rising ground used for public executions, and Rahere had the gallows moved so that he could construct a large priory and, nearby, a hospital. A charter of 1147 defines the purpose of St Bartholomew’s Hospital as to provide shelter and care for the poor, the sick, the homeless and orphans.

  The site was consecrated by the end of 1129 and Rahere became the first prior. Crowds of pilgrims, the sick and people who had been cured in the hospital gathered at the church on St Bartholomew’s feast day, and in 1133 Rahere was given a royal charter which licensed a three-day St Bartholomew’s Fair, one curious feature of which was that no outlaw or criminal could be arrested while attending it. The hospital and fair became enduring features of London life, and the choir of the priory is one of the few medieval structures still standing in London. Rahere himself, like Dick Whittington, became a mythologized figure of poor-boy-made-good.

  EDWARD II’S MINSTRELS

  The fortunes of English minstrels probably reached their zenith during the reign of Edward II, who was a minstrel fanatic. His father was away a lot and the nurse who brought him up was a minstrel, which may explain why he was so fond of them. So fond, in fact, that the treasury rolls showing the expenditure for his coronation list 154 musicians. They also show that on the anniversary of the death of his lover, Piers Gaveston, Edward cheered himself up by travelling to France and being entertained by Bernard the Fool and 54 naked dancers.

  Edward seems to have been in the habit of throwing money at anyone who made him laugh – and it evidently didn’t take much to make him laugh. Jack of St Albans was paid 50 shillings because ‘he danced before the king on a table and made him laugh very greatly’. And he awarded the princely sum of 20 shillings to one of his cooks ‘because he rode before the King . . . and often fell from his horse, at which the King laughed very greatly’.

  The barons tried to restrict Edward’s extravagant entertainment budget by creating exact job descriptions for every member of the household. This meant an end to multitasking minstrels – now they had to be either jugglers or flute players or whatever, and their numbers were to be strictly limited: ‘There shall be trumpeters and 2 other minstrels, and sometimes more and sometimes less, who shall play before the king and it shall please him.’

  The barons were not the only people who were trying to limit the number of minstrels. The minstrels themselves were trying to protect their profession and to make it more exclusive. Fraternities or guilds of musicians seem to have been formed in London at least as early as 1350. One of their main objectives was the exclusion of ‘foreign’ musicians (those who were not Londoners). Another was to stop amateurs from performing in taverns, inns and at weddings. The route to minstrelsy was now through apprenticeship, and the guilds in London, York, Beverley and Canterbury were careful to restrict the number of trainees.

  If this seems to be an industry under threat attempting to protect itself, that is about right. The English music and story-telling business was taking a new turn, evidenced by the appearance in the fourteenth century of a new vernacular literature in the form of romantic poetry. The poems were mostly translations of French romances.

  ROMANCING THE EPIC

  In France (and to some extent Italy and Germany) a change had been taking place in the content of chansons de geste since the middle of the twelfth century. Like the earlier ones, they were still usually stories of conflict between Christians and Saracens; but magical and romantic themes had begun to take over, with evil knights, the rescue of ladies and the frequent appearance of magic rings, belts and swords. A heroic tradition is converted into a romantic one. There is an emphasis on describing Islam as idolatrous, and Muslims as superstitious, treacherous and polygamous; the Saracen world is as exotic as it is dangerous, and Muslim women are presented as lascivious and seductive, irresistibly attracted to Christian knights and, after willing conversion, faithful only to them. Some historians of the literature have suggested that a little wishful thinking might have been involved, but this seems mean-minded. All adventure stories involve wishful thinking; the interesting question is the nature of the wish.

  One of the most significant examples of the new mood in European poetry is Le Roman d’Eneas, a French version of Virgil’s Aeneid which appeared anonymously in about 1160. The emphasis is on story elements that were new to Virgil as well as to French poetry – the feelings of two women, Dido and Lavinia, who are in love with Aeneas. A new literary principle had appeared: the principle of overpowering love.

  This, of course, indicates that the whole world of performance must have changed. The audience and the location for the entertainment are different. This is not material for the battlefield or for a hall of warriors. And it assumes a new kind of performer.

  This new performer had first appeared in southern France in the twelfth century. He was called a troubadour.

  INVENTING TROUBADOURS

  The pioneer of the new style of poetry was not a professional musician but an aristocrat – the gloriously randy Duke William IX of Aquitaine, whose court was in Poitiers. According to his thirteenth-century Provençal biographer:

  The Count of Poitiers was one of the most courtly men in the world and one of the greatest deceivers of women. He was a fine knight at arms, liberal in his attentions to ladies, and an accomplished composer and singer of songs. For a long time he roved the world, bent on the deception of ladies.

  According to the chronicler William of Malmesbury, after a disastrous crusade of his own devising in 1101, Duke William plunged enthusiastically into a life of sexual entertainment and frivolous versifying to amuse his companions. He was obviously strongly influenced by his travels; half his surviving songs draw on a particular form of Arab mystical poetry (the zajel) for their detailed metrical structure and conventional expressions.

  The word ‘troubadour’ meant an author or composer who discovered something new – literally the ‘finder’ of something that had not been known before. Duke William was playing with novelty, and demonstrating that poetry and song could be about absolutely anything – or about nothing at all.

  I made this verse on sweet F.A.

  There is no person to portray

  No talk of love or youth at play –

  Nothing, of course.

  Composed while sleeping yesterday

  Sat on my horse

  Duke William was without doubt a true original. He was excommunicated twice. On the first occasion, in 1114, when the bishop of Poitiers imposed the penalty for some unknown offence, he held the bishop at sword point in the cathedral and demanded absolution. He didn’t get it, which says something for the bishop’s courage and possibly explains why the duke’s crusade hadn’t achieved anything. The second excommunication was caused by William’s affair with the Viscountess of Chatellerault, alarmingly known as Dangerosa. It was said he kidnapped this mother of three and installed her in a tower in his palace at Poitiers. Will
iam of Malmesbury says he even had her portrait painted on his shield, so ‘I could bear her into battle as she had borne me into bed’. The duke’s wife was not happy at all about this.

  William also fantasized about establishing a convent of prostitutes, and his verse includes a great deal of crude sexual joking, with women portrayed as fine horses to be mounted, or as captives, and he jokingly records his seduction by two ladies whose only concern was to avoid disclosure.

  But he also wrote some verses that conveyed a much more reverent attitude to women, which would become the basis of what is called ‘courtly love’. In these poems his lady is a married woman, and is as aloof as she is desirable. There is a frequent theme that the lover must be patient and, as he waits for the lady’s favours, behave with courtesy to all about him. For the courtly lover, the lady alone has the power to kill or cure; in her hands alone lies his salvation.

  The language of Duke William’s compositions was the southern French vernacular, Occitan. This was itself a radical move, as up to this time the language of all intellectual life had been Latin. But it was no more revolutionary than the idea of a lover addressing his love song to a married woman. This was conventionally liable to bring the death penalty and was regarded as the equivalent of casting a spell on her.

  This courtly romanticism flourished under William’s son, and then his granddaughter, the redoubtable Eleanor of Aquitaine. She established her own court in Poitiers, which was dominated by the idea of courtly love and, supposedly at least, run by its rules. The court culture there was in the vernacular tongue, and the old, heroic warrior entertainments were deeply out of date.

  Shortly before Christmas 1182 the Limousin troubadour Bertran de Born spent time at Henry II’s court at Argentan in Normandy, and complained about the boorishness of the old warrior culture: ‘A court where no one laughs or jokes is never complete; a court without gifts is just a paddock-full of barons. The boredom and vulgarity of Argentan nearly killed me.’

  Troubadours were often great lords themselves, but less boorish than those of Argentan. They performed their own songs and employed jongleurs or minstrels as their accompanists. Aristocratic troubadours even took part in singing competitions.

  Not that these men weren’t warriors. Eleanor’s sons Richard I and King John were both tough and violent. But Richard ‘the Lionheart’, whose idea of a satisfying life involved the use of extreme force on a face-to-face, or even a nose-to-nose basis, was also a man who had been raised in a troubadour culture. He wrote and performed elegant songs, both at court and while on campaign. Two of his poems have survived, one with the music.

  BLONDEL

  It was because of Richard’s poetic inclinations that the story of his rescue by his minstrel, Blondel, had such wide currency. In 1192 Richard was captured by Leopold of Austria while returning from the Third Crusade. (He was alone and in disguise – typical of Richard, no other English king would have created such an adventure.) He simply vanished, and it was said that Blondel set out to find him. The minstrel wandered from castle to castle, and outside each he sang part of a song they had composed together. At the castle of Durnstein he heard Richard answer his song by completing it. The king, having been found, could now be ransomed.

  This is a good poetic tale in itself, but probably apocryphal. Blondel de Nesle was certainly a well-known troubadour, the composer of many love songs. But he was not Richard’s minstrel, a supporter of the English; he was actually from northern France and wrote in the Picardy dialect. The tale is probably a minstrel’s invention – the minstrel in question being the unknown author of Récits d’un ménestrel de Reims, which appeared in about 1260. Presumably he wanted to convey a clear moral: ‘Look after your minstrel and he’ll look after you.’

  The career of Blondel de Nesle is an illustration of the way in which the troubadour influence had spread north to the Loire and beyond, out of the Langue-d’oc. (Dante distinguished three cultural regions that were defined by their word for ‘yes’: si in the south, oc in the middle and oïl in the north.)

  Although the romanticization of song and poetry spread into northern France, where the poets were called ‘trouvères’, troubadour poetry was uniquely linked to the culture of Provence, shaped by the experiences of Provençal crusaders in the Middle East. It was within this framework that the world of courtly love flourished, chivalry became concerned with courtesy and the adoration of noblewomen, and a new kind of literature arose: the poetic, epic romances of heroes like Arthur and his knights.

  CATHARS

  At the same time, Provençal religious beliefs were changing significantly. Hostility to the worldliness and greed of the Church was widespread throughout Europe, but in Provence the belief that it was a fraudulent and pompous organization that had misunderstood Christianity mutated into a new form: Catharism. The Cathars believed the world was seized in a combat between two divinities, God and the devil, and that the material world was the territory of evil and the devil. They understood the Bible not as a historical document but as an allegory, and saw Jesus not as a man but as an angel.

  They maintained that humans could free themselves from the evil world by being good. The perfecti, ‘pure ones’, were idealistic, pacifist vegetarians. Many members of the Languedoc nobility supported and were sympathetic to the Cathars.

  There was an obvious contradiction between the earthy enthusiasm of Duke William’s poetry and the flesh-denying asceticism of the Cathars. To some extent this was moderated as Catharism came to dominate Provençal courts. Troubadour music and poetry became more high-flown, rhetorical and allegorical. Just as some of the music of the 1960s was the voice of protest and hippy idealism, some of the troubadours of the thirteenth century were the voice of Cathar protest. Even the use of their own language rather than Latin had an anti-Rome flavour to it.

  Pope Innocent III was deeply hostile to the movement. Recognizing that its appeal was largely a reaction against the venality and corruption of his Church (a criticism with which he thoroughly agreed), he tried to win people back by sending poor preaching friars into the region, including a group led by St Dominic in 1205. They failed to attract Cathars back to the fold.

  In 1208, after the murder of a papal legate, Innocent III changed tack and invited the chivalry of Europe to stop killing Saracens and start killing Cathars – a worthy deed for which they would be granted absolution from sin. This holy war, the first crusade deliberately launched against Christian ‘heretics’, lasted until 1229 and decimated the Languedoc. It was called the Albigensian Crusade as the Cathars were identified with the town of Albi and known by the northern French as Albigensians.

  It was ruthlessly savage. Arnold Aimery, the papal legate at the siege of Béziers, ordered his men: ‘Show mercy neither to order, nor to age, nor to sex . . . Cathar or Catholic, Kill them all . . . God will know his own.’ The attackers were Anglo-French Normans eager to seize property in the Dordogne (nice farmhouse, needs some repairs . . .) This was how Simon de Montfort was granted control of the area encompassing Carcassonne, Albi and Béziers.

  The troubadours had to flee or be killed. They sought refuge in northern Italy, the Iberian Peninsula and the north, producing new musical movements across Europe. In fact, the only real survivor of the slaughter was the troubadour sensibility; an outflow of poetic refugees had an impact on the rest of Europe comparable to the flight of intellectuals from Nazi Germany. The comparison is not far-fetched. The Albigensian Crusade was truly genocidal in intent, and it has been estimated that a million people were slaughtered.

  TRIUMPH OF THE VERNACULAR

  One example of the troubadour influence is in the work of Wolfram von Eschenbach, a Bavarian who is remembered as the most brilliant of Germany’s narrative poets and who wrote the epic Parzival, which was clearly based on Chrétien de Troyes’ Arthurian romance, Perceval. Wolfram said he used extra material given him at the time of the Albigensian Crusade by one Kyot of Provence; apparently Kyot had taken refuge in Spain, like ma
ny Provençal troubadours, before going to Germany.

  The legacy of the troubadours far outlasted their own shattered culture. The impact on writers in other lands was profound, even when they had no sympathy for the ideology of Catharism. The most important and influential of these admirers was the Italian Dante Alighieri, who at the very beginning of the fourteenth century wrote a Latin essay, ‘De Vulgari Eloquentia’ (On Vernacular Language), in which he extolled spoken language (as opposed to Latin) as a suitable vehicle for literature. He identified as exemplars three great troubadours, one of whom, Arnaut Daniel, he quoted in Occitan and immortalized in his Divine Comedy.

  Arnaut’s poetry is quite astonishing. He writes with an unforced lightness of touch, constructing rhyme-schemes and scansion that are beautifully calculated and precise. The more you recite his verses the more complexity is revealed beneath a surface that is entirely natural and open, one human being speaking to another. It feels as though the language has been borne along with the poem. This makes it quite untranslatable; it is impossible to mimic the rhyme, scansion and spirit while translating the meaning into another tongue. The joy of the poetry and the language that expresses it are inseparable.

  No vuelh de Roma l’emperi

  I don’t want the Empire of Rome

  ni qu’om m’en fassa postoli

  or for someone to make me the Pope

  qu’en lieis non aia revert

  if I can’t find a place by her

  per cui m’art lo cors e’m rima;

  by whom my heart is burned and scorched

  e si’l maltrait no’m restaura

  and if she does not cure this injury

  ab un baizar anz d’annueu,

  with a kiss within a year

  mi auci e si enferna.

  I die and to hell with her

  A great deal of effort went into making troubadour verse seem respectable, and collections of poems were produced with biographies of the poets attached to the verses attributed to them. (Usually no-one was quite sure who had written what, and the biographies were to some extent derived from the content of whatever poems were attributed to the troubadours by the collator.)