The Troubadour's Song

by David Boyle

  Richard I — known to history as Richard Coeur de Lion — remains one of the most recognizable figures in English history, famous partly for his military prowess and partly for his failure to spend more than nine months of his reign in his own kingdom. He is the only king to have his statue outside the Houses of Parliament in London. As well as England's ruler, Richard was also Duke of Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine and Count of Anjou and Poitou, and he ruled over an empire that stretched from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees. His parents were Henry II, one of the most successful administrators ever to sit on the English throne, and Eleanor of Aquitaine, one of the most celebrated women of the age.

  As for Blondel, though he remains shadowy and elusive, he was real too. The evidence for this can be found inside a beautiful classical building hidden away in the rue de Sully in Paris. The Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal is more like a gentleman's club than alibrary, though it is officially part of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Even so, having filled in the numerous forms that provide you with a day reader's pass, a short stay in its wood-panelled interior, with its long tables, numbered seats and leather-bound books from floor to ceiling, is enough to give you access to the microfilm which contains their manuscript No. 5198.

  This is all that members of the public are allowed to see of an extraordinary thirteenth-century document, running to nearly 200 pages, with spidery nineteenth-century notes and index at the beginning. With its beautifully decorated initial letters and its immaculate black script and medieval music with square notes, this is one of the earliest song books in Western Europe. It contains more than a century of love songs by names who have passed into the history of poetry as the greatest troubadours of them all, and especially those who came from northern France and wrote in Old French — the so-called trouvères.

  The Victorian editor has provided page numbers, and if you wind the microfilm reader, you will find the follow­ing words written in red: 'Here ends the songs of the Chastelain de Couci and here begins the songs of Blondel de Nesle.' In other words, the mysterious minstrel who is supposed to have sung under Richard's tower was not completely legendary. He really existed, and he was a ttrouvère famous enough to have his words and music recorded a century after the events described in the legend are supposed to have taken place.

  There are sixteen other manuscripts in existence in European cities like the one in the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal. They can be found in the British Library in London, the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the Vatican Library in Rome; there are no fewer than nine elsewhere in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, as well as others in Siena, Berne, Leiden and Modena. In total these manu­scripts attribute thirty-four songs to Blondel, twenty-seven of which are believed by most modern scholars to have been correctly attributed. They are almost exclusively about love — passionate, hopeless love too — and there is some evidence that they were well known. Two generations later, a poet from Reims called Eustachesli Peintres mentioned someone called Bloundiaus in a list of great lovers alongside the Chastelain de Coucy — one of the most famous of the trouvères — and Tristan himself. It seems likely that the songs which have been so beautifully recorded in manuscript No. 5198 were sung widely in the Middle Ages.

  The manuscripts spell the name of the man history knows as Blondel in a number of different ways: sometimes he is Blondiaux, sometimes Blondiels; sometimes he is Blondeaus or even Blondelz; sometimes he is just Blond. The place he is said to be from is some­times Nesle, but just as often Neele or Noyelle. It seems clear, though, that this is not just the same person but the same person the legend refers to. In other words, while it may now be impossible to be absolutely sure who he was, and while the evidence for his origins and work may be contradictory and fragmentary, Blondel was real.

  His story, as far as we know it, together with the bizarre tale of Richard's arrest, discovery, ransom and return, and the real mean­ing of the legend of the minstrel under the tower, is the subject of this book.

  1. The Courts of Love

  'To leap up on errands, to go through heat or cold, at the bidding of one's lady, or even of any lady, would seem but honourable and natural to a gentleman of the 13 th or even of the 17th century, and most of us have gone shopping in the 20th with ladies who showed no sign of regarding the tradition as a dead letter.'

  C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, 1936

  Were the whole world mine

  From the Elbe to the Rhine,

  I'd hardly value it at all

  If only England's queen

  Would lie my arms between.

  Carmina Burana,

  twelfth-century German verse

  A small plaque next to a slightly unkempt Georgian back garden opposite Worcester College, Oxford, marks the site of Beaumont Palace, birthplace of one of England's most celebrated and para­doxical kings. There has been no trace of the massive wood and stone structure since it crumbled away as a workhouse in the 1830s, though in its heyday it was known for the beautiful murals of its great hall. But on 8 September 1157 the private quarters of the queen would have echoed with the cries of a new royal arrival -a son to King Henry II and his glamorous, strong-minded consort, Eleanor of Aquitaine. The new prince would be known in his own lifetime as Richard the Lionhearted. He was second in line to inherit his parents'joint empire, including not just England and Normandy but duchies and other ancient fiefdoms stretching right down to the Spanish peninsula.

  Richard was born almost a century after the Norman Conquest of England swept aside the Anglo-Saxon nobility. This had im­posed a new layer of French-speaking aristocrats and institutions, enforced by a network of stone castles and intricate feudal relation­ships. This feudal combination of homage and tradition linked the new lords and ecclesiastical princes with the whole, overwhelm­ingly rural, social system. Richard was destined to spend little of his life in England, but a similar — though more informal and ambiguous — network of lords and vassals covered much of conti­nental Europe too, so that everywhere he went the yeomen, serfs or villeins in every village, the shadowy inhabitants of the forests that covered so much of the countryside, and the monks and nuns in the religious orders were connected in chains of mutual responsibility all the way to the king.

  The Norman invasion itself, ninety-one years before Richard's birth, was over the horizon of living memory, but not so long ago as to be irrelevant. The new prince was born in that period of English history when the divisions between Norman and Saxon were becoming more complicated than simply those between invader and vanquished. It was too early for each side to speak the other's language, but not too early for the first signs of a combined English language to begin to emerge. It had been a difficult few generations for the English. There may have been some in Beau­mont Palace who remembered the death of the Conqueror's son William Rufus in a hunting accident in i ioo. But many must have remembered all too well the hardships, chaos and descent into anarchy in the civil war that followed the death of Rufus's younger brother, Henry I, when 'it was openly said that Christ and his saints slept'. It was during those years that Richard's grandmother Matilda had stayed less comfortably in Oxford, escaping in 1141 from the castle there in the snow — the famous flight in which she was said to have worn her shoes backwards to disguise the direction in which she was heading.

  But a new world was emerging too. When Richard was born, his future opponent Saladin was a nineteen-year-old in service to the Syrian ruler Nur ed-Din. The Pope, Adrian IV, was from St Albans — the only Englishman ever to have achieved that pos­ition. The future archbishop and martyr Thomas Becket was the first chancellor of Saxon descent since the Conquest, and was filling the role with sumptuous hospitality and sartorial extravagance. On a visit he made to Paris when Richard was a few months old to negotiate marriages between the English and French royal houses, he took no fewer than twenty-four changes of magnificent clothes, plus a travelling chapel, twelve horses carrying table plate, plus hounds, falcons and a long-tailed monkey perched on the back of e
ach horse. A new age of light and luxury was recognizably dawn­ing. But the most obvious change was in architecture: the gloomy churches with their heavy stone arches and round Romanesque windows were giving way to soaring, pointed Gothic arches and magnificent windows that let in a flood of light to the new cathedrals and abbeys of the Continent.

  Richard was born between these two worlds, perched at the beginning of a new era of learning, extravagance and light, as it must have seemed at the time. His wet nurse had a son born on the same day who became the great scholar Alexander Neckham. This ambiguity, in neither the old world nor the new, applies to almost every aspect of Richard's life and reputation — caught not just between darkness and light but between his mother's world and his father's.

  His mother, Eleanor, was Duchess of Aquitaine in her own right and one of the most extraordinary women of the age. She had previously been married to Louis VII of France, a man given to disturbingly pious gestures: he had a habit of kissing lepers at moments of religious fervour.* She contrived to have the marriage dissolved and — to the horror of the French — married the younger but highly eligible Henry of Anjou, heir to the Angevin empire, which controlled Normandy and most of western and southern France, and also a claimant to the throne of England.

  Richard was their third son, and though the first, William, died as a baby, there was a prophecy of Merlin's — popularly supposed to apply to the Angevin dynasty — which said that 'the eagle shall rejoice in her third nesting'. Richard was certainly Eleanor's favourite. Her documents always described him as her 'very dear son', while her youngest son, John — his father's favourite — only managed a 'dear son' at best. Richard's parents had a stormy, bitter relationship, which ended in separation. This meant that he was to be brought up as a teenager in the colourful and cultured court of Poitiers, the very heart of the overlapping world of troubadour culture and courtly love.

  We can only imagine the peculiar divisions that pulled him between the chivalric world of his mother and the brisk, adminis­trative world of his father. Richard inherited both his temper and his generosity from his father. He was Henry's son in his military prowess, not just in feats of arms but in his strategic thinking too. He understood his father's world of devastated castles, of sore legs from being constantly in the saddle and of clerks working through the night as they agonized over the wording of the latest laws. Unlike his older brothers but again like his father, Richard was never interested in tournaments; he was fascinated by the noise, screams and excitement of real warfare. He proved his generalship while still a teenager in the bitter struggles to bring the uncontrol­lable vassals of Aquitaine to heel. But he was his mother's son in his love of show and his sophistication — she insisted that no men appear before her with uncombed hair — as well as his sense of humour, his poetry and his songs. Eleanor's palace had belonged to Duke William IX, her grandfather and the first troubadour, and it was decked out with tiled floors, silk hangings, glazed windows, linen tablecloths, sweet-scented rushes and carpets from the Orient, and Richard never lost that fascination for finery. He failed to master English, but he told Latin jokes, and wrote in both French and the language of southern France, Provencal or — as it is now known — Occitan. He also had a lifelong habit of impulsive chival- ric gestures. Above all, he was Eleanor's boy in his love of music: as king, Richard would stand alongside the choir at the royal chapel, urging them with his hands to sing louder.

  Perhaps he also inherited his sense of humour from his father, who was known to chuckle a great deal. Richard 'turned every­thing into a joke, and made his listeners laugh uncontrollably,' said the Yorkshire monk and chronicler William of Newburgh, and this was not written as approval. Richard's most famous joke was at the expense of the preacher Fulk of Neuilly, who accused him of having three evil daughters: pride, avarice and sensuality. Very well, said Richard, pointing neatly to the known weaknesses of the different arms of the Church, 'I give my pride to the Templars, my avarice to the Cistercians, and my sensuality to the Benedic­tines.' Neither the joke nor the sense of humour endeared him to the ecclesiastics who made up the majority of chroniclers at the time. Most were divided about him, as historians have been ever since. 'He was bad to all, worse to his friends, and worst of all to himself,' wrote one. 'Why do we need to expend labour extolling such a man?' wrote another. 'He needs no superfluous commen­dation. He was superior to all others.' Even a French chronicle the following century described him as 'the greatest of all Christian kings'.

  It is hard now to pick a way through such a mass of contradic­tions. Richard could be cruel and arrogant, yet he twice suffered some kind of mental breakdown characterized by extreme self-loathing. He could and did cut a swathe through any battlefield, using his favourite mace with his long reach, scything down the opposition,* yet he was actually slightly overweight, frequently sick and suffered from a continual shaking in his hands from some kind of malarial fever that nothing seemed to control. 'While thus almost continually trembling,' wrote the chronicler Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales), 'he remained intrepid in his deter­mination to make the whole world tremble before him.'

  His great rival Philip Augustus of France — the longed-for 'Dieu-Donné' (given by God) of Louis VII — was born almost eight years later, to Louis' third wife, Adela of Blois. Giraldus Cambrensis, who was studying in Paris at the time, was awoken in the summer night when all the bells began to ring and he could see the flickering light of flames from bonfires. Poking his head out of his bedroom window, he was told, 'By the grace of God, there is born to us this night a king who shall be a hammer to the king of the English.' And he was. The uneasy relationship between the kings of England and France, dividing between them most of the provinces we now know as France, dominated Richard's life from his earliest years. It was complicated by the fact that the fathers of both Richard and Philip had, at one time or another, been married to Richard's mother. And as if that wasn't enough, there were the enormous problems faced by Henry when it came to providing for and occupying the time of his four surviving sons, Henry, Richard, Geoffrey and John.

  What could occupy the young aristocratic men of Europe was one of the critical questions of the age. It worried the great thinkers like St Bernard of Clairvaux, gaunt and domineering — a leading figure in the Cistercian monastic order — and it clearly worried Richard's father. Henry tried alternating and equally disastrous strategies, but since he and Eleanor seemed to have bred the archetypal dysfunctional family — the so-called 'Devil's Brood' — it made it easier for Louis and then Philip Augustus to exploit the divisions between them.

  At first Henry's solution was to provide his elder three surviving sons with land. That meant crowning Henry the 'Young King' as his heir, and watching with frustration as he seemed to fritter his life away with William the Marshal (later regent of England), storming the tournaments of Europe and demanding more res­ponsibility from his father. Geoffrey was given Brittany to rule and Richard his mother's inheritance of Aquitaine. The problem of land for the youngest brother, the red-haired John, was never satisfactorily solved — hence his lifelong nickname, Lackland — and would prove just as disastrous as giving land to the others. Henryalso planned to cement the uneasy relationship with France by marrying Louis' daughter Margaret to Henry the Young King and betrothing her sister Alys to Richard — the arrangement negotiated by Becket in Paris in 1158. Alys, who was then just a child, was sent to live in the English royal household, where she was duly seduced by Richard's father, and grew up to become a nagging source of irritation between the two kingdoms.

  Aquitaine was considered ungovernable, but Richard learned to govern it at an early age, sometimes with the utmost brutality. When, in 1179, the rebellious Geoffrey de Rancon took refuge in fortified Taillebourg — believed to be impregnable — the 21-year-old Richard captured the castle in nine days. Nobody had even dared attack it before.

  The old feudal tradition of owing your lord forty days a year in military service was no good to Richa
rd. He needed a standing army to control a place like Aquitaine and so used the money his vassals paid in lieu of military service to employ a band of mercen­aries. Through them, he learned the art of war. There was little actual fighting — pitched battles were so unpredictable they were avoided if at all possible — but Richard's life outside the court was an almost constant round of laying siege, plundering towns and destroying crops in the villages of his disobedient vassal lords. His life was then day after day of flashing steel and waving pennants, with smoke and flames billowing from some poor innocent farm, while cattle and horses were seized by the mercenaries. Although the system of peasant farming from one side of Europe to the other was stable and secure, it is hard to exaggerate the misery of getting in the way of princes and their warlords. 'When two nobles quarrel, the poor man's thatch goes up in flames,' went a contemporary saying.

  It would have been a familiar experience for Richard: the mer­cenary camps with their whores and looted chalices, the villages left as smoking ruins, the burning crops and the raped women, their children left dead by the road, mouths stuffed with grass in a desperate attempt to find something to eat after the destruction of the crops. Richard's reputation as a hero has constantly to bebalanced against this aggression, as well as his egotism, his delight in his own appearance and his friendship with wholly unredeemable warlords, like his loyal mercenary commander Mercadier. His dark and cruel side emerged with ferocity as Aquitaine rose in rebellion in the 1170s. In his own desperate and divided state of mind — his mother had just been imprisoned by his father — he ravaged the countryside of the rebels, putting out eyes and cutting off hands.

  That was one side of Richard's life in adolescence, but it was only one. Because the Aquitaine court at Poitiers under Eleanor was not just where troubadours congregated, nor simply where chivalry became more than just a romantic dream. It was the centre of a multi-faceted movement that dominated the century and put women and the feminine spirit back at the heart of politics, culture and religion.