The Troubadour's Song

by David Boyle

  The evidence is very obscure. Victorian historians coyly com­pared him to his homosexual great-great-uncle William Rufus, but drew a veil over why. But there is some indication that his two nervous breakdowns had something to do with his sense of sinfulness. In 1195 o n e of these was brought on by a hermit who warned him to 'be thou mindful of the destruction of Sodom and abstain from what is unlawful; for if thou dost not, God's vengeance shall overtake thee'. Some historians say that the reference to Sodom could have meant anything at the end of the twelfth century, but that is not necessarily so. The curmudgeonly preacher Peter the Chanter at Notre-Dame had already identified the 'sin of Sodom' with homosexuality a generation before and this interpretation was being adopted by preachers across Western Europe. The words 'sodomite' and 'bulgarus' (bugger) came into the language in the twelfth century; so did some books of dubious Arabic poetry about boys, translated by Arabic scholars in Spain. There was no concept of 'homosexuality' as an inclination in the twelfth century, but it was known that people sometimes had sex with their own gender. Yet Sodom contributed to the Zeitgeist in Richard's lifetime, and although youthful sexual experimentation seems to have been part of the culture Richard may have taken that experimentation very much further.

  Richard's nickname, thanks to the troubadour Bertran de Born, was Oc e Non — 'Yes and No' in the Occitan langue d'oc - and its meaning is obscure. It may be just that he blew hot and cold, or kept changing his mind. It is tempting to think there is some reference to one of the key books of the century, Peter Abelard's Sic et Non, by the man who famously loved according to his own conscience rather than the rules — though actually 'yes and no' is more likely to be an ironic reference to Richard's habit of swearing, because that is what the phrase refers to in the New Testament. Who knows, maybe it just meant he swung both ways. The truth is that Richard went through periods of predatory sexuality, that this may well have included his own sex and that he felt perpetually guilty about it.*

  Richard's time with his mother in Poitiers, learning from her the skills that a ruler would need, was a golden period for him. But it was over all too soon. Two years after his investiture as Duke of Aquitaine, the sixteen-year-old prince was playing a major role in an extraordinary rebellion by his mother and brothers against his father's attempt to settle the succession. Henry finally marched into Poitiers on Whit Sunday 1174, dismissed Eleanor's servants and dismantled the court (perhaps this was the real meaning of the ruling of the Courts of Love that same year that love could not exist between husband and wife).

  Richard carried on the battle alone for four months before coming face to face with his father in Tours on 29 September, weeping and falling at his feet to beg forgiveness. Henry raised him gently and gave him the kiss of peace, but had no suchforgiveness for his estranged wife. Eleanor was taken to England and locked inside the draughty castle at Old Sarum in Wiltshire for the next fifteen years and the Courts of Love — and the whole dream of chivalry and music she had created there — were scattered.

  Within the decade, all Henry's plans for his inheritance, and his careful divisions of land between his elder sons, were also in ruins. Richard's younger brother Geoffrey was killed in an accident at a tournament, leaving behind a baby son called Arthur. Philip Augustus, his friend as well as his half-brother, was so distraught that he had to be physically prevented from leaping into the grave. Then in June 1183 Henry the Young King died of dysentery.* The inheritance question should have been simple, but Henry was haunted by the mistake he had made with his eldest son — crowning him as heir in the Angevin tradition and then giving him no responsibility — so he decided not to repeat his mistake with Richard. This time, he clearly told himself, he would hold back the reward of naming his successor. As a result, thanks to the clever whisperings of Philip Augustus, Richard came to believe his father was plotting to replace him with his youngest brother, John.

  Every suggestion his father made seemed suspicious. Should John marry Alys instead of him? Should John take over Aquitaine? Richard urgently needed to strengthen his position and, in this mood in 1187, he travelled to Paris to enlist the French king's support. It was there in Paris, then the biggest and most magnificent city in Western Europe, that he may have encountered Blondel for the first time.

  *'I thought to have married a king,' Eleanor is supposed to have said about her first husband, 'but found I am wed to a monk.'

  *The mace was also the weapon favoured by bishops, because it allowed you to slaughter an enemy in battle without necessarily shedding his blood.

  * Similar rules included one that prevented millers from letting water rise so high behind a dam that a bee standing on top could not drink without wetting its wings.

  *This part of Paris is still known as the 'Latin Quarter', because that was the language used by the university.

  * There is a story that an innkeeper's wife attempted to seduce Bernard by slipping into his bed at dead of night. The future saint escaped by shouting, 'Thief!'

  * As many as 110 turned up.

  * Woodstock in those days included a royal zoo with lions. Later, when he was king, Richard would keep a crocodile there.

  * Ermengarde ruled her ancient city in her own right, even leading her own siege — of the city of Baux in 1162.

  *The main talking point was actually the biggest chicken coop in the world, built to accommodate some of the menu for the gigantic banquets.

  *The bishop managed fourteen of them in just twenty-two months: an amazing feat even for someone who had not taken a vow of celibacy.

  * The Church seemed much less worried in those days about sins of the flesh. One set of rules stipulated five years of penance for a married man who committed adultery, or ten years for a priest and twelve for a bishop. If you were an unmarried man, that was reduced to two years, or one if it was with a servant girl.

  *His wife, Margaret of France, was also having an affair with his old tournament partner William the Marshal.

  2. The Age of Light

  'From just before its opening till a generation after its close, from the first conquests of the Normans to the reign of St Louis . . . from the first troubled raising of the round arch in tiers to the full revelation of Notre Dame — in that 120 years or more moved a process such as even our own time has not seen. It was an upheaval like that by which, in the beginnings of terrestrial life, the huge and dull sea-monsters first took to the keen air of the land. Everything was in the turmoil which the few historians who have seen the vision of this thing have called, some an anarchy, and others a brief interlude of liberty in the politics of Europe. It was neither one nor the other: it was the travail of a birth.'

  Hilaire Belloc on the twelfth century, The Old Road, 1904

  My lady is like water and fire;

  And she can inflame me or extinguish me.

  Blondel de Nesle,

  J'aim par coustume', Chanson X

  As we have seen, something revolutionary was happening in the middle years of the twelfth century in Western Europe, as Richard was growing up, and its spirit suffused his life. After a long conva­lescence following the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe was finally beginning to stir and awaken.

  The central motif of this new age was the sudden emergence of the first Gothic churches. The new style had been introduced by Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis, outside Paris, the resting place of the French kings, and was now being copied all over northern France, at Chartres, Notre-Dame, Rouen, Amiens and Beauvais. In each cathedral the light poured in through the new stained glass, made by grinding up ancient mosaics for exactly the right colours, and in each one there was as much stone below ground level in the foundations as there was soaring above ground.*

  The middle years of the twelfth century were an age of light in other ways too. It was a period where Europe suddenly opened itself up to ancient learning, with knowledge of mathematics and astronomy brought home from the East by returning crusaders, or bubbling up from the translators of Arab Spain, meeting t
ogether in the new universities, where suddenly everything could be dis­cussed. This was an age tolerant enough for set-piece debates between Christians, Jews and Muslims, even Cathar heretics, though the results tended to be manipulated.† The Pope even had a Jewish adviser, and monasteries across Europe often employed Jewish financiers to manage their money.

  Scholars were translating Aristotle and other classics in Toledo — the Spanish city where Jews, Arabs, Christians, Slavs, English and Germans all mixed freely in the search for secret knowledge — making them available in Western Europe for the first time, trans­lated into Latin from Arabic. The Jewish zoologist Jacob ben Mahir ibn Tibbon was in Provence, translating lost scientific works from Arabic into Hebrew. Greek heretics were translating the Bible into Coptic, Armenian and even Chinese. The great Jewish mathema­tician Maimonides was calculating that every star was at least ninety times as big as the earth. It was a unique moment in history, wheneverything seemed to be coming together to break free of the old world of ignorance.*

  This scholarship and the extraordinary awakening of the urge to travel were given added impetus by a series of discoveries of silver deposits in central Europe. These started around 1168, the first for well over a century, near the Saxony village of Christi-ansdorf, when Richard was eleven. Soon amateur miners were flooding there, and to the other new silver mines, from all over Europe. Fifteen years later, the silver was being transformed by the new mints into coins, and Christiansdorf had grown into a chartered town called Freiberg (Free Mountain). By Richard's twenties, these new, plentiful silver coins were appearing in north­ern France. By his thirties and forties, they had become a flood; there were even nine mints in the Middle East using the new silver to strike coins. Wherever European merchants traded — silk from China, precious stones from India, furs from Russia and wool from England — the silver coins were making their way. Nearer Blondel's home, Philip Augustus was producing parisis — silver pennies minted in Paris — and these were beginning to spread across north­ern Europe. They were being used by Henry the Liberal, the enterprising Count of Champagne, who was independent of the French monarchy, to invest in new mills, ovens and wine presses. His neighbours in Flanders were investing in the land-drainage schemes that would soon result in the new port towns of Calais, Dunkirk, Gravelines and Damme.

  The coins made it possible for the first time for noble families to move from their dark and draughty castles into new homes in Paris, receiving rents in cash rather than in cattle or hens or crops. It was possible for them to pay mercenaries for their armies rather than relying on feudal obligations, and for the young clerks at the universities to pay their professors. The serfs could buy their wayout of their feudal duties with the same coins, earned by selling their surplus produce. The poor might welcome the ability to buy their way out of feudalism, but there were many others who mourned the passing of the feudal generosity and hospitality: sud­denly travellers were expected to pay for their lodging, unless they happened to find a monastery — and even then, the monks often refused to take in hounds as well as horses. The coins made it possible for people to flock to the towns and get rich, but those who depended on generosity for their livelihood — like wandering scholars, troubadours and monks — mourned the side-effects of these changes. This was a period when the newly powerful cities began to flex their muscles and their hard-won freedoms, finding allies in kings and princes sometimes to protect them from their conservative feudal lords, and fighting sometimes for the right to set up the first rudiments of local self-government.*

  It was a period of unprecedented prosperity across the 50 million population of Western Europe, driven, according to some econ­omists, as much by the new silver coins as the more ubiquitous smaller denominations, produced in duller metals in local mints in great numbers and recalled and reminted every five to six years -after which you would tend to get three coins back for the four handed in. Where it took place, this renovatio monetae 'tax' system kept money in circulation or in productive investments — there was no point in hoarding it for too long if you were liable to lose it in a few years' time — and helped drive the dramatic prosperity of the so-called Twelfth-century Renaissance: 20,000 water-mills in France alone, thousands of sheep farmers in England or vineyards in France — the vast majority of them small, independent farmers, and even those still employed in feudal agriculture enjoying a life of unprecedented security with many more free days, when work for the lord was not required, than any employee has today. These small coin tokens, known sometimes as méreaux, meant that — even when the silver used for continental trade was scarce — there was still abundant local money in circulation, accepted locallyaccording to local laws, and spreading the prosperity of the age downwards through society. The méreaux would be used for local trade, and the silver coins for savings.

  This dual-currency system, and the explosion of trade, may not have provided the spark that set the Twelfth-century Renaissance alight, but it certainly kept it running, providing the wealth for the great cathedrals and bridges that sprang up across Europe. It also provided the population with an excellent diet and almost unprecedented health. No wonder the skeletons of men and women excavated from twelfth-century London show that they were on average as tall as — and, in the case of women, slightly taller than — they are today. Of course there were famine, disease and poverty, but that was usually the direct result of the activities of warring aristocrats, with their habit of burning the crops and the villages that nominally belonged to their rivals. Generally speaking, the fledgling economic system seemed to work.

  This was the world where Blondel and Richard grew up. Theirs was a generation that was tolerant and cosmopolitan by medieval standards, and thrilled by rather than fearful about the future. They belonged to a society that had finally burst out of dark medieval gloom and embraced a new architecture of light and ambition. Both must have been only too aware of the great changes around them, the luxuries pouring in from Byzantium, Damascus and Jerusalem, and the new coinage that was turning society upside down.

  Blondel de Nesle, the ttrouvère and Richard's legendary rescuer, is a shadowy figure, but he belongs to this same age of light. His songs are his generation's deepest expressions of fin' amor, and although the music is difficult to interpret, his twenty-seven or more songs on the shelves of the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Bodleian and other great libraries are evidence of the world in which he and Richard grew up — romantic, tolerant and, above all, musical. One of the collections of songs in Paris is a document known as 'The Manuscript of the King', written in the 1240s, and it once included a portrait of Blondel, though this was torn out atsome time in the past seven centuries or so. These songs and the legend — which is dismissed as serious history — would at first sight seem to be all we know about Blondel. But there are other clues to be found if you look more closely at the songs. In fact, two pieces of evidence then become very clear.

  One of these concerns his rhymes. Consistently throughout the versions of his songs, there are linguistic peculiarities. Words that should end with 'ein are rhymed to end in 'ain as in 'painne or 'semaine, and words that ought to end with an 'cur' sound are rhymed to end in 'our, as in 'valour and 'honour. These and other oddities pinpoint the author as originating from Picardy, the flat region of forests and wild boar to the north-east of Paris. The other points to a birth date, like Richard, some time in the 1150s. We know this because he dedicated two of his songs to the well-known ttrouvère Conon de Bethune, who left for the Fourth Crusade in 1204 and never came home, and he sent another one to the equally famous Gace Brulé, who was also one of the oldest generation of trouvères and was later exiled to Brittany. The evi­dence is that Blondel was a contemporary and probably a social equal of theirs.

  Picardy was a region of brutal pursuits and superstitious habits, where cock-fighting survived into the twentieth century and priests were still exorcizing plagues of grasshoppers in the 1830s. The dialect that he spoke was described later by Jules Ve
rne — who lived in Picardy and loved everything about the place — as 'clumsy, uncouth and doomed to disappear'. Like so many other agricultural regions, you could have sat in the town square and heard the usual bizarre tales of coincidence, quickness and cleverness (by locals) and astonishing stupidity (by strangers). But this was not a region divorced from the rest of the world. To the north and west lay England and Normandy, both part of the Angevin empire ruled by the Plantagenet kings. To the south was Paris, past the new Gothic abbey of Saint-Denis, the richest city in Christendom. To the east, past the five towers of Coucy-le-Chateau, lay the great trade routes and the independent principality of Champagne, the commercial centre of Europe. Merchants from all over the knownworld made their way to the annual Champagne fairs in Provins, Troyes, Lagny-sur-Marne and Bar-sur-Aube, their safety to and from the fairs, their justice, honesty and security', all guaranteed by Champagne's Count Henry.

  As a native of Picardy, Blondel must have been aware of the polyglot bustle towards these centres. As he grew to adulthood and wandered down to Champagne, or stood on the banks of the Seine, he must also have seen the sugar heading for Paris from Spain, Syria and North Africa. Or watched the ivory from Africa, the pepper and spices from India, the furs from Russia, the pearls from Persia, the silk from China and the wealth of the world that was being unleashed in his generation, all unloaded at the Paris quays. He would have seen the wagons of grain — Champagne was known for its grain in those days, not its sparkling wine — trundling along the great road between Paris and Rome. Perhaps he visited the fairs himself, watching the foreigners and bankers crowding into the local inns, and marvelled at the sophisticated deals they could make there — cashing money orders at the fair taken out in England; spices bought and sold while they were still in harbour in Italy.