The Troubadour's Song

by David Boyle

  In those days, it was the habit of the French monarchy to have the heir to the throne, the Dauphin, safely anointed and crowned well before the king expired. Philip was the spoilt, nervous and devious 'Dieu-Donné' ofthe pious Louis VII, and was fourteen in 1179, when he was crowned. Father and son were on their way together to Reims Cathedral when they stopped in Compiègne, and there Philip and his companions set off into the dark of the forest to hunt. Chasing a wild boar, the Dauphin suddenly found himself separated from the others, and it was some hours later when he stumbled weeping through the door of a charcoal burner's hut and collapsed with fever. The coronation was postponed andphysicians despaired of his life. For three nights running, Louis dreamed of the murdered Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket and, after the third night, he dressed as a pilgrim and crossed the English Channel — to the horror of his advisers — to pray for the life of his son. He was welcomed by Henry II and placed a cup full of gold on Becket's tomb. Back in France four days later, he found his son had recovered completely.

  When Philip's coronation finally went ahead on All Saints' Day, Louis was dangerously ill with paralysis and would die the following year. But one of the songs sung in the cathedral during the ceremony was a setting of a poem by the archbishop's secretary and local poet, Walter of Chatillon, celebrating the occasion with a series of voices in harmony. It was called 'Ver pacis apperit': 'The springtime of peace/Opens the bosom of the earth.' The technical name for a song like this for more than one voice and set in Latin — the common language for educated classes and aristocracy across Europe — is a conductus. But the tune used for one of the voices exists separately and can be found attached to another song, ascribed to Blondel, and appearing in five of the manuscripts that include his work. This is 'Ma joie me semont', courtly, highly moral and very upright.

  It is impossible to know which was written first, the coronation song or the verse about Blondel's 'joie', whether Blondel borrowed the tune from some forgotten court composer because of its success in Reims, or whether Walter of Chatillon knew Blondel's tune already and adapted it for one of the parts of his royal anthem. Either way, it is evidence that Blondel was moving in court circles at the time, and at the age, if the tradition about his birth is correct, of about twenty-four. Blondel may not have actually been at the coronation himself — though Richard and his brothers Henry and Geoffrey were there — but this implies that he was then based in Paris, somewhere between Philip's draughty palace and the scattered university emerging on the Left Bank of the Seine.

  The coronation tune implies that he attracted attention in the highest circles in the French court, so it is likely that he was on the spot and that he learned his music there at the university andperhaps also that he met Richard there in the 1180s. His older contemporary troubadour Giraut de Borneil says in one song that he will give up singing and go back to being a scholar, and Giraut's biography says that he used to spend his summer moving from court to court with two singers to perform his songs, but his winters teaching rhetoric and poetic composition. The older troubadour Cercamon used to be called 'Maestro', which in those days was a reference to a university education. If Blondel was in Paris, he is likely to have had links with the university as well as the court.

  Like other young men of aristocratic family, Blondel must have been able to play the harp and fiddle and to sing before he was grown up. By the age of nine, he would also know how to hunt, bet and wait at table — and to be a mild concern to his parents over what he should do, like so many other sons of minor branches of noble families. Probably he would have been taught to read by a chaplain or local priest, practising his letters on wax tablets or slates before being sent off to be a page at a nearby castle, perhaps at the castle of Nesle's lord — learning how to carve meat, how to kneel to present the wine cup, how to dance and play backgammon and chess, how to hawk and how to tilt. Those skills must have failed to catch his imagination, which is why, by his early twenties, Blondel almost certainly set aside the chance to be a knight — if indeed he was ever offered one — like the great teacher Peter Abelard before him, and made the day's journey from Nesle to the emerging university in Paris.

  Arras, the cloth town with close links to Nesle, may also have been Blondel's home at some time during his youth or adulthood. Early manuscripts about his legend describe him as a 'Gentleman of Arras', and it was a place teeming with minstrels and trouvères: out of a population of 2,000, about 10 per cent claimed to be poets, organizing themselves into literary guilds, composing songs for each other, and attracting young people from all over Europe who wanted to learn. Arras was a truly international town, not fully subsumed under the authority of the French king until the seventeenth century. Its guilds and tapestries were the outward symbols of a place that was shaking itself free of feudalism, wherefree people could trade and be what they wanted to be, which is one reason it attracted poets. It is a leap of imagination to suggest that Blondel spent time there, but it is a reasonable one.

  In both Paris and Arras, he was breathing in the spirit of the age, and in northern Europe there were no better places to do so. You can hear the authentic voice of the late twelfth century in the words of the song he wrote, 'Ma joie me semont', that uses the coronation tune:

  My happiness calls me

  To sing in the sweet season,

  And my heart replies

  That it is right for me to sing —

  And I dare not ignore

  The wishes of my heart.

  God, what times these are

  For those devoted to their talents!

  That is what joy is all about:

  To love sincerely,

  And, when the moment comes,

  To give generously;

  And one more thing as well:

  To speak courteously.

  Those who follow these three ways

  will never make their lives ugly.

  Very briefly and simply, it sets out a way of life that seems to contradict so much of what we assume about brutal medieval life — love sincerely, give generously and speak courteously. It also captures some of the unique spirit of Blondel's generation: the idea of unprecedented times, the central importance of generosity, love and beauty — and the very modern thought that it is the poet's heart, not duty or religion, that he must listen to, and his heart tells him to sing. The song was part of a whole new literature that was a whole new departure from the old Franco-German idea ofa holy empire that dominated heart and mind. No longer were monks, kings or emperors the custodians of our souls. The old literature celebrated great deeds of arms; the new celebrated King Arthur and his knights, and great deeds of love.

  Blondel was clearly steeped in the world of courtly love, now in its second generation, its ideals spread by those like him all over Europe. This sense of the overwhelming power of love and beauty would have given him something in common with Richard when they met and when — by tradition — Richard asked him for song-writing and composition lessons. Troubadours were wanderers. The word comes from the Latin trobare, which means to find or invent, and their wanderings were not just to perform, they were to find material as well, though many of them also worked as teachers or diplomats. From Arras or Paris, Blondel probably wan­dered widely and could have encountered Richard in Poitiers or perhaps at his half-sister's court in Champagne. We know how Richard sought out musicians wherever he went. But equally, it was to Paris that Blondel probably came as a young man and it was to Paris, also, that Richard came in search of support against his father, and the chances are that — if they knew each other — they cemented the friendship there.

  *The limestone quarries of Northern France produced more stone to build the Gothic cathedrals during 300 years in the Middle Ages than was used in all of ancient Egypt to build the pyramids.

  † Emperor Frederick II in the following century shocked his contemporaries by holding debates and failing to fix the result. And although the debates themselves were symptoms of tolerance, it may s
till have been an uncomfortable experience for the Jewish, Muslim and Cathar debaters on the other side.

  * Even Buddhism — or rumours of Buddhism — were filtering through Byzantium and into the West. Buddha himself finally emerged after various incarnations as St Josafat, with a church dedicated to him in Palermo.

  *The Germans had a saying, 'Stadt luft machtfref, town air makes free.

  *The twelfth-century aristocracy loved baths and used soap, invented in the East, made from mutton fat, wood ash and natural soda. It was not too effective.

  * There were still wolves in Western Europe, even in the woods in England, where Richard's brother John — after he became king in 1199 — used to pay a levy of five shillings for every wolf's head.

  * Henry II's minstrel Roland le Pettour was given land as a reward for his performance of'a leap, a whistle and a fart'.

  * William had watched in tears in 1101 as his crusading army was cut to pieces by the Turks, but lingered in Antioch and Jerusalem on his way home, thrilled by Arab culture and Arab translations of Greek and Roman classics.

  *In those days, scales were sung 'ut re mi fa so la', from the opening syllables of each line of the Latin hymn Ut queant laxis/Resonarefibris.

  3. Paris and Jerusalem

  The golden age comes round

  The earth's salvation nigh

  The rich man is thrown down

  The poor man lifted high.

  anthem sung at the

  coronation of Richard I, 1189

  'Now may God grant me that I may ascend to the high honour of holding the one who has my heart, and all my thoughts, naked once in my arms before I go overseas.'

  Chastelain de Coucy

  Students sometimes went to university in those days as young as thirteen, so Blondel would have gone to Paris by the early 1170s, when it was the biggest, richest and most exciting city in Western Europe. It had a population of 200,000 and the wealth of the world seemed to flow up the Seine to the docks and wharves along the banks. Louis VII and later Philip Augustus were also there, directly ruling the small expanse of land that was then the full extent of the kingdom of France, but claiming an uneasy overlordship over the surrounding counts, dukes and lords. After he succeeded, Philip's untidiness and fastidious fear of injury and disease obscured a reforming zeal and strategic determination. This emanated from one end of the He de la Cite from his dark and draughty palace, the open windows of which had been such a factor in the departure of his father's first wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. This was a Paris that had already become the source of both the new Gothic design andthe new learning a generation after Abelard's death — a city of debate, culture and intellectual excitement that had been described by one scholar as 'paradise on earth, the rose of the world, the balm of the universe'.

  We know about Paris in Blondel's day because Alexander Neckham arrived there at the same time in the 1170s. Neckham -the son of Richard's wet nurse — was an exact contemporary of Richard's, and paid on arrival for cramped lodgings a year in advance, crammed with so many other new students into the rue Saint-Christofle. Blondel may well have lodged in the same street. Both must soon have come to know the mercantile centre on the Right Bank of the Seine as well as the students and intellectuals on the Left Bank. The dogs roaming the streets, the beggars, the famous hams hanging in the shops and the bridges covered with houses must have soon become familiar sights. Also the shepherds herding their flocks into the city, the revenue officers sampling the wine, the wandering apothecaries urging people to try their ointments and potions, and the paddle wheels grinding the grain underneath the Grand-Pont, the eighteen-foot-wide stone bridge where moneychangers and goldsmiths — the first bankers — piled their coins. New city walls and stone pavements were ordered by Philip Augustus, who was not yet on the throne when they arrived; before then, these were muddy streets — but still the thoroughfares of a city whose population was exploding, doubling in size every generation.

  On the second Wednesday of every June, the prized possession of Notre-Dame — a piece of the true cross — was shown to the people. New students joined the crowds afterwards as they made off down the road to Saint-Denis, with the vineyards on either side, for the annual Lendit Fair. In their periods of leisure, they inspected the pillories and stocks in the town squares, the floor-shows in the taverns and the famous Paris gibbet, with space for twenty-four — with the oldest skeleton thrown into a pit to make way for the most recent malefactor. They must have brushed away the flies as they watched the butchers killing animals in their shop fronts and the fishmongers throwing the unsold fish into the streetfor the poor, and grown used to the smell of decomposing refuse behind the houses on the open land, and the daily business of avoiding the contents of chamber pots coming down into the gutters running along the middle of the street.*

  Then there were the latest Paris fashions. In those days, this meant brightly coloured robes that fitted tightly around women's waists, with the edges of clothes cut into tongues, shoes with pointed toes, young men with long, curling hair and long, flowing sleeves in reds, violets and saffrons, and birds' plumage that -according to Peter the Chanter at Notre-Dame — would 'make a crow laugh'. Even the occasional beard was woven through with silver thread. Many fashionable women put white powder on their faces and had dyed hair, which was parted in the middle, with two long plaits hanging down their backs and a band across their forehead — still the fashion for nuns eight centuries later — or just a crown of flowers. These luxuries would be beyond the pockets of scholars, who had to dodge the poppy oil, wax and paper sellers in the street, but watched the bakers selling leftover bread outside Notre-Dame on Sundays, or tasted the light pastries that were already such a Parisian speciality, or the pasties with chopped ham, chicken or eel that were carried around through the streets in little baskets covered by a white cloth.

  At the heart of the city — at the other end of the He de la Cite from the palace, with its garden of pumpkins, roses, lilies and mandrakes — was the spectacular rebuilding of Notre-Dame in the new Gothic style, with the highest vault in the world taking shape before their eyes. It must have been an extraordinary sight, surrounded by merchants and stalls, with the new breed of crafts­men and engineers in their masons' lodges, wandering in and out of the site looking for work, while the marble pillars were dragged laboriously all the way by sea from Rome and up the Seine. Each soaring archway relied on the mathematical insights of Arab books, written in the East and translated into Latin in Spain. In an era when most churches were made out of wood and straw, Saint-Denis and Notre-Dame — filled with coloured light from the glass, and the green, ochre, blue and violet paint on the walls, hung with tapes­tries where there weren't paintings — were further signs of the emerging new age. Together with the new architecture, it was a new theological style that went hand in hand with Abelard's humane morality. Gone were the autocratic statues of Christ on a throne, lord over the world. In their place were the new Gothic carvings of Jesus suffering like a vulnerable man on the cross. It was a revelation of a human and tolerant God.

  Blondel and Neckham will have understood these symbols in a way that we no longer can. They were hard at work, starting the day at five or six in the morning with the watchman's horn blowing from the Grand Chastelet tower the moment the upper rim of the sun appeared above the horizon. They would only have shaved once a week — as was the custom — and would have poured out on to the streets with fellow students on their way to lectures, via morning mass. Then they crossed the Petit-Pont to the Left Bank, with the houses of intellectuals giving way quickly to the vineyards and wheatfields that surrounded the abbey schools, still frequented by the occasional wolf in winter. There they sat on straw on the floor or benches, with their wax tablets at the ready, while the beadle patrolled outside to keep the streets quiet.

  At 10 a.m., they adjourned for dinner, and there were another six or seven hours of lectures before they hurried to the banks of the Seine — or home to make notes on parchment wh
ile it was still light. We can imagine them working in their tiny rooms, with ink horn, goose quill and penknife to sharpen it next to them, and maybe a stick of lead to rule margins on the page, and a goat's tooth for polishing parchment — and a candle guttering in the draught as they fell asleep at the desk. Along with the other students, they retired to sleep between eight and nine at night, perhaps bringing home some hot food from the cookshop by the river, off the rue de la Huchette, and fell asleep or lay awakeworrying about how to afford to rent more books from the stationers, listening to the night watchmen calling out the hours, timed by the rising stars.*

  There was no choice about what subjects to take. Students in Paris had to study the trivium (grammar, rhetoric and logic), but Blondel would perhaps have found more interest in the subsequent quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music). Music teaching had a particularly important place at the University of Paris, which was the centre of debate between those who wanted to develop the pious plainsong tradition — where no notes or solo vocalists pierced the constant holy rhythm — and those who wanted something more elaborate and exciting, and therefore shocking. Like other students, Blondel would also have had to find ways of managing his teachers — they sat on 'thrones' in gowns, rings and long gloves, the proudest of them demanding the status of knights and insisting their positions were hereditary — while constantly exhausted from the strain of speaking Latin all day long. Anyone caught speaking one of the hundreds of local languages and dialects was beaten.