The Troubadour's Song Read online

  As he grew up, he met returning crusaders with tales of the fabulous Arab cities of the East, the public baths, the municipal water supplies and central heating. Like others of his generation, he came across the wealthy mayors of local townships, with their long scarlet robes, and heard the whispers that — back home in their own village — they had actually been serfs who had escaped for a year and a day or simply bought their way out. He would have witnessed for himself the misery of the regular famines, the horror stories of Hansel and Gretel-style cannibalism, where peasants could waylay a passer-by — like the hapless Bishop of Trier at that time — and eat his horse before his very eyes. He must also have known from his own experience the rural, married priests whose job was both saving local souls and looking after the parishbull and parish boar. They were part of the old world, like the wolves in the forest, the drunken monks on the road — the butt of jokes from Europe's growing intelligentsia.*

  With so little surviving documentation, it is impossible to piece much together about Blondel's life. One of the peculiarities in the surviving manuscripts that include his songs is that, unlike his contemporaries, Blondel never gets the title 'Messire' or 'Mon-seigneur'. All the other trouvères were minor nobility, so it is still likely that Blondel was that as well. It is even more difficult to pinpoint the man himself because it is not clear whether 'Blondel' was a surname or actually a nickname or pen-name — though this was an era in which these tended to merge. If it was a nickname, it might be that a title sounded inappropriate when it was written down. More likely, he was the younger son of a junior branch of a noble family.

  The fact that he is remembered at all is thanks partly to the efforts of an antiquarian from Champagne called Prosper Tarbe — a great romantic himself- in the 1850s and 1860s. He rediscovered Blondel's songs when he was asked to collect some regional poetry, claiming that Blondel was one of those musicians who knew how to take people 'from the miseries of the world and elevate the soul to the highest skies, and slowly put them to sleep in the middle of dreams of happiness'. Tarbe spent years researching everything that remained about Blondel in an ultimately vain attempt to prove the truth of the legend of his song under the castle walls. But it was Tarbe who finally confirmed beyond argument that the Blondel of the legend and Blondel de Nesle were one and the same person, and who demolished the prevailing view that Richard the Lionheart's companion was actually English. There had been an idea that he was the William Blondel listed in the annals of the Tower of London as having been granted land in Northampton­shire after Richard's return from captivity.

  Tarbe first published his collection of Blondel's songs in 1862, arguing that Blondel was the nickname of blond-haired Jean de Nesle, and that he was actually from Artois — which is where the oldest-existing description of the Blondel legend says he was from — from a small and now forgotten village called Noyelle, either outside Abbeville or the one near Boulogne. A generation later, in 1904, the German scholar Leo Wiese concentrated on the evidence of the dialect that Blondel was from Picardy to point instead towards the modern town of Nesle as his birthplace.

  Having established that, historians have tried to pinpoint his identity more precisely. In 1942, the Finnish historian Holger Petersen Dyggve used a poem by the unfortunately named ttrouvère Audefroy le Bastart, who mentions another poet he describes as 'mon seigneur . . . qui de Neele est sire. He said this proved that Blondel was a nickname for the man who became Jehan II, Lord of Nesle and Chastelain of Bruges between 1202 and 1230, and who was well known as being stunningly attractive. But Jehan II was almost certainly too young to have written Blondel's songs, and in later life he became a fearsome crusader against heretics and troubadour culture in the south of France. It could have been the same man who wrote the gentle songs — other troubadours turned against the culture of Languedoc — but it seems unlikely. Even so, Dyggve's interpretation was widely accepted — you will find it in some of the modern music encyclopedias — and it was not until 1994 that the French philologist Yves Lepage attacked the theory, suggesting instead that Blondel was actually Jehan II's father, Jehan I, Lord of Nesle from 1180 to 1202. Jehan I was in Palestine with Richard on the Third Crusade, as legend suggests that Blondel was.

  This is not impossible, but it is still unlikely. If Blondel, one of the most famous musicians of his generation, had been Lord of Nesle, you would expect the family genealogists to have recorded it, then or later. This silence and the lack of any kind of title in the manuscripts imply that, while he may have been from the same noble family — perhaps illegitimate — he was probably not himself either Jehan I or Jehan II. We will never know, because — veryconveniently for Blondel scholars, who might prefer not to expose their theories to the cold light of fact — Nesle twice lost its town archives, once when it was sacked by the Duke of Burgundy in 1472 and once when the town hall burned down in 1799. The most likely explanation is that, in those days of shifting surnames, the poet Jean de Nesle — a junior member of the noble house of Nesle, and nicknamed Blondel because of his hair — founded a dynasty that survives in the family name of Blondel in France and Blundell in England and America today. As for his birthplace, there are towns and villages called Nesle or Noyelle all over France, but the Nesle of Jehan I and II — on the road north from Paris to the Somme — is the only one with a tradition that Blondel was a local hero. There is even a local story that assigns him a birth date in 1155, though few of these local traditions tend to predate the nineteenth century. Even so, it is safe to assume that we know, at least, where he came from — and that means that it is possible to imagine a little about his childhood.

  Nesle was almost completely flattened during the First World War, so the only remaining features from the twelfth century are a short stretch of moat and a short stretch of city wall — and the very modern rue de Blondel de Nesle. But the river, which is now little more than a ditch, was in Blondel's day 150 metres wide and navigable, and it is here — or from the watch tower on the bend of the river — that the young Blondel must have seen the barges of goods on their way south towards Paris, or the carts trundling south down the chemin des Boeufs, through the walls and into the town, passing the castle of Yves III, Lord of Nesle — Jehan's predecessor — on their right, and setting up in the town square on market days. It was here, perched on the road between Paris and the Channel ports — with the merchants of the world passing his door — that Blondel would have grown up, before setting out on the road himself.

  For Blondel and Richard especially, this was also an age of music. Their generation loved to sing. There was little else to do in the long winter evenings when the candles and torches that lit dinnerhad been extinguished and the hearth fire was the only light, but even in the summer in the towns you could see regular festival dances and singing in the open spaces and graveyards inside the new walls. Knights like William the Marshal would sing carols as they waited for tournaments to begin. Kings employed boys to sing them to sleep. When Thomas Becket visited Paris so spec­tacularly in 1158, he was preceded by 250 choristers singing English songs. Some of those hopeful travellers, setting out on the ancient potholed roads, were also minstrels or members of the still-mysterious camaraderie of the troubadours.

  These were not the simple minstrels and jongleurs who were relatively common on the road, and who might look to the trouba­dours to provide them with material. The evidence is that these would use the songs that troubadours wrote, along with other accomplishments: a true minstrel, according to one thirteenth-century manuscript, could 'speak and rhyme well, know the story of Troy, balance apples on the point of knives, juggle, jump through hoops, play the citole, mandora, harp, fiddle and psaltery'. Many could also imitate birds and use performing dogs and puppets.*

  The troubadours (from the south, the Languedoc, writing in Occitan) and trouvères (from the north, writing in Old French), or their German equivalent the minnesingers, were more than popu­lar performers and remain something of an enigma. It is not clear whethe
r they sang unaccompanied, played instruments or simply recited their poems, or whether they all had their own technique. We know the names of 460 troubadours, and that most of the early ones came from lands ruled by the Angevins, which anyway covered most of the area speaking Occitan. We know they wrote not just about love, but also about war and politics, and more than 2,600 of their songs survive, with rhyming lines for a new kind of music that had a regular number of syllables and music that matched the ends of the lines. But we barely understand what they soundedlike, because their square boxes for musical notation carry no information about the rhythm, speed or metre.

  The first troubadour was almost certainly William IX of Aqui­taine, Richard's great-grandfather — a priapic old aristocrat who used to disguise himself as a deaf mute to seduce the wives of absent nobles in local inns. William seems to have been inspired by the romantic works of the Roman poet Ovid, but he himself managed to remain rather unromantic, and certainly avoided the high seriousness of Blondel and his colleagues two generations later. Most of his encounters with a woman ended — as he put it — with 'my hands beneath her cloak'.*

  The names and characters of the early troubadours are more famous than those of the northern trouvères: Bernart de Ventadorn, who fell hopelessly in love with Eleanor herself and had to be exiled to England; Raimon de Miraval, who threw his wife out of the castle when she took his love poems too literally and encour­aged her own suitors; Bertran de Born, who wrote songs praising war and execrating the Plantagenet family; Giraut de Borneil, said to be the greatest of them all, but whose 'wailing, thin, miserable songs' also irritated his fellow troubadours. Or Eleanor's own son, Richard himself, a troubadour, musician and poet in his own right.

  They and their northern colleagues were generally high-born wanderers, entertaining their audiences with wit and sparkle, feed­ing networks of minstrels who were prepared to use their material and make them famous. Songs were messages — letters almost — that spread rapidly via their favourite performers: 'Little Hugh, my courtly messenger,' wrote Bernart de Ventadorn, in the middle of his unrequited love for Eleanor, 'sing my song eagerly to the Queen of the Normans.' But the troubadours were primarily entertainers in their own right. When the company in the castles and manors gathered round the great fire after dinner, when the table had been swept clear and put up against the wall — with thevalets running around with jugs of hot water to wash the food from people's fingers — they would begin to tell stories. Then, if they liked the audience and the woodsmoke was light enough, they would offer more. Then they would loosen their clothing, take off their belt, smooth down their hair — maybe put on a woollen cap — reach for their fiddle with its seven horsehair strings, lay it in their lap and sing.

  We have one description by the troubadour Raimon Vidal of the journey he made south to Catalonia. 'And the night, as I saw,' he wrote, 'was very dark after dinner and next to the bright fire the company was large, knights and jongleurs, clever and accomplished and amiable, courtly and agreeable to courteous men . . . and the knights, without any reminder, went to bed when they were ready, for my lord wanted to remain with a companion near the fire.'

  The lord he stayed awake talking to was a troubadour himself, Dalfi d'Alvernhe, Count of Clermont and Montferrand. Vidal was describing a journey to meet lords who are about to be ruined by the Albigensian Crusade against local heretics. It was an age that was about to disappear, and he knew it. But his hosts were still generous enough to justify the visit, which was how troubadours paid their way. 'God did not make this age so consistently bad that an ambitious, clever and frank man cannot get gifts out of it in order to rise and make himself noticed,' said Vidal, 'if he knows how to be clever, and has the right manner.'

  They were generous with gifts because that was the chivalric spirit and because troubadours were the journalists of the age. Their songs spread tittle-tattle. They could praise or they could ridicule, just as Bertran de Born ridiculed Richard. Greasing the palm of a passing troubadour was a sensible insurance policy for keeping your faults well hidden — another reason why churchmen were enraged by the whole idea. Minstrels were denied the hope of salvation by the Church in the twelfth century, but even church­men knew that the times were changing, and began to make exceptions — as long as the songs avoided what they called 'wantonness'. 'The singing of love songs in the presence of men of eminence was once considered in bad taste,' wrote John of Salisbury, the tolerant and enlightened scholar, around the time Blondel was born. 'But now it is considered praiseworthy for men of greater eminence to sing and play them.'

  The trouvères of the north were more serious than the trouba­dours of the south. They were more high-minded than the lustful William IX or warlike Bertran de Born. They sang in a mixture of the related languages and dialects of Champagne, Picardy and Normandy, unlike the troubadours, who used Occitan, and -unlike the existing troubadour songs — the vast majority of ttrouvère songs that survive have music attached, though sometimes different melodies for the same song.

  trouvères were more unambiguously aristocratic, like Blondel's friend Conon de Bethune, later given the task of negotiating with Constantinople on behalf of the Fourth Crusade in 1203 on the grounds that he was the wisest and most eloquent. Like them, Blondel would have discovered his love of poetry and music at an early age, in those long winter nights. The basics of notation — the black squares and diamonds on little sticks that passed for music at the time — he would have learned by an early exposure to scales.* Blondel may even, like Conon, have made his way to the Diet of Mainz in 1184, to the great meetings of minnesingers and trouvères at the festival there that year.

  What we do know is that Blondel and the others were in constant touch in Paris or the great trading town of Troyes in Champagne, at the court of Richard's sister Marie de Champagne — patron of the pre-eminent ttrouvère Chretien de Troyes — or the wool town of Arras in Artois, and that they developed a distinctive voice for themselves in keeping with the spirit of the age. It was deeply romantic, abjectly deferential to women and popular enough to be recited and remembered over a century later in the manuscripts now in Paris and the Vatican. If we read Old French, we can still now hear Gace Brulé complaining about the dawn driving him away from his lover's bed, or the mild masochism of the Chastelain de Coucy in lines like joy rules in my heart while I can stay/In her service, never to be free'. We can also see how Blondel had a style very much his own, with slow rhythms and short lines, and demonstrating the most cringing helplessness before his beloved. This is classic Blondel:

  Remembering her face,

  So smooth and rosy-cheeked

  Has brought my heart to this:

  I cannot let it go.

  But since I asked for pain

  I must endure it now.

  And yet I missed the point:

  I should love it even more.

  Even his faster-paced songs have a deep romantic melancholy at the heart of them:

  Someone should sing the joy offin' amor—

  But me, I find it difficult to sing,

  Because I lack the joy leaping inside

  Which lets you sing, and so I cannot sing . . .

  Or:

  In the season of the wind,

  Thanks to the one who has me,

  But I still do not have,

  My heart grows black and grey.

  With a sincere, truthful love,

  I begged her with my heart,

  Though not inflamed like me,

  To grant me this request. . .

  It is difficult so many centuries later to completely understand what is meant by this joyful kind of misery, except that the respect these songs are given twenty or more years after Blondel's death implies that his contemporaries loved it. They might not have treated women with quite such respect in practice. They might have flown into a rage if their wives or daughters had taken the lyrics too seriously, as Raimon de Miraval did. But something about the idea of an all-powerful lady — the domna
in Occitan — seems to have thrilled Blondel's generation. In their imaginations, they rushed to abase themselves, loving 'pain the more'. It was an idea they had borrowed from their parents' generation but pushed to an extreme that was all their own, and it is hard now to read it as they must have done. But theirs was the first generation to take the new intellectual freedom and the wandering for granted. Like fin' amor and the Courts of Love, Blondel's songs belong in that same intersection between two worlds — the new world of global money, trading and freedom, and the old world of monasteries and feudal supplication — where briefly, and among a narrow elite, there was an unmistakable explosion of music, romance and chivalric love.

  There is one other piece of evidence that dates Blondel and may also place him geographically in the earlier years of his career. This might also provide a clue about where he first met Richard, if we believe the underlying assumption of the legend that they were close friends. This is the coronation of Philip Augustus as the king of France in the traditional coronation place, Reims Cathedral.