The Troubadours

The new cult began in Languedoc and spread to Italy and Spain; it was carried by the trouveres through Northern France and to the shores of Britain; it was borne by the minnesingers to Germany. Since the Church discouraged any attempt to beautify desire with poetry, this new emotion had to be circumspectly expressed; so the more God-fearing troubadours sang of the (theoretically) unattainable, of a suppliant's love baulked by insuperable obstacles. In its purer forms, the cult was almost a religion of love. But, the world being what it was, the fashion became corrupted and soon the troubadours were singing of a more accessible love-a love compounded equally of adoration and adulterous ardour. The adulterous element was inevitable, for according to the philosophy of the day no man could feel a suppliant's passion for his wife, whom he had probably acquired by a financial arrangement, and whose plain duty was to accede to his demands. Therefore the object of his grand passion, hopeless or otherwise, had to be a third party.

Gradually, in the songs of the troubadours, grew the convention of woman as the inspiration and despair of her pining paramour, the fount of courtesy and the capricious tyrant. Her husband was expected to feel pride in having verses addressed to his wife, and even to shut his eyes if he suspected that adoration went beyond the bounds of poetry. It was, of course, always open to the husband to conceive a romantic and exalting love for somebody else's wife.
The troubadours set their own verse fashions. One of these was the aubade, or dawn song, which told of the paramour's distress at having to rise from a warm bed at the first light of day, in response to the warning cry of the watchman. It is an inconvenience which has vexed adulterers through the ages, though only in the twelfth century did it occur to anybody to make a song about it. Another song form was the tenson, in which one troubadour debated with another such unrewarding questions as: 'Which is worse, the anguish or the ecstasy of love?'

In theory, there were four stages of love: worship from afar, supplication, declaration and acceptance. The last state, if reached, was held to entitle the suitor to any physical rewards the lady might care to offer, though there were suitors who were content to live in a state of permanent frustration. The grand passion was supposed to be a secret between the two parties, but perhaps rarely was; for as Crebillon fils says, it is easier to pretend what one does not feel than to conceal what one does.

Anyone (even a woman) could be a troubadour, given the talent and the urge. Duke William IX of Aquitaine, that lecherous Crusader, was supposedly the first, and his example was followed by a number of impoverished or landless knights. Their motives appear to have been mixed. Some of the humbler singers sang, literally, for their supper; it has been suggested that they would have been terrified if called on to implement their gallant proposals. Others boasted, perhaps truly, perhaps falsely, of their successes in bower and bedchamber. Even the penniless knights recognized that the more accomplished and the more insinuating their songs, the more liberal would be the hospitality of the castle, the longer the welcome. Among them were licentious adventurers whose passion, given the least encouragement, is unlikely to have remained long on a literary level.

For women, it should have been a proud day. The chatelaine, who was used to being knocked about by her lord, now revelled in adoration. At last man was where woman had always wanted him: on his knees. But was he? The gulf between poetry and reality was vast. It is probable that the ideal of courtly love hovered as far above everyday conduct as the Sermon on the Mount hovered above Nero's Rome. Still, it was always something to have an ideal. The notion was spreading that some pattern of courtship was useful to disguise and ornament the fundamental crudities of passion; and the knights of chivalry could not bear to think that there was nothing to distinguish their love-making from that of serfs. At the one extreme, the cult of courtly love enabled a raffish knight and a lustful lady to clothe a purely sexual affaire with high-flown sentiments, to prolong it with artificial obstacles, with cajoleries and coquetries, and generally make amusing what would otherwise be a barnyard interlude. Fashionable society has played the same game ever since. At the other extreme, courtly love was suffered to develop into a hopeless, melancholy frenzy which could never be assuaged, except in death. The whole essence of this passion was that it should be a frustrated one, progressively inflamed by insuperable barriers-the rabies insana of which the ancients wrote. In a sense, this was the state of being 'in love with love'. The twentieth-century variant of this idea is that everyone has a right to live in a state of happy romantic love.

If the feudal knights fell short of the ideal of courtly love, so did the troubadours themselves. There were clowns and exhibitionists among them, like Peire de Vidal, the farrier's son, who had himself attired in a wolf skin and was hunted by dogs in sight of his mistress, the 'she-wolf' of Carcassonne. The lady laughed at his wounds; it was her husband who sent for the doctors. Vidal was lucky in his husbands. He had been found in bed with the wife of Barral de Baux, but the husband merely rated his wife for encouraging the presumptuous fellow.

It was a less indulgent husband who ended the activities of the troubadour Guillem de Cabestanh. Finding that his wife was the inspiration, and more, of this importunate singer, Sir Raimon de Rossilho put him to death. A few hours afterwards (the story goes) the knight sat down to dinner with his wife and invited her opinion of the devilled heart. She had no criticism to offer. When informed that she was eating the heart of her lover she replied, in words which constitute a pattern for wives involved in such situations: 'It was so good and savoury that never other meat or drink shall take from my mouth the sweetness which the heart of Guillem has left there.' As her husband rushed at her, she threw herself from a balcony. Royal wrath was afterwards visited on the humourless husband.