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spirited, face fresh and lovely, and to whom his true heart is surrendered. Throughout the long nights and days in the land of the paynim, he will remember her and the pleasure he had in holding her body:
...if anyone ever died for loving loyally
I do not think I will survive even as far as the sea-port.
For just as the blossom springs from the branch,
Springs from you the great sorrow which torments me...15
1. Power, Medieval Women, p.19.
2. A.Bonner, Songs of the Troubadours George Allen and Unwin, London, 1973.p.93: Power, Medieval Women, pp.21-2.
3. Runciman II, pp.103-4.
4. Ibid., p.72. R. Grousset, The Epic of the Crusades N. Lindsay (trans.), Orion, New York, 1970, p.46.
5. M. Remnant, Musical Instruments of the West Batsford, London, 1978, p.44.
6. Ibid, p.30.
7. Ibid, p.163.
8. Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid, p.23 and 51.
9. Bonner, Songs of the Troubadours, 1973.
10. Ibid., p.110.
11. A.Kelly, Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings Vintage, New York, 1950, pp.130-1.
12. Ibid., p.210.
13. Ibid.
14. W.W. Comfort (trans.), Chretien de Troyes Arthurian Romances Everyman, London, 1970.
15. Riley-Smith, The Crusades,: Idea and Reality, pp.157-9. The song is untitled and undated.
Chapter 15:
The Cold Crucible
The rantings of Church writers and the brutal behaviour of warriors might suggest that noble medieval women were widely regarded as low on the scale of creation at the time of the Crusades. The tempting assumption is that Frankish women especially were relegated to a secondary role in shaping the social order.
But some historians have argued to the contrary, that evidence from the twelfth century shows a relatively widespread medieval view of woman as the superior of man.
And other evidence - apart from that related to the fictions of Courtly Love - indicates that women often had great influence on the creation of the characters of their children, and in particular on those men from whose numbers the ranks of Crusading armies were formed.
Given the current practices related to childrearing amongst the Franks, this is in itself rather unexpected. It was considered de rigeur for noble males to be separated from their mothers at the earliest possible age, to be brought up in the equivalent of an all boys school. In a practical sense, many boys and girls were apparently brought up without direct influence from their mothers at crucial stages in their lives.
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