The fabliaux, although related by inspiration and often by specific thematic properties
to earlier works from Europe, the classical world, and even the Orient, came into
existence in France toward the end of the 12th century. Some scholars identify Jehan
Bodel as the first author of fabliaux; Bodel, who died in 1210, was in any case the first
whose name is known. Most fabliaux are in fact anonymous, but a number of fabliau
authors in addition to Bodel are identified; they include Gautier le Leu, Henri d’Andeli,
Eustache d’Amiens, Rutebeuf, Baudouin de Condé, and his son Jean (d. 1346), who was
the last known composer of fabliaux.
The shortest of the fabliaux is Du prestre et du mouton (signed by one Haiseaus or
Haisel) at eighteen lines. The longest run to some 1,300 lines, with the single exception
of Trubert, a 3,000-line text that is often but not always considered a fabliau. Most
contain between a hundred and 300 lines, with the average around 250.
Whether or not the fabliau is taken as a bourgeois genre, it is true that the characters
most often belong to the middle class or to peasant society. Only rarely do knights play
prominent roles. In some works, such as De celle qui se fist foutre sur la fosse de son
mari, a knight may appear, but he is often not the protagonist, a role taken in this text by
his squire. Similarly, descriptions of activities associated with the nobility are rare but not
unheard of: Le chevalier qui recovra l’amor de sa dame offers an account of a
tournament through which a knight will win a lady’s love and is identifiable as a fabliau
only because of a ruse perpetrated by the knight in the second half of the poem.
Readers interested in social history will find in these texts fascinating reflections of the
daily life of the period. The characters in fabliaux are very often observed working,
eating and drinking, and carrying on all the usual activities of middle-class and peasant
existence. We have descriptions of houses, towns, professions (notably merchants,
millers, and farmers), and leisure activities. References to work, food, and drink are
extremely common in the fabliaux, but the activity most frequently depicted is sexual. Of
course, sexuality within marriage is hardly ever treated, and sexual satisfaction between
spouses is practically unheard of. When it is mentioned at all, marital sex is dismissed
with a very few words or else reduced to an emphasis, not on desire or sexual intimacy,
but on sex organs. A memorable but not atypical example is the absurd story told in Les
quatre souhaits saint Martin, where a husband and wife, granted four wishes, initially
have their bodies covered with genitals and have to use all their remaining wishes to
return to normal.
Much more common is seduction or attempted seduction outside of marriage. This can
hardly come as a surprise, not only because sexual humor is almost universally
extramarital, but also because fabliau characterizations imply and invite such dalliances.
Husbands are routinely presented as cruel or stupid, while many wives are found to be
lascivious creatures with gargantuan sexual appetites, either ripe for an adulterous
relationship or already embroiled in one. Adultery is a prevalent theme in the fabliaux.
Nykrog calculated that sixty-three of his 160 fabliaux dealt with love triangles. Almost
invariably, the participants in an adulterous relationship are married women and men
other than their husbands, rather than husbands with mistresses. Seducers are never in
short supply. Priests attempt the most seductions of married women, but they are rarely
successful (only five out of twenty-two times, according to Nykrog). Knights and clerics
invariably succeed.
The Encyclopedia 637