Some troubadours, like the poet Bertran de Born (fl. 2nd half of 12th cent.),
wrote about war, not love:
Trumpets, drums, standards and pennons
And ensigns and horses black and white
Soon we shall see, and the world will be good.^14
But warfare was more often the subject of another kind of poem, the chanson de
geste, “song of heroic deeds.” Long recited orally, these vernacular poems appeared
in written form at about the same time as troubadour poetry and, like them, the
chansons de geste played with aristocratic codes of behavior, in this case on the
battlefield rather than at court.
The chansons de geste were responding to social and military transformations.
By the end of the twelfth century, nobles and knights had begun to merge into one
class, threatened from below by newly rich merchants and from above by newly
powerful kings. At the same time, the knights’ importance in battle—unhorsing one
another with lances and long swords and taking prisoners rather than killing their
opponents—was waning in the face of mercenary infantrymen who wielded long
hooks and knives that ripped easily through chain mail, killing their enemies outright.
A knightly ethos and sense of group solidarity emerged within this changed landscape.
Like Bertran de Born, the chansons de geste celebrated “trumpets, drums, standards
and pennons.” But they also examined the moral issues that confronted knights,
taking up the often contradictory values of their society: love of family vied with
fealty to a lord; desire for victory clashed with pressures to compromise.
The chansons de geste, later also called “epics,” focused on battle; other long
poems, later called “romances,” explored relationships between men and women.
Enormously popular in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, romances took
up such themes as the tragic love between Tristan and Isolde and the virtuous
knight’s search for the Holy Grail. Above all, romances were woven around the
many fictional stories of King Arthur and his court. In one of the earliest, Chrétien de
Troyes (fl. c.1150–1190) wrote about the noble and valiant Lancelot, in love with
Queen Guinevere, wife of Arthur. Finding a comb bearing some strands of her
radiant hair, Lancelot is overcome:
He gently removed the queen’s
