that bears a dedication to Charles and carries the original song up front like a blazon or motto (Fig. 12-8;
Ex. 12-10). The song playfully incorporates a horn call—presented variously in three-note and four-note
versions, dropping a fifth after an initial series of repeated notes or tattoo—that was possibly drawn from
Burgundian town and castle life. A payment record from 1364 survives, detailing the purchase by Philip
the Bold, the first Duke of Burgundy, of “a brass trumpet for the castle turret at Grignon, to be blown when
the watchman sees men-at-arms.”^5 A hundred years later that trumpet was still sounding in Burgundy, if
the famous song is any indication.
The cycle of six Masses based on the tune as shown in Fig. 12-8 exactly fits the service requirements
of the Sainte Chapelle at Dijon, the official chapel of the Order, where every week six polyphonic Masses
and a Requiem were sung.^6 The Masses (and the song as well) have a durational structure that is built on
the prime number 31: the song is 31 tempora (breve-length measures) long and the subsections of the
Mass are likely to be 31 or 62 (31 × 2) or 93 (31 × 3) measures long. Thirty-one was the prescribed
number of men-atarms in the Order and hence symbolized it. One of the Masses sounds the cantus firmus
in canon between two tenors: its rubrics make elaborate veiled references to the titular “Man at Arms”
and to another armed man “fashioned out of his very entrails”—as the second voice of a canon is
fashioned out of the first, or as Charles the Bold had been fashioned out of the flesh of his father, the
founder of the Order. Thus the circumstantial (“external”) evidence associating the song L’Homme Armé
and the Mass tradition based on it with the Order of the Golden Fleece in its late crusading (or at least
blustering) phase under Charles the Bold seems to have ample “internal” corroboration.
FIG. 12-8 L’Homme Armé tune as it is given in its single complete and texted source (Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, MS VI E.
40, fol. 58 v).
EX. 12-10 Transcription of L’Homme ArméSo if Charles the Bold was the instigator of the L’Homme Armé tradition, special interest and