Einhard’s picture, the last Merovingians did little that left any historical record. Childeric
III, the final king of his line, was deposed, shaved of his symbolically uncut hair, and put
in a monastery in 751 by Pepin the Short, who became the first Carolingian king.
Childeric was the first king in the West to be deposed not for tyranny or for injustice but
for incompetence.
Constance B.Bouchard
[See also: MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY]
Einhard. The Life of Charlemagne, trans. Samuel E.Turner. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1960.
Geary, Patrick J. Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the
Merovingian World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Wallace-Hadrill, J.M. The Barbarian West: The Early Middle Ages, A.D. 400–1000. rev. ed. New
York: Harper and Row, 1962.
——. The Long-Haired Kings and Other Studies in Frankish History. London: Methuen, 1962.
ROI FLORE ET LA BELLE JEANNE
. A mid-13th-century anonymous prose romance found in a single manuscript (B.N. fr.
24430; dated 1290), Roi Flore et la belle Jeanne is really two distinct stories forcibly
combined. Written in Picard-Wallon dialect, the tale relates the adventures of Jehane,
first as third wife of Flore, then as cross-dressed squire to her husband, Robert.
Wendy E.Pfeffer
Moland, Louis, and Charles d’Héricault, eds. Nouvelles françoises du XIIIe siècle. Paris: Jannet,
1856, pp. 83–157.
Krueger, Roberta. “Double Jeopardy: The Appropriation of Women in Four Old French Romances
of the ‘Cycle de la Gageure.’” In Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance
Writings: Essays in Feminist Contextual Criti cism, ed. Sheila Fisher and Janet E.Halley.
Knoxville: University of Tennesse Press, 1989, pp. 21–50.
ROLAND, CHANSON DE
. Bearing the marks of the enthusiasm engendered by the First Crusade, the Chanson de
Roland is probably the earliest preserved chanson de geste, and the masterpiece of the
genre. It seems to have been composed ca. 1100 by an anonymous poet (unless the
mysterious Turoldus of the last line is considered to be the author—a controversial
matter), who may well have been a Norman. Like other chansons de geste, it was
certainly intended for singing, to a stringed instrument called a vielle, by a jongleur;
whether this performer was also the composer is a debated question.
The earliest extant version, 4,002 decasyllabic lines grouped into some 290
assonanced laisses (stanzas of irregular length; the exact divisions are in some cases a
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