Different in Aliscans is the early announcement, before Rainouart has proved himself,
that he will wed Aelis.
Joan B.Williamson
[See also: GUILLAUME, CHANSON DE; GUILLAUME D’ORANGE CYCLE]
Holtus, Günter, ed. La versione franco-italiana della “Bataille d’Aliscans”: Codex Marcianus fr.
VIII, 252. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1985.
Régnier, Claude, ed. Aliscans. 2 vols. Paris: Champion, 1990.
Newth, Michael A., trans. The Song of Aliscans. New York: Garland, 1992.
ALLEU/ALLOD
. An allod was freehold land, land that the possessor owned outright, without owing dues,
rents, or homage for it. “Allodial land” in Merovingian times generally referred to
inherited property, as opposed to property one had purchased, but soon came to mean any
land owned outright. Although scholars used to describe peasants as primarily renting
their land and nobles as holding theirs in fief, they now argue that all sectors of society
owned much allodial land throughout the Middle Ages.
Constance B.Bouchard
Duby, Georges. Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval Westv, trans. Cynthia Postan.
London: Arnold, 1968.
Evergates, Theodore. Feudal Society in the Bailliage of Troyes Under the Counts of Champagne,
1152–1284. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.
ALPHONSE OF POITIERS
(1220–1271). Count of Toulouse. Alphonse was the brother of Louis IX (St. Louis) and
was himself one of the great territorial princes of the 13th century. When they came of
age, the younger sons of Louis VIII were provided for by means of apanages, territorial
holdings of considerable extent. Alphonse, who was invested with the apanage of Poitou
in 1241, immediately ran up against serious problems. Poitou and its southern marches
constituted a region that had seen an English army of invasion a generation before.
Nobles in the region were fiercely independent, and many had rallied to the English king,
their former overlord, in 1214. They had been defeated, but the region remained
discontented. So long as their new lord was the French king, a remote figure, discontent
did not become open rebellion; but in 1241, when authority was given over to the cadet
prince Alphonse at a great festival in Saumur in the heartland of Poitou, the occasion was
interpreted as a direct challenge to the independence and authority of the native nobility.
Alphonse’s first years as count of Poitou were thus checkered by the necessity of putting
down a rebellion in which the rebels received both the support of the English and the
The Encyclopedia 51