called Manuscrit du Roi, prepared for Charles d’Anjou, the brother of King Louis IX of France (and
himself a trouvère), between 1246 and 1254. With over five hundred songs (fifty by troubadours, the rest
by trouvères in descending order of social rank), it is the largest and most sumptuous of all chansonniers.
Refrains lived a life of their own in the works of the trouvères. Detached from their original contexts
—in pastourelles, in chansons de geste, in otherwise unrecorded dance songs (caroles) and popular
ditties—they circulated like proverbs from song to song, and it became a mark of skill for a trouvère to
contrive new settings for familiar tags. Ier mains pensis chevauchai by Ernoul Caupain, an especially
elaborate chanson avec des refrains, incorporates no fewer than eight of them, one into each stanza.
Narratives and migrating refrains were both popularizing touches, and so was the general lack of
concern among the trouvères for the values of trobar clus, so beloved of the troubadours. Chançon
legiere à entendre ferai, wrote Conon de Béthune (d. 1220), one of the noblest trouvères by birth and a
knight-crusader to boot: “I will make a song that is light upon the ear, for it matters to me that all may
learn it and willingly sing it.” Few among his northern counterparts were inclined to contradict him, and
Conon’s sentiment would only gain in force as the courtly art he practiced underwent a phenomenal social
transformation.
For past the middle of the thirteenth century, the main site of musico-literary activity among the French
shifts from castle to town, mirroring the general movement of society. Urbanization, on the rise since the
eleventh century, had begun to gallop. Over the century ending around 1250, the city of Paris doubled in
size. Its streets were paved and its walls expanded. The first Louvre (a fortress) and several major
churches including Notre Dame were built, and the city’s schools were organized into a university. The
episcopal town of Arras to the north was granted a commercial charter in 1180 and soon became an
international center of banking and trade, the bastion of France’s emerging class of town-dwelling
freemen—bourgeoisie, in the original meaning of the term. It was at Paris and (especially) Arras that
musical activity burgeoned among this capacious class and came to be organized along lines comparable
in some respects to crafts guilds.
This tendency was epitomized in the Confrérie des Jongleurs et des Bourgeois d’Arras (Brotherhood
of Minstrels and Townspeople of Arras), nominally a lay religious guild founded near the beginning of the
thirteenth century, which became a leading sponsor of musico-poetic pursuits. Audefroi le Bastart, the
specialist in chansons de toile, was a member, as were the three most important trouvères of the late
thirteenth century: Moniot d’Arras (d. 1239), Jehan Bretel (d. 1272), and Adam de la Halle, the last of the
line (d.ca. 1307).
To the first of this trio, whose pseudonym means “The Little Monk of Arras,” belongs the most famous
pastourelle in the repertory, Ce fut en mai (“It happened in May”; Ex. 4-5). Its text contains a valuable bit
of testimony, corroborated by other witnesses, about how such songs were performed: it describes a
dance accompanied by a fiddle (viele). On the assumption that it is itself a dance song, it is transcribed in
a regular alternation of long and short syllables yielding a sort of iambic meter. The musical structure
approximates the “binary” form of later dance styles: two phrases of equal length, each repeated with
contrasting “open” and “shut” cadences. That plus the use of the major mode (Lydian with B-flat) makes
this a consummate imitation folk song. There is little left here of the Latinate.
EX. 4-5 Moniot d’Arras, Ce fut en mai (pastourelle)