Cœur-de-Lion
Henry's successor on the English throne was his eldest surviving son Richard, surnamed Cœur-de-Lion for his gallantry in war.
We have come now to the years of which the great story has been told to us in very picturesque language. It seems to be an age of heroes, and of heroes inspired by the highest motives. It is the time of that third Crusade in which the kings of England and of France combined with the emperor to try to win back Jerusalem from Saladin, that great Moslem ruler who held Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and the Mediterranean shore of Africa nearly as far west as Tunis. Westward again African Moslems held the southern half of Spain. There were gallant actions to be performed on behalf of the Cross both in East and West.
It was the age of those wandering minstrels the troubadours of the Langue d'oc in the south of France, the trouvères of the Langue d'oil in the north of France, the singers of the Lingua di si in Italy. Each of those was so called from the word used by the people of the locality for our English word: "yes." In the "oil" we have the origin of the modern French "oui." In England we have seen that there were wandering minstrels. In Germany there were the same, by the name of Minnesingers.
These Romance languages, as they were called, of the Langue d'oil and the Langue d'oc, were the result of the mixture, in the different localities, of the Gothic, or German language with the Roman, the Latin. The trouvères of Northern France, like the minnesingers and the English minstrels, were singers or reciters of stories. Sir Walter Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel" may give us an idea of the tales that they recited. But, at this moment of our story, say the end of the twelfth century, we are in the midst of the age of chivalry, as it is called. It was the age when the knight thought it right to devote all his services to some lady of his love whose colours—probably a knot of ribbon which she had worn—he carried conspicuously. It was the age of tournaments, which were encounters between mounted and heavily armed knights held before some great lord's castle. It was an age too of constant fighting, some of which was in the sacred name of the Cross against that Crescent which was the badge and the sign of the Saracens. So these rhymesters had plenty of stories for their telling.
There was a whole series of tales about the Court of King Arthur in Britain, some of which Tennyson has put for us into modern verse in his "Idylls of the King." There was a series, too, about the Court of Charlemagne and his paladins, as his knights were called. Many, indeed most, of the stories, which may have had some historical and real incident underlying them, were so overlaid with invention that it is quite impossible to tell where truth leaves off and fiction begins. The knights are of quite incredible stature and strength, and the feats they perform are far too good and great to be true.