In the latter part of the twelfth century the romances of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table begin to appear. These enjoyed great popularity in all western Europe for centuries, and they are by no means forgotten yet. Arthur, of whose historical existence no one can be quite sure, was supposed to have been king of Britain shortly after the Saxons gained a foothold in the island. In other long poems of the time, Alexander the Great, Cæsar, and other ancient worthies appear as heroes. The absolute disregard of historical facts and the tendency to represent the warriors of Troy and Rome as mediæval knights, show the inability of the mediæval mind to understand that the past could have been different from the present. All these romances are full of picturesque adventures and present a vivid picture of the valor and loyalty of the true knight, as well as of his ruthlessness and contempt for human life.[165]
The fabliaux and the fables.
Besides the long and elaborate epics, like Roland, and the romances in verse and prose, there were numberless short stories in verse (the fabliaux), which usually dealt with the incidents of everyday life, especially with the comical ones. Then there were the fables, the most famous of which are the stories of Reynard the Fox, which were satires upon the customs of the time, particularly the weaknesses of the priests and monks.
The troubadours.
100. Turning now to southern France, the beautiful songs of the troubadours, which were the glory of the Provençal tongue, reveal a gay and polished society at the courts of the numerous feudal princes. The rulers not merely protected and encouraged the poets; they aspired to be poets themselves and to enter the ranks of the troubadours, as the composers of these elegant verses were called. These songs were always sung to an accompaniment on some instrument, usually the lute. Those who merely sang them, without being themselves poets, were called jongleurs. The troubadours and jongleurs traveled from court to court, not only in France, but north into Germany and south into Italy, carrying with them the southern French poetry and customs. We have few examples of Provençal before the year 1100, but from that time on, for two centuries, countless songs were written, and many of the troubadours enjoyed an international reputation. The terrible Albigensian crusade brought misery and death into the sprightly circles which had gathered about the count of Toulouse and others who had treated the heretics too leniently. But the literary critic traces signs of decline in the Provençal verse even before this disaster.[166]
Chivalry.
For the student of history, the chief interest of the epics of northern France and the songs of the South lies in the insight that they give into the life and aspirations of this feudal period. These are usually summed up in the term chivalry, or knighthood, of which a word may properly be said here, since we should know little of it were it not for the literature of which we have been speaking. The knights play the chief rôle in all the mediæval romances; and, as many of the troubadours belonged to the knightly class, they naturally have much to say of it in their songs.
Chivalry was not a formal institution established at any particular moment. Like feudalism, with which it was closely connected, it had no founder, but appeared spontaneously throughout western Europe to meet the needs and desires of the period. We learn from Tacitus that even in his time the Germans considered the moment a solemn one when the young warrior was first invested with the arms of a soldier. "This was the sign that the youth had reached manhood; this was his first honor." It is probably a survival of this feeling which we find in the idea of knighthood. When the youth of good family had been carefully trained to ride his horse, use his sword, and manage his hawk in the hunt, he was made a knight by a ceremony in which the Church took part, although the knighthood was actually conferred by an older knight.
Nature of the knightly order.