1066 - Andrew Bridgeford [100]
There is thus sufficient evidence, over an extended period, for the medieval fascination with dwarfs and we should not to be surprised if Turold is a jongleur attached to the noble household of Count Guy of Ponthieu. This certainly remains no more than an implication from what we see in the tapestry;no written evidence supporting it survives. But it seems an entirely reasonable hypothesis on the basis of which to continue our investigation. Let us now consider what kind of jongleur Turold might have been. Some churchmen held jongleurs in very low esteem, regarding them as typically blasphemous, vulgar and drunk. Honorius of Autun (c. 1080-c. 1117) fulminated that they were all the servants of Satan and would end up in hell. The image of a jongleur in hell, in the process of having his tongue torn out by devils, can be seen above the west door of the early twelfth-century church at Conques in central France. In the same vein, Orderic Vitalis, writing around the 1130s, tells the story of a jongleur who, having made an irreverent joke about certain holy relics, was said to have been struck dead by lightning that very night.20
Our Turold was surely no disreputable fellow like this. He was a high-class jongleur. His name has been embroidered proudly in the company of kings and nobles. There were some high-minded clerics who were prepared to tolerate the art of the jongleur, provided that it was put to some useful purpose.Jongleurs could, after all, sing to the people about edifying or uplifting subjects and in a language they could understand. It did not have to be all scandalous songs or idle tricks and dirty jokes. They could sing the lives of saints and moral fables or the famous heroic tales of feudal and Christian valour known as chansons de geste. Above all else, it is in this last role, as performers, and sometimes authors, of chansons de geste that jongleurs are nowadays best remembered. Chansons de geste were the epic poems of Old French literature. They were tales of exciting and heroic deeds, usually set in or around the age of Charlemagne, sung by a jongleur to an audience of lords and courtiers. The great popularity of chansons de geste is testified by the fact that more than 100 survive, dating from the latter part of the eleventh century to the first half of the fourteenth. So is this how we should see Turold? As a performer, and perhaps author, of chansons de geste} Interestingly enough, Gormont et Isembart, the very earliest chanson de geste that survives, albeit in fragmentary form, is known to come from Ponthieu. The monk Hariulf, writing in the 1080s at the monastery of Saint-Riquier, just outside Count Guy's capital of Abbeville, tells us that the story of Gormont et Isembart was 'remembered and sung every day by the people of the land'.21 But there is something more than this, something that is much more intriguing. The very greatest of all the chansons de geste is the Chanson de Roland (the Song of Roland) and it is familiar, if only by name, to every French schoolchild. It is the first great work of French literature, a monumental celebration of Charlemagne and his kin. It occupies a position in French literary history equivalent to the English Beowulf and it may be counted among the world's classics. Scholars have long argued over the authorship, origin and date of the Roland. Mystery surrounds these issues. But in the very last of the 4,002 lines of the earliest extant version of the Chanson de Roland, preserved in the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman manuscript kept in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, we read the following extraordinary clue:
Ci fait la geste que Turoldus declinet
Here ends the story