Samaran’s doubts that the Digby manuscript was ever associated with a jongleur have not prevailed. We call the poem it contains the Chanson de Roland, accepting the title Michel first provided, one that occurs nowhere in the manuscript. We refer to the words preserved in this specific manuscript, and we mean that these words, with some variation, were once sung, as Gautier’s minstrel sang them, in a great hall one long afternoon or through a series of repeated performances.
Was There Ever a “Song of Roland”?
Given the pressing need of postrevolutionary France for a national epic, had the Chanson de Roland not existed, it would have been necessary to invent it. And the Chanson de Roland was, if not invented, at the very least constructed. By supplying it with an appropriate epic title, isolating it from its original codicological context, and providing a general history of minstrel performance in which its pure origin could be located, the early editors presented the 4,002-line poem as sung French epic. They fashioned the poem they desired.
There is, then, an important sense in which if there ever was such a work as the Chanson de Roland it does not survive. If the 4,002 lines now preserved in the Digby manuscript ever were a minstrel’s song, that is not what they were in the manuscript during the twelfth century when they were copied, nor at some later date, when they came to rest alongside the Timaeus. If there ever was a Song of Roland, it was not the late Anglo-Norman transposition but an earlier poem in a slightly different dialect. But this raises a further question. Was there ever such a song, a song of 4,002 lines that was recited or sung by a minstrel and that more or less corresponded to the version preserved in the Digby manuscript? This in turn depends on whether there ever was a tradition of extended or serial recitation in which a work of this kind could have been performed. Here we will encounter another form of material support, that of the sung poem. Just as the material support of the written text is not confined to the physical stuff of ink, parchment, and paper, but must be extended to include the social conventions that govern a text’s circulation, so the material support of an oral poem is not just confined to the sounds of the voice, but must be extended to include the social conventions that govern performance. And just as the materiality of writing is often occluded, so too is the materiality of the voice. Gautier’s noble vision of a minstrel’s dignified and sustained performance bears little relation to what we actually know about medieval performance conditions.
Now there is no doubt that medieval minstrels performed poems about the deeds or gestes of epic heroes, including Roland, and that these performances, were often sung.162 What is troubling is that the numerous references to minstrel performance at secular festivities such as chivalric feasts never suggest that this singing lasted very long.163 A case in point is the famous description of the wedding feast of the count of Archimbaud and a Flemish princess, Flamenca, in the Provençal romance that bears her name. After the second feast of the day is over and the tables have been cleared, the guests are brought fans and cushions. Now is the time for the fifteen hundred jongleurs to perform. They offer a full range of minstrelsy—singing, playing on almost every conceivable instrument, telling stories to musical accompaniment, tumbling, and juggling. They offer a wide choice of stories:
Qui volc ausir diverses comtes
de reis, de marques e de comtes,
auzir ne poc tan can si volc. (lines 617–19)
He who would hear diverse accounts of marquesses and kings and counts may hear as many as he wants.
It is possible that the jongleurs are conceived as reciting well-known passages from famous works, but equally possible that the songs they are singing would have borne only the most tangential connection to the famous poems about the same heroes that have survived. In either case, their performances do not appear to have been of any duration. Soon the king calls for the guests to join him in jousting and then dancing. The account in Flamenca is filled with names famous in French literature, including those of the heroes of Chrétien de Troyes, and Yvain is referred to by the title Chrétien gives him, the Knight of the Lion. Another work mentioned, the “lais de Cabrefoil,” might be Marie de France’s Chevrefoil.164 Yet under these conditions, the jongleurs could not have expected to deliver even one of the longer Old French lais, let alone an Arthurian romance, or a large section from a chanson de geste. The time was too short and the status of any single performer too lowly. At such a feast, no single jongleur could expect to command the attention of any but a small group of guests and even that not for long. Nor are the circumstances depicted in Flamenca such as to permit the jongleur to work through a longer piece over a series of performances. The jongleurs and their audience were assembled to add dignity to a single ritual occasion; once the feast was completed, they dispersed. To the extent that Flamenca offers a credible depiction of the performance conditions at a royal feast, the implication is that minstrels rarely had the opportunity to perform lengthy pieces to their conclusion and hence that the minstrel versions of lais, chansons de geste, or romances differed radically from those that have been preserved in manuscript.
The example of Flamenca is telling because it does seem to reflect established chivalric ceremonial, albeit filtered through literary conventions of plenitude that exaggerate the numbers of minstrels. Accounts of historical feasts, when they survive, show that the number of minstrels was considered a reflection of the dignity of the occasion. The pay record for the feast held for the knighting of the English Prince Edward in 1306 shows 119 minstrels; of these, more than 80 are explicitly classified as musicians.165 Few other feasts are as well documented, but large numbers of minstrels are recorded in many cases: 426 minstrels were paid for performing at the marriage of Princess Margaret to John of Brabant in 1290, for example.166 Nor did the more exalted minstrels who attended the great feasts necessarily stay in the area much longer than those in Flamenca. The minstrels who helped celebrate Edward’s knighting on Whitsunday 1302 had to be up before dawn the next morning in order to collect their payment before prime.
In fact, a major feast was perhaps the least suited of all these occasions for extended recitation. The audience was often disruptive, and there was too much competition; the more prestigious the occasion, the more competition there would be.167 Humbler situations might have been easier for the performer. At an isolated castle, monastery, or country house, or at a village gathering, a jongleur would have stood a better chance of holding the sustained attention of the entire audience, as he does in Gautier’s vision. Even here he would have been obliged to modify his performance to suit the occasion and retain interest. To do so, he would have needed to deliver short fragments and to modify them appropriately.
This, indeed, is a recurring accusation against jongleurs—that they distort the truth, singing whatever they think will please their listeners and offering biased and partial accounts. Peter the Chanter compares priests who change the form of the mass to increase the offerings they receive to jongleurs who switch stories to keep their audience’s interest: “Priests of this kind are like jongleurs or storytellers (fabulatori) who, when they see that the song of Landri does not please their audience, immediately begin to sing of Antioch. And if the audience is too demanding and is still not pleased by hearing of Alexander they switch to a song about Appollonius or to one about Charlemagne or about someone else.”168 Chrétien de Troyes, similarly, in the introduction to Eric et Enide accuses “those who live by telling stories” of corrupting the story:
d’Erec, li fil Lac, est li contes,
que devant rois et devant contes
depecier et corronpre suelent
cil qui de conter vivre vuelent. (lines 19–22)169