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Ful fetis was hir cloke, as I was war. Of smal coral aboute hir arm she bar A peire of bedes, gauded al with grene; And ther-on heng a broche of gold ful shene, On which ther was first write a crowned A, And after, Amor vincit omnia! Prologue to the Canterbury Tales
He was no singer of love and the three of his chansos that remain are inspired by the misogyny that we have noted in the case of Marcabrun. Peire Cardenal's strength lay in the moral sirventes: he was a fiery soul, aroused to wrath by the sight of injustice and immorality and the special objects of his animosity are the Roman Catholic clergy and the high nobles.
And, by my hope of salvation, I am vexed by a young man who bears too openly a shield which has never received a blow, by a chaplain and monk wearing beards and by the sharp beak of the slanderer." The monk's satire upon other troubadours is stated by himself to be a continuation of that by Peire d'Auvergne; the criticism is, as might be expected, personal.
This is a poem in irregular metre, intended to show the perturbation of the poet's mind. Raimbaut increased this effect by writing in five different languages. He found a ready welcome from Bonifacio II. at the court of Montferrat which Peire Vidal also visited. The marquis dubbed him knight and made him his brother in arms.
It was Barral who was attracted by Peire's peculiar talents: his wife seems to have tolerated the troubadour from deference to her husband. Peire, however, says in one of his poems that husbands feared him more than fire or sword, and believing himself irresistible interpreted Azalais' favours as seriously meant.
Peire Cardenal is thus by temperament a moral preacher; he is not merely critical of errors, but has also a positive faith to propound. He is not an opponent of the papacy as an institution: the confession of faith which he utters in one of his sirventes shows that he would have been perfectly satisfied with the Roman ecclesiastical and doctrinal system, had it been properly worked.
Such troubadours as Guilhem Figueira and Peire Cardenal, who inveighed against the action of the Church during the crusade, say nothing of him, and upon their silence and that of the biography as regards his ecclesiastical life the argument has been founded that Folquet the troubadour and Folquet the bishop were two different persons. There is no evidence to support this theory.
Peire inveighs against the disgraces of particular orders; the Preaching Friars or Jacobin monks who discuss the relative merits of special wines after their feasts, whose lives are spent in disputes and who declare all who differ from them to be Vaudois heretics, who worm men's private affairs out of them, that they may make themselves feared: some of his charges against the monastic orders are quite unprintable.
"Peire Rogier sings of love without restraint and it would befit him better to carry the psalter in the church or to bear the lights with the great burning candles. Guiraut de Bornelh is like a sun-bleached cloth with his thin miserable song which might suit an old Norman water-carrier.
Hymns and songs to the Virgin exhibit the same characteristics of form. The middle class of Toulouse seems at all times to have felt an interest in poetry and had already produced such well-known troubadours as Aimeric de Pegulhan, Peire Vidal and Guillem Figueira.
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