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Updated: June 3, 2025
Though written by both Troubadours and Trouvères, the latter were far superior in style and invention, and it is mostly their work which has survived. These romances were sometimes in prose, but more often in poetry of extremely smooth and flowing metre. In the first group, "Brut d'Angleterre" contains the mythical story of all the early English kings.
If Shakespeare's "godlike Romans" are not entirely free from anachronism, nobody of sense would exchange them for anything else than themselves; and though Dante practically repeated in the Commedia the curious confusion which in less gifted trouvères and romances mixed up Alexander with Charlemagne and blended Greek and Gothic notions in one inextricable tangle, this also was supremely unimportant, if not even in a manner interesting.
Didactic rather than poetical, his influence was great in breaking down the barriers which separated the people from the higher classes, by adapting to their own home-idiom the best productions of the age. About this period we find prevalent those Northern singers corresponding to the Trouvères, Troubadours, and Jongleurs.
And when, at last, the Elizabethan era properly so-called began, the proof was speedily given that geniuses worthy of holding fellowship with Chaucer had assimilated into their own literary growth what was congruous to it in his, just as he had assimilated to himself not always improving, but hardly ever merely borrowing or taking over much that he had found in the French trouveres, and in Italian poetry and prose.
But the knights and their retainers listened with delight to the martial and amatory strains of the minstrels, minnesangers, trouveres, and troubadours, and burned to win favour in ladies' eyes by showing prowess in Holy Land. The third was truly the romantic era of the Crusades.
Neither the sirventes nor the chanzos of the troubadours, nor the fabliaux of the trouveres, nor the romances of chivalry, can be read without a blush. On every page the grossness of the language is only equaled by the shameful depravity of the characters and the immorality of the incidents. In the south of France, more particularly, an extreme laxity of manners prevailed among the nobility.
THE TROUVERES. While the Provencal was thus relapsing into a mere dialect, the north of France was maturing a new language and literature of an entirely different character. Normandy, a province of France, was invaded in the tenth century by a new northern tribe, who, under the command of Rollo or Raoul the Dane, incorporated themselves with the ancient inhabitants.
The French and Provençals sang first, the Germans later, the Sicilians last; but although we may say after deliberate analysis, such or such a form, or such or such a story, was known in this country before it appeared in that one, such imitation or suggestion was so rapid that with regard to the French, the Provençals, and the Germans at least, the impression is simultaneous; only the Sicilians beginning distinctly later, forerunners of the new love lyric, wholly different from that of trouvères, troubadours, and minnesingers, of the Italians of the latter thirteenth century.
At this period there were neither theatrical entertainments nor games at cards to fill up the leisure hours of society, and the trouveres or relators of the tales were welcomed at the courts, castles, and private houses with an eagerness proportioned to the store of anecdotes which they brought with them to enliven conversation.
From it, and the Scandinavian mythology spring all the fairy tales of modern nations. And these romances of the Koran form the groundwork of the fabliaux of the Trouveres, and of the romantic epics of Boccaccio, Tasso, Ariosto, Spenser and Shakespeare. Mohammed's teaching unified the different tribes of Arabia, and fostered a feeling of national pride, and a desire for learning.
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