3Uncourtly cloth workers in the Old French sewing songs
E. Jane Burns
The Old French sewing songs (chansons de toile) are generally considered distinctive examples of courtly literature of the thirteenth century because they stage female singers in the role of desiring subjects.1 Eight songs in the corpus of twenty-two also feature the female singer-lover in the act of sewing. With the exception of the single bourgeoise, Euriaus, whose song is found in the narrative of the Roman de la Violette, scholars have tended to assume that the women singer-sewers are courtly and aristocratic.2
To be sure, the settings for the cloth work are overwhelmingly courtly—a royal chamber, a castle, or tower. And the young women singers are typically described as ‘bele’, the epithet often forming the first word of the song, followed by the woman’s name. Hearing from the outset that the story is about ‘Bele Yolanz’ or ‘Bele Doette’, the reader/listener is primed for a tale of courtly love and longing. I have argued elsewhere that the sewing songs actually diverge considerably from the established pattern of the male love song, emphasising, instead of lovelorn distress, the young female singer’s hope and often successful arrangement of her own marriage. In fact, the chansons de toile can be understood as work songs in two important ways: the women in love are staged as working cloth, and the songs themselves work to bring lovers together.3
Equally important, the sewing songs contain other details that are tellingly out of sync with the courtly paradigm. Those details and their implications for providing a fuller understanding of the women workers figured in the chansons de toile are the subject of this essay. As we re-read these songs taking full stock of the genre’s curiously uncourtly aspects, we will see the extent to which women workers featured in the chansons de toile range significantly beyond the strictly courtly ‘beles’ of their opening lines.
We might begin with the thirteenth-century narrative Le Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole, which includes three of the eight songs that mention cloth work directly.4 For the purpose of this essay, I will read these chansons de toile, embedded as lyric insertions within the sumptuous world of a courtly romance, in conjunction with the sewing songs that appear in individual manuscripts.5 Taken together, the eight songs, dated between 1228 and 1250,6 reveal the extent to which women’s work plays a crucial role in the elite world of courtliness.
The romance of Guillaume de Dole opens with a springtime love-fest hosted by the emperor Conrad who lavishes expensive gifts on the knights and ladies in attendance. Courtiers sleep in silken tents, countesses wear gowns of heavy silk and cloth of gold, and costly quilts cover the beds (vv. 192–93; 200–01; 230). These luxury items attest to Conrad’s excessive wealth, but they are also consonant with his reputation as ‘Li bons rois, li frans debonere, / il savoit toz les tors d’amors’ (a good king and a very charming man who knew all the tricks of love, vv. 160–61).
The lyric insertions found in this early section of the romance reflect and reinforce the courtly milieu. We hear three times of ‘Bele Aelis’, adorned and prettily dressed, dancing in the meadow and ready for love (vv. 310–15, 318–22, 532–37) along with Robin and Marie cavorting near the spring under the olive tree (vv. 522–27). Two other songs that evoke love in a predictable springtime setting are taken directly from the established trouvere corpus.7 When women’s sewing songs first enter the story, we witness the heroine Lienor’s mother sing a seemingly conventional song, about a young couple in love: Bele Aude and Doon. The first stanza reads:
(Mother and daughter are seated doing embroidery. With gold thread they make gold crosses. The mother speaks with a courtly heart: ‘Such a good love exists between Aude and Doon’.)
Lienor’s song: Bele Aye
The tenor of the romance changes abruptly, however, as soon as the heroine Lienor sings. She does so in a private chamber where she and her mother are embroidering. The song is sung at the request of Nicole, a messenger sent by the emperor Conrad, who has fallen helplessly in love with the Fair Lienor based on a minstrel’s tale of her incomparable beauty. Although the romance has prepared us to find in Lienor the paragon of courtly perfection, the song she sings reflects instead the dark underbelly of courtliness. Lienor tells of ‘Bele Aye’ who sews with beautiful stitches but is severely ‘beaten morning and night’ (el est batue et au main et au vespre, v. 7; p. 159).
Although Lienor’s initial invocation of ‘Bele Aye’ seems to echo previous references to Bele Aelis and Bele Aude in this romance, the heroine of Lienor’s song is not ‘beautifully dressed’ for love or ‘sitting and sewing’ in the company of her mother. Rather, while working luxury cloth with ‘beautiful stitches’, Aye sews ‘at the feet of a cruel female master/mean mistress’. Her daily beatings cause hot tears to run down her face:
(Bele Aye is seated at the foot of her cruel mistress. She makes beautiful stitches on the English silk cloth in her lap … hot tears run down her face.)
It is not uncommon for heroines in the chansons de toile to weep over a distant or absent lover, as indeed Bele Aye also does in this song. Belle Doe, the subject of Lienor’s second song, similarly ‘plaint et regrete’ (laments and expresses regret for, v. 3; p. 160) her lover’s delayed return, but suffers no dire consequences as a result. She also does not sew.
Bele Aye’s case differs perhaps most significantly from Doe’s in that she seems to be working for or under an abusive female maistre. The term, which also appears in the song about the unhappily married Bele Emmelos, has a range of meanings in Old French. Although a maistre can direct and control the actions of another as would a governess, the word is also used to indicate the abuse of power and authority or superior position in a more severe sense, including actions that cause mistreatment, torment, or suffering.
Indeed, Bele Emmelos, who is beaten and disfigured by a mal mari, explains, for example, that her husband ‘trop me guerroie … et maistroie’ (wars against me … and mistreats/abuses me, vv. 8–9; p. 154, my emphasis). Emmelos complains further that her husband, who insists she has no legal right to take a lover (et dit de vos amer n’ai loi, v. 40; p. 155, my emphasis), acts outside the law himself, mistreating her unjustly by going literally ‘beyond the law’ (estreloi, v. 41; p. 155, my emphasis). This song recalls the genre known as the chansons de mal mariée in which jealous husbands often enclose and then punish their young wives for having or seeking lovers.9 Women are also beaten in some of the other chansons de toile by fathers or husbands who disapprove of their love choices.10
Bele Aye, by contrast, is not married as far as we know and has no father hoping to marry her off to a husband of the appropriate social class. She is beaten for a different reason by an abuser who is curiously not condemned and not even named outright. We know at least that Aye’s punishment does not result from the quality of her sewing. Indeed, Aye’s stitches are said to be ‘beautifully executed’ (i fet coustures beles, v. 3; p. 159). Her beating seems rather to stem from her status as a worker.
It is important in this regard not to confuse Aye’s accomplished cloth work with the kind of embroidery done by the putatively noble women like Lienor and her mother in Guillaume de Dole. To be sure, the expensive silk cloth (paile d’Engleterre) that Aye works in her lap would tend to suggest the luxury of a courtly milieu in which noble women sew. Lienor and her mother are said to embroider various kinds of clerical vestments and decorations for the Church: as their pastime and their charity (vv. 1134–37). They give ‘what they make to poor churches in need of ornaments’ (vv. 1138–39).11 Their work is designated specifically as ‘deduis’, a pleasurable undertaking (v. 1137).12 But they are elite women. Of the eight women depicted as doing cloth work in the chansons de toile, only one, Erembours, is described as noble. The social class of Aye and the others, although they are termed ‘beles’, is tellingly never specified. Aye in particular seems to be ‘working’ under duress, toiling under the eye of the cryptic ‘evil mistress’ (male maistre) who seems likely to have administered the beating.13
Aye’s crime is not the more courtly offence of having taken a lover against the wishes of a protective husband or father. This heroine’s offence, rather, is to have fallen for a ‘soudoier d’autre terre’ (soldier from another land, v. 8; p. 159). In stark contrast to Belle Doe, whose lover Doon is evoked repeatedly as a noble vassal, brave and bold, a man whose chivalric excellence has earned the heroine’s undying love (vv. 5–8; p. 160), Bele Aye’s affections have drawn her beyond the courtly realm. Her heart has been taken unawares, captured, and captivated, we are told, by a foreigner or outsider from another place. As the refrain insists:
(Alas! Alas! My lover from afar / from another place. You have captured and bound my heart.)
A fear of the foreign runs throughout much of Old French literature, but it may have special significance in these songs about women’s work, as we shall see.14
At this point we might wonder at least whether Bele Aye is to be understood as a French woman who has fallen for a foreign soldier. Or might she herself be a transplanted foreign woman with a prior attachment to a foreign man? And most important for our purposes, how does a heroine like Bele Aye, who is said to be in love with an outsider and also working silk for a seemingly abusive maistre fit within the courtly context surrounding her?
Indeed, Lienor’s brief song, used to make a first impression on the emissary of the most courtly Conrad, curiously raises a host of uncourtly questions. Most pointedly, it stages women’s production of luxury textiles in the chansons de toile in relation to physical abuse and foreignness. It suggests at the same time that the women working silk, cloth of gold, and other fabrics in the aristocratic households described in the chansons de toile might not be limited to aristocrats alone. Some of those cloth workers, it seems, might function more as professional embroiderers or seamstresses, whether they are skilled in working costly gold and silk threads or in creating and tailoring garments.
More than embroidery
Perhaps the strongest indication of this possibility is the range of cloth work performed by women workers in the chansons de toile. If we consider, for example, the second stanza of ‘Fille et la mere’, we find that Aude, whose social class is unspecified, is instructed to take up, in addition to the kind of highly skilled embroidery that she and her mother were described as doing in the first stanza—that is, working gold thread into golden crosses (vv. 1–3; p. 158)–the broader skills of sewing and spinning. Although Aude’s mother spoke earlier with a ‘courtly heart’, approving of the bon’amor between Aude and Doon (vv. 3–4; p. 158), she now turns pointedly away from the courtly register. She instructs Aude to ‘forget about loving Doon’ (L’amor Doon vos covient oublier, v. 7; p. 158) and concentrate instead on cloth work:
(Learn to sew and spin, daughter, and to embroider golden crosses on banded fabric.)
To be sure, the refrain, which remains the same in both stanzas, brings us back to the courtly register. But the deviation from it in the preceding three lines is significant. We are not given a reason for the apparent change of ‘heart’ on the mother’s part. However, it does seem that the range of skills outlined, from luxury embroidery to sewing and spinning, suggest more than a ‘pleasurable’ pastime practised by aristocratic women like Lienor and her mother.
So too does the song about ‘Bele Yolanz’, found in an independent chansonnnier,15 begin with a young woman sewing gold and silk thread on luxury cloth that then broadens the parameters of her cloth work to include sewing more generally, cutting or tailoring, and spinning along with embroidering:
(Lovely Yolanz in a quiet room unfolds silk fabric across her knees. She sews with one golden thread, another of silk. … Mother, why do you reproach me? Is it because of the way I sew or cut or spin or embroider? Or is it because I sleep too much?)
When these skills, listed by the daughter who asks why she is being chastised, are repeated in the mother’s answer, we learn that the mother’s complaint is not provoked by laziness on the daughter’s part (trop somillier), nor by insufficient sewing skills:
([It is] not because of the way you sew or cut or spin or embroider. And not because you sleep too much.)
On the contrary, the repetition in these two stanzas drives home the point that this young woman is skilled in all the tasks mentioned, from spinning and embroidery to sewing and possibly even dressmaking or tailoring. In stanzas IV and V, the song segues abruptly away from sewing and enters another lyric register altogether, taking up the language of the chanson de mal mariée. Bele Yolanz’s error, the mother explains here, is in talking too much to her lover, the knight Count Mahi, which will displease her husband:
(Because … you speak too much to Count Mahi, and that displeases your husband.)
It is important to note, however, that within this framework, ‘Bele Yolanz en chambre koie’ describes a woman of unspecified social class who is engaged in types of cloth work that extend beyond purely decorative aristocratic needlework. We can distinguish the singer-sewers like Yolanz and Aude who perform wide-ranging cloth work from the more courtly portraits of elite women who seem engaged in aristocratic embroidery only. Bele Beatris, for example, is seated in a golden chamber, lamenting and weeping as she pulls on the threads of her work (presumably some kind of needlework):
(Lovely Beatrice is seated in a golden chamber. She laments loudly and, crying, she pulls the threads of her work.)
She eventually marries Hugh, who is ‘courtly and well-mannered’ (v. 114, p. 133). Bele Erembours, an emperor’s daughter (v. 16, p. 93), sits by the window lamenting her beloved with a coloured silk cloth across her knees (paile de color). Precisely what she does with the cloth is not specified, but it is clear that Erembours’ cloth work is limited to small scale silk pieces worked in her lap:
(Lovely Erembours at the window by day holds a coloured silk fabric on her lap.)
By contrast, a second song devoted to Bele Yolanz entitled ‘Bele Yolanz en ses chambres seoit’, features a predictably lovely woman seated and working luxury cloth—in this case a heavy silk (samite), but she seems to sew an entire garment: ‘D’un boen samiz une robe cosoit’ (v. 2; p. 77). While this ‘robe’ is destined to be a gift for the singer’s beloved, it differs significantly from other love tokens like the chemise that the heroine Soredamor sends to her beloved in Chrétien de Troyes’ Cligès. In that instance, the verb coudre (queudre) indicates only the stitches Soredamor uses to embellish an existing chemise with gold thread mixed at times with strands of her own golden hair:
(She [Guenevere] took out a white silk chemise, delicate and soft. The threads in the seams were of gold or at least silver. On several occasions Soredamor’s own hands had done the work, stitching next to the gold thread in some places a hair from her head on both sleeves and at the collar.)
Yolanz, on the other hand, is actually fashioning an outfit from high-quality silk fabric (samite), exhibiting the skills a seamstress might have.
Bele Aiglentine too sews and tailors/cuts a garment, in this case a chemise, presumably from whole cloth. We hear first that she ‘cousoit une chemise’ (sewed a chemise) and later that she ‘cousoit et si tailloit’ (sewed and cut, the ‘cutting’ presumably referring to the fabric from which she makes the chemise, vv. 2, 6; p. 161). Although placed in an aristocratic setting, this heroine does not embroider at all. We find her seated in a royal chamber working ‘in front of her dame’ (devant sa dame, v. 2; p. 161), a formulation that resonates tellingly with the Bele Aye sitting at the feet of her ‘evil mistress’ (male maistre). In fact, we hear twice that Aiglentine does her cloth work ‘devant sa dame’ (vv. 2, 6). Is it possible that the skilled Bele Aiglentine could be working for this lady within the royal household? The refrain asks us to acknowledge at the end of every stanza the extent to which this beauty works:
(Now you will hear how Bele Aiglentine worked/did her work.)
Working for others
The romance of Guillaume Dole contains any number of passing references to servants working for the elite classes, most often without indication of payment or gain. We are told specifically that Conrad employs many competent and experienced servers trained in courtly manners (vv. 463–64). During the hunt, well-schooled servants arrange quilts, beds, carpets, comfortable tents, and table settings for the guests (vv. 339–46). Later they care for items of clothing and ply needle and thread to help sew up courtly sleeves (v. 2590). We witness Guillaume de Dole himself travelling with servants on his visit to Conrad, and we hear that Guillaume’s mother instructs her servants to prepare the bed upstairs for the seneschal’s arrival (vv. 3274–75). Might Conrad, Guillaume, and his mother all be considered in some sense ‘maistres’ presiding over and governing these servants from whose skilled work the aristocracy benefits?
Guillaume is said, at one point, to use monies generously bestowed by Conrad to pay ‘his servants and bourgeois creditors’ (por paier la menue gent / et as borjois cui il devoit, vv. 1934–35). Presumably the reference is to household servants, but whether they are women or men, French or foreign is not indicated. Neither are such details available for Conrad’s servants, including those we have noted who are involved with clothing or cloth work. Their stories are obscured by the sumptuous courtly milieu surrounding the emperor, in particular the lavish silks and brocades that bedeck the attendees of Conrad’s festivities. If ornate cloth work is critical to the success of courtliness and to the very identities of emperors, kings, and counts, the story of that textile production is only faintly suggested.
We hear, for example, that Guillaume de Dole, while housed one evening at one of the emperor Conrad’s palaces before the tournament at St.-Trond, ‘has his doublet covered with cloth of gold’ (Il fist d’un drap d’or et de soie / au soir covrir son beau pourpoint, vv. 2038–39). Whether the doublet is re-covered or re-done in cloth of gold or made anew from that highly costly and extravagant fabric is unclear. Even more hidden in this account, however, is who might have undertaken the work that Guillaume ‘had done’.
Sewing as women’s professional mestier?
An interesting passage in the twelfth-century Roman d’Enéas categorises the acts of ‘filer’, ‘coldre’, and ‘taillier’, all the types of non-decorative cloth work mentioned in the chansons de toile, specifically as the profession (mestier) of women. When the heroine Camille, in this early romance text, takes up the garb and profession of knighthood, she pointedly rejects the ‘women’s work’ of spinning and sewing:
(I have never had any interest in women’s work, whether spinning or sewing.)
When others chastise Camille for this choice, they contrast the paid profession of soldier/knights specifically with what would seem to be the paid profession of women workers (mestier), now expanded to include cutting along with sewing and spinning:
(That is not the mestier for you, but rather spinning, sewing, and cutting. It is nice to please oneself in a chamber behind a bed curtain with such a girl.)
The sexual innuendo of men ‘enjoying themselves’ with women who sew is a significant detail to which we will return.
Meanwhile, the definition of women’s cloth work as a mestier rather than a pastime might help explain the curious change of heart expressed by Bele Aude’s mother in ‘Fille et la mere’, which we discussed above. Could the mother’s insistence in the second stanza that Aude abandon her love for Doon and concentrate instead on sewing and spinning (and in this case also embroidery) suggest that Aude, as someone highly skilled at cloth work, is not of a sufficiently high social class to pursue the more courtly Doon? Could her pointed advice that Aude stick to sewing be equivalent to saying she should stick to her mestier as a professional woman, and to the social rank that accompanies it?
Although we have tended to assume that the mother and daughter in this song are noble ladies, following the model of Lienor and her mother, mention of their social class is tellingly absent, along with the location of their work and any indication of the scale of their enterprise. Might they in fact both be professional embroiderers working in the employ of aristocrats? These women are said to produce highly skilled embroidery with gold thread including orfrois, which tends to indicate a level of expertise surpassing that of most elite women historically.19 And in fact, even Lienor’s own mother in the Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole is introduced by Guillaume as an ouvriere of incomparable skill who knows everything about the mestier of sewing (vv. 1131–33). But how has she acquired this knowledge? Has she at some point perhaps also worked professionally?20
There is, of course, evidence of professional embroidery as early as the mid-thirteenth century, especially in royal workshops in London and Paris. Other embroidery workshops probably existed early in the Middle Ages to produce the luxurious decorated garments that were an integral part of medieval international diplomacy as gifts and attire for kings, popes, princes, and prelates.21 Sharon Farmer has examined Parisian embroidery statutes at the close of the thirteenth century, which indicate that seventy-nine of the ninety-four embroiderers registered with the guild were women. By the fourteenth century, she explains, royal households and ecclesiastical institutions were commissioning embroiderers to produce luxury garments for their use.22 There is also documentation in the fourteenth century of in-house cousturieres at royal households.23
Perhaps the most telling literary evidence of professional embroidery by women does not take place in a courtly household at all but in an urban embroidery business in Montpellier, as Sahar Amer has shown.24 In Jean Renard’s L’Escoufle, the lesbian couple Aleis and Ysabel escape their elite existence and travel to Montpellier where they set up a highly successful embroidery business, building on the skills of working silk and gold thread that Aleis had acquired as an aristocrat. As Aelis explains to her business partner and lover, Ysabel: ‘Bien sachies que jou / referoie / Joiaus de fil d’or et / de soie; / K’il n’est feme ki tant en sache; / D’orfrois, de cainture, d’atache, / De ce faire ai je tot le pris’ (Please know that I will embroider luxury accessories with gold and silk thread, no woman knows as much as I do about gold embroidery for belts and fasteners. I am renowned for this work, vv. 5457–61). The business flourishes and the women are said to be well paid for their cloth work.25
In the chansons de toile, possible indications of employed or professional women are necessarily subtler than the descriptions provided in L’Escoufle. We might think of Bele Amelot, who appears at first, like so many of the other women singer-lovers featured in the chansons de toile, alone in her chambers singing to a beloved. And yet in this case the heroine’s only work is spinning: ‘Bele Amelot soule an chambre feloit’ (Lovely Amelot, was spinning alone in a chamber, v. 1; p. 102). She would likely be spinning flax (used to make linen), perhaps participating in the kind of economy that surrounds Guillaume and Lienor’s mother in Guillaume de Dole who uses some of the money her son sends home ‘to have her flax sown’ (por fere semer ses linieres, v. 1938). Whether the mother also pays to have her flax spun is not specified, although we are told that she uses another portion of money received from Guillaume to defer household expenses (maintenir un bon hostel, v. 1939). We should at least wonder whether Amelot, and perhaps her own mother, might both be employees of the household where they work.26
Cloth workers as ‘foreigners’
If indications of social class and status are most often lacking in the chansons de toile, so too are references to ethnicity. This makes the assertion that Bele Aye is beaten because she loves a ‘foreign soldier’ (soudoier d’autre terre) all the more intriguing. To be sure, foreign lands and their inhabitants are often cast as dangerous and threatening within the larger corpus of the chansons de toile. A knight travelling to Outremer can be the cause of the lovers’ painful separation, as in ‘Bele Ysabiauz’ (vv. 43–48; p. 109). Knights can be killed jousting ‘en autres terres’ (in far-off lands) as is the lover of Bele Doette (vv. 1–5; p. 90). Or ladies like Bele Yzabel can be delivered into the hands of ‘une estrainge gent’ (foreigners) without hope of rescue: ‘de mes amins nus secors nen atant’ (I could hope for no rescue from my friends, vv. 8–9; p. 98). The logic of the chansons de toile suggests that a ‘soudoier d’autre terre’, whether from a distant land or neighbouring region, would exist in that unknown realm beyond the pale of courtliness. By contrast, Yzabel seeks a ‘cortois chivelier’ (courtly knight) who is ‘loeiz and prisiez’ (praised and esteemed, vv. 22–23; p. 98), much as bele Amelot chooses Garin who is ‘vaillans et prous’ (valiant and capable, v. 64; p. 104) over a higher ranking duke or count, and Bele Doe waits for Doon because he is such an accomplished warrior, the flower of knighthood:
(God, what a warrior, what a knight! I will love no one but Doon. You are so competent, so prized as a knight.)
Similarly, Bele Erembours waits for Reynaud who returns from the king’s court among the prestigious Franks of France:
(When the Franks of France return from the king’s court, Renaud is in the first row.)
The very job of many of these knights, metaphorically at least, is to fight foreigners in the threatening lands of ‘outremer’, presumably confronting the kind of ‘soudoier d’autre pais’ that Bele Aye has taken as a lover. Indeed, in stark contrast to Aye’s problematic foreign soldier lover, Bele Aiglentine’s beloved is termed specifically ‘a courtly soldier, valiant Henri who is so highly esteemed’ (un cortois soudoier, le preu Henri qui tant fet a proisier, vv. 20–21; p. 162). When this knight carries Aiglentine off to ‘son pais’, she becomes not a captive but a countess: ‘si enporta la bele en son pais / et espousa: riche contesse en fist’ (he took her to his country and married her, making her a rich countess, vv. 47–48; p. 162). Bele Emmelos succeeds similarly in escaping a violent and abusive husband by fleeing to the ‘pais’ of her lover Gui (v. 49; p. 155). Bele Ydoine takes refuge from her abusive father’s beating by fleeing with Count Garsile, one of many contestants from ‘mainte terre estrange’ (many foreign lands, v. 140; p. 119), to ‘sa terre’ (his land) where he is said to treat her honourably (v. 169; p. 120).
These ‘courtly’ men from ‘d’autre pais’ do not pose the kind of threat that Bele Aye’s foreign soudoier does because they are foreigners made over in a courtly mould. They are praised and sought after, not unlike Conrad, who emerges in this narrative as a German emperor in name only. His generosity is said to be boundless (vv. 88–91, 130–31, 150–51) in terms often applied to King Arthur and the legendary Alexander the Great before him, and Conrad is further compared to the French courtly heroes Tristan and Lanval (vv. 5507, 5511). Although Conrad is known for protecting merchants and travellers and for facilitating the economic prosperity of townspeople and peasants (vv. 593–604), he does so while living in a courtly dream world composed only of nobles:
This emperor, an honorable man, reserved positions of authority for God-loving noblemen who cherished his honor and authority as much as their own eyes.
(Cist empereres, cist prodom / lor fu toz tens adés eschis / De vavassors fesoit baillis / qui aiment Deu et criement honte, / qui s’onor et quanqu’a lui monte / li gardoient come lor oils, vv. 587–92.)
Conrad, the ‘noble prince who lives well, maintains and rules his lands so wisely’ (Bien vit li hauz princes et regne / qui si sagement tient sa terre, vv. 619–20), is especially blind to the uncourtly and foreign-influenced economics of cloth work that Lienor’s song about Bele Aye lays bare.
Indeed, in an important sense, many of the women working costly fabrics in the chansons de toile—especially those who sew threads of silk and gold— participate in bringing a telling element of foreignness into the very centre of the courtly world. The pailes, orfrois, and samit they work are marked specifically in the narrative portions of Guillaume de Dole, as they are typically in Old French romance texts, as ‘imported’ or ‘foreign’.27 The guests attending Emperor Conrad’s festivities wear tunics and cloaks ‘of samite, cloth from overseas, or rich gold silk from Baghdad embroidered with birds’ (de samiz, de dras d’outremer / de baudequins d’or a oiseaus, vv. 233–36). When the Fair Lienor arrives in Mainz, she marvels at the entire city bedecked with ‘fine cloth’ while ‘the gables of the houses were draped in expensive cendal and Baghdadi silks, ermine, and gold brocade’ (vv. 4181–86). When Lienor and Conrad wed, guests at the wedding wear no end of foreign-derived fabrics:
(No one had ever seen so much Baghdad-style brocaded silk, so much light silk cloth with patterned roundels, so much brocaded silk, and so much heavy silk cloth.)
In these examples the foreign is understood to be enthralling and magical rather than threatening.
I have argued elsewhere that women and women’s cloth work in courtly texts often create rich sites of cultural crossing between the Christian West, Byzantium, and the Muslim world. It is often through fictional depictions of women and women’s silk work in particular that the threat of the ‘eastern’, ‘Saracen’, or ‘foreign’ is transformed in Old French romance texts into a highly valued mark of Frenchness itself.28 Women’s cloth work in the chansons de toile can perform a similar function.
Indeed, from the point of view of the women singers in the chansons de toile, the greatest threat to court life is posed, not by attack from a foreign enemy, but by domestic abuse within the castle walls. Emmelos’ mean and evil husband beats and disfigures her (la bat et laidoie, v. 3; p. 154) until her flesh turns blue (v. 25; p. 154) because she has a lover, much as the malz mariz in ‘En Un Vergier’ mistreats and disfigures the unnamed ‘bele’ in that song until she becomes blue and discoloured: ‘Tant la bati q’ele en fu perse et tainte’ (He beat her so long that she became blue and discoloured, v. 15; p. 86).
In ‘Bele Ydoine’ it is the father himself who beats his daughter until he has stained all her white flesh red: ‘que toute sa char blanche li fait en vermeil taindre’ (v. 72; p. 116). She, like Bele Aye, loves a foreign soldier (vv. 15–16, p. 114). And yet, this heroine describes her foreign lover at length as utterly without baseness (ainc n’ot vilenie, v. 31; p. 115). In fact he exhibits in her account every sign of courtliness that any ‘king’s son’ preferred by her father might display. Garsile, she claims is ‘douz et franz, courtois et debonaire’ (kind and noble, courtly and charming, v. 36; p. 115), and later ‘le bel, le preu, le sage’ (handsome, valiant, and wise, v. 123; p. 118). The father’s beating of Ydoine appears then an unwarranted punishment for his courtly daughter: ‘Ydoine la courtoise’ (v. 101; p. 117).
In Bele Aye’s case, by contrast, the ‘love from another land’ is not described by Bele Aye herself. An unnamed voice details the foreign lover without mention of a single courtly attribute, much as Bele Aye herself is not characterised as noble in any way. She appears rather to be an outsider in terms of both class and amorous behaviour, a foreigner in the sense of not belonging to the dominant court culture, and perhaps even a foreigner in the sense of being someone ‘from elsewhere’.
Physical abuse
We might compare her to the 300 exploited and abused silkworkers in Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain, women who work the same luxury fabrics that we find in the chansons de toile: various kinds of silk, cloth of gold, and orfrois, but on a much larger scale of commercial production.29 The 300 captives, who actually differ less from courtly ladies than one might expect—they could be ‘beles et gentes’ (v. 5228), we are told, if only they were not mistreated—are also said specifically to be beaten to excess (tant sont acorees, v. 5205). But why?
We know that thirty new workers are sent every year, through no fault of their own, as a tribute payment to the lord of a far-off land (Yvain, vv. 5275–79). They are pooled together in what appears to be a kind of great hall-turned-workhouse (v. 5184), occupying what seems to be part of a larger castle in King Arthur’s realm (v. 5264). In this case there is no question that the silkworkers are paid—if vastly underpaid—employees (vv. 5298–313). Most important for our purposes, they toil under the control of an overseer who abuses them physically, economically, and sexually, as the women explain:
(The man we work for has become rich from our service while we live in poverty. We stay awake a good part of the night and all day long to prevent him from threatening to maim our members while we are at rest. For this reason we dare not rest.)
Their liberator Yvain is described tellingly, in stark contrast to the evil master, as a ‘biax mestre’ (good master, v. 5211). But until the women are freed, they live ‘a honte, … et a dolor et a meseise’ (in shame, pain, and discomfort, vv. 5286–87) because, although they produce one of the most valuable commodities in the Western medieval economy, these women workers are vulnerable to physical abuse and sexual predation. That is the story they tell the ‘biax mestre’ Yvain: that whereas their work is highly valued, their lives are not. Imported into the Arthurian world from a cryptic ‘elsewhere’ (vv. 5251, 5801), they are abused and beaten, it seems, simply because they are workers.30
I have argued in Sea of Silk that this highly anomalous scene tucked into the courtly world of King Arthur’s knights might in fact be a kind of narrative keyhole revealing working conditions not in France but in the neighbouring silkworks in Palermo, taken over from their Muslim founders by the Norman kings in the twelfth century.31 The song ‘Bele Aye’ may also give us an unexpected glimpse into the plight of foreign women cloth workers, abused and mistreated in this instance by a different sort of evil master in a less commercial setting. Aye is clearly working expensive silk. But where? And for whom? We should remember in this regard that the silkworkers depicted in Yvain only fall victim to exploitation and physical harm once they enter the world of courtliness. They are fictive versions of foreign workers who have been transposed into the Arthurian landscape.
Lienor’s song about Bele Aye allows us to see yet another aspect of this deeper and darker world of cloth work that subtends courtly extravagance. Reading the chansons de toile in relation to Bele Aye’s story helps us grasp the wide variations among the singer-sewers figured in these songs. Whereas some of the highly skilled working women embroider as a pastime, others, whether paid or not, can cut and sew whole garments. Still others spin. Some may be foreign, others are abused, but all are part of the production of textiles that define the French elite classes in the world of courtly romance.
If this is the story that Lienor’s song about Bele Aye opens up for us, it is important to situate it in relation to the story of Lienor’s own assault later in the tale. At first this courtly heroine seems to hold little in common with Bele Aye, resembling instead the lovely Aelis who is ‘beautifully dressed’ (vv. 310–15, 318–22, 532–37).32 Yet as the tale unfolds, Lienor becomes a young woman alone, helpless, and overcome with weeping, a woman whose plight reminds us increasingly of the beleaguered Bele Aye. Lienor’s plight results initially from the false accusation levelled by Conrad’s jealous seneschal that Lienor is not a virgin. It is worsened, however, by a relentless string of verbal attacks, first from her brother Guillaume and then from his nephew, accusations that create the rhythmic effect of a prolonged verbal beating. After Guillaume asserts that Lienor has been a faithless whore, vile and rotten, calling her ‘that slut’ who has disgraced us (la jaianz, la jaieus, v. 3807; la bordeliere, v. 3809), his nephew continues the assault, claiming ‘she must be destroyed … I’ll kill her with my own two hands’ (vv. 3833; 3835). He repeats the violent threat subsequently to Lienor’s mother, calling Lienor a ‘whore’ of ‘vile conduct’ (vv. 3921–23) whom he hopes to kill with his own two hands (vv. 3942–43). And the attack continues as he calls her a ‘faithless woman who dishonoured’ Guillaume (v. 3959) and who should die ‘a most horrible death’ (v. 3958), a seductress whose beautiful long hair has so ruined the family’s standing that he, Guillaume’s nephew, ‘would like to have taken his sword and chopped it all off’ (vv. 3962–64). Finally, Lienor, known up to this point as ‘the most capable of young women’ (v. 4072), is forced to prove her virginity in a public trial where she resembles a beaten woman. She bows her head, sighs from time to time (vv. 4638–39), and assumes a pose strikingly similar to that of Bele Aye as hot tears (de chaudes lermes, v. 4637) run down her face.33
Everything changes, however, when Lienor begins to speak, rebutting the seneschal’s claims by brashly accusing him of sexual assault. Although the charge is part of a fiction that Lienor invents to prove her innocence, its terms are significant. She asserts that the seneschal assaulted her and took her virginity in a place where women, like Bele Aye, are vulnerable to various kinds of abuse, that is, in the sewing room:
(He came, as it happened, to the place where I was sewing. He badly mistreated and dishonoured me by taking my virginity.)
We have already encountered the assumption that women who are sewing provide potential sexual prey for knights seeking ‘pleasure’, in the passage we considered earlier from the Roman d’Enéas.
In terms of the Guillaume de Dole, more specifically, mention of the ‘place’ where Lienor was sewing carries us back, not only to the room where Aye was sewing before being beaten, but also to the site where Lienor herself sat embroidering with her mother when Guillaume brought Conrad’s messenger to hear her sing the chanson de toile about Bele Aye. Guillaume, we are told, ‘took him [the messenger, Nicole] to see his mother and Lienor … in her private rooms’ (Sa mere et bele Lienor / le maine en la chambre veoir; my emphasis, vv. 1116–17). And in that encounter too, Lienor was subjected to force, although in a different and more subtle way. Whereas Lienor’s mother ‘loved to sing and did so willingly’ (vv. 1146–47) at her son’s request, Lienor did not respond when Guillaume suggested that she sing in turn (vv. 1170–72). She remained utterly silent until her mother explained that Lienor had no choice in the matter: ‘Il vos estuet feste et honor fere / au vallet l’empereor’ (You cannot refuse to do honour to the emperor’s messenger and entertain him, vv. 1178–80).
Conclusion
Lienor cannot refuse to please the emperor, but she can sing of Bele Aye and thus bring to his attention and to ours the untold story of women cloth workers in aristocratic households who, while easily confused with courtly ladies, can also suffer at the hand of an evil maistre and be beaten without cause. Lienor’s song about Bele Aye reveals the extent to which the decorative embroidery work done by elite women in the chansons de toile is shadowed at every turn by the less visible work of an exploited population of unpaid or underpaid women who create the luxurious and putatively ‘foreign’ garments that noble men and women wear.
Notes
1I would like to thank Sahar Amer for her insightful comments on an earlier version of this essay.
For a detailed analysis of the range of songs included under the rubric of chansons de toile and the many challenges they pose for medievalists, see E. Jane Burns, Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 88–118; and on female subjectivity in particular, 262–63 nn. 10–12.
2For a detailed account of scholarship on this complex genre of women’s songs, see Burns, Courtly Love Undressed, 92–94. Key studies include Pierre Bec, La lyrique française au Moyen Age (XIIe–XIIIe siècles), 2 vols. (Poitiers: Picard, 1977), 1:47–136; and his ‘Trobairitz et chansons de femme: contribution à la connaissance du lyrisme féminin au Moyen Âge’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 22 (1979): 235–62; Pierre Jonin, ‘Les types féminins dans les chansons de toile’, Romania 91 (1970): 433–66; Edmond Faral, ‘Les chansons de toile ou chansons d’histoire’, Romania 69 (1946–47): 433–62; Michel Zink, ed., Les chansons de toile (Paris: Champion, 1977), 3–71; Maureen Barry McCann Boulton, The Song in the Story: Lyric Insertions in French Narrative Fiction, 1200–1400 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993).
3Burns, Courtly Love Undressed, 100–18. From this perspective, only three songs of the twenty-two-song corpus generally designated as chansons de toile do not exhibit the otherwise prevalent feature of women’s work: Bele Ysabiauz, a lament staged wholly from the male lover’s point of view, although it contains a scenario of the mal mariée; Or vienent Pasques les beles en avril, actually a reverdie classed as a chanson de toile because its refrain cites Aigline and Guis as mutually satisfied lovers; and Lou Samedi a soir fat la semaine (Gaiete et Oriour), marked similarly by a refrain that records sweet sleep between lovers.
4Quotations of the romance text are from Jean Renart, Le Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole, ed. Félix Lecoy (Paris: Champion, 1962). Translations are mine. For the complete text in English, see Patricia Terry and Nancy Vine Durling, trans., The Romance of the Rose or Guillaume de Dole (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993). The inserted songs include: Fille et la mere se sieent a l’orfrois, Siet soit bele Aye as piez sa male maistre, and Bele Aiglentine en roial chamberine. For details about the surviving manuscript in which Renart’s romance is located (Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Reg. lat. 1725, fols. 68va–98va), see Lecoy, cited above.
5Bele Beatris is found in a collection attributed to Audefroi le Batard; Bele Yolanz en chambre koie and Bele Yolanz en ses chambres seoit, Quant Vient en mai (Erembors), and Bele Amelot soule an chambre feloit, are in the anonymous Chansonnier de Saint-Germain-des-prés. For details about manuscripts containing these chansons, see Zink, ed., Les chansons de toile, 76–102, 107–53.
6Zink, ed., Les chansons de toile, 23.
7Gace Brulé, vv. 844–852; Le Chastelain de Couci, vv. 923–30; along with a selection from the troubadour known for ‘love from afar’, Jaufré Rudel, vv. 1301–07. For other songs by known male poets that appear later in the romance, see Terry and Durling, trans., Guillaume de Dole, 111–14.
8Texts of the sewing songs are from Zink, ed., Les chansons de toile. Translations are mine.
9For examples, see Eglal Doss-Quinby et al., eds., Songs of the Women Trouveres (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 33, 47.
10Women are beaten in ‘Bele Ydoine’, ‘En Un Vergier’, ‘Bele Emmelos’, and ‘Bele Aye’.
11The description is in keeping with the heroine Fresne’s assertion that embroidery is the most traditional occupation for noble women in medieval romance. See Renaut, Galeran de Bretagne, ed. Lucien Foulet (Paris: Champion, 1925), v. 3881.
12In fact, as the tale develops we see that Lienor also crucially uses decorative embroidery to exculpate herself from false legal charges. See E. Jane Burns, Sea of Silk: A Textile Geography of Women’s Work in Medieval French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 83–94.
13Although I suggested in Courtly Love Undressed that there was only a remote possibility that the ‘male maistre’ might have delivered the beating (267 n. 53), I think now, in light of evidence presented in this essay, that we should reconsider that possibility.
14See, for example, Sharon Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), who explains the simultaneous familiarity and fear of ‘foreignness’ characteristic of many Old French literary texts.
16Chrétien de Troyes, Cligès, ed. Alexandre Micha (Paris: Champion, 1957).
17For an extended discussion of how this singer-heroine works at sewing and at loving simultaneously, see Burns, Courtly Love Undressed, 90–91.
18Enéas: roman du XIIe siècle, ed. J.J. Salverda de Grave (Paris: Champion, 1925).
19See Kay Staniland, Embroiderers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 8.
Staniland cites exceptional noble women embroiderers in England.
20Categorisations of the social class of Guillaume de Dole’s family fluctuate throughout the narrative. Although Guillaume has creditors, he and Lienor are described generally as noble and wealthy. Both are said to be ‘highborn’ (v. 749; vv. 1371, 3025) and Gui ‘lives very well, like a great lord’ (vv. 1434–36). Nonetheless, Lienor’s marriage to Emperor Conrad would constitute a move up the social ladder for all members of her family (vv. 5282–83, 5313). Conrad asserts, for example, that he can rightfully marry Lienor because, based on her beauty alone, she ‘could be a queen or an empress’ (vv. 812–13), although she is not from a royal family. The absence of a father, making Lienor an ‘orphan’, complicates the family’s social standing further (v. 4068).
21Staniland, Embroiderers, 5.
22Sharon Farmer, ‘Biffes, Tiretaines et Aumonieres: The Role of Paris in the International Textile Markets of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries’, in Medieval Clothing and Textiles, 2, ed. Robin Netherton and Gale R. Owen-Crocker (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), 85.
23Francois Maillard, ed., Comptes royaux, 1314–1328, 2 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1961), 2:161 (Comptes de l’argenterie 1317) notes Jehanne la Cousturière (no. 14098), Flourie la Cousturière (no. 14097), and Erembour de Monstereal (no. 14096). L. Douet-d’Arcq, ed., Nouveau recueil de comptes de l’argenterie des roys de France (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1874), 158 notes Margot Bourcière, cousturière du Roy, and Robinette Brisemiche, cousturière de la Royne. My thanks to Sharon Farmer for bringing these references to my attention.
24Sahar Amer, Crossing Borders: Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 121–37.
25Amer, Crossing Borders, 126. Interestingly, the romance of Guillaume de Dole, while offering no indication of the possible remuneration of women cloth workers, does provide two examples of payment for women singers. Guillaume gives Aelis, the innkeeper’s daughter, ‘a silver-trimmed belt to reward her for her singing’ (vv. 1841–45), much as he pays minstrels at other moments in the tale with luxury garments. Later, Lienor encounters a group of ‘minstrels from many lands who are trying to earn a living in Mainz’, one of whom is a woman from Troyes named Doete (vv. 4564–66).
26If so, they would seem to be well remunerated since Amelot’s mother gives gold and silver to Amelot’s lover, Garin, at the end of the song to enable the couple to wed (vv. 67–69).
27Burns, Sea of Silk, 184–94.
28Burns, Sea of Silk, 2–4.
29For a fuller analysis of this important scene, see Burns, Sea of Silk, 37–69 and esp. 44–48.
30It is never made clear exactly who is responsible for holding the women silkworkers captive. See Burns, Sea of Silk, 55.
31Burns, Sea of Silk, 41–59.
32Lienor, whose splendid attire is described at length before her trial (vv. 4350–8478), is also said to have an astonishing number of clothes for an orphan maiden (vv. 4068–69). Even more specifically, Aelis stands in as an obvious cipher for Lienor in the song Conrad sings about the ‘Fair Aelis’ in whom he has found his ‘heart’s desire’ (j’ai amors a ma volente; I have the love I desire, v. 5441).
33The image of Lienor overcome by tears is prolonged for several pages. See vv. 4709 and 4765.
Select bibliography
Amer, Sahar. Crossing Borders: Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
Bec, Pierre. La lyrique française au Moyen Âge (XIIe–XIIIe siècles). 2 vols. Poitiers: Picard, 1977.
——— ‘Trobairitz et chansons de femme: contribution à la connaissance du lyrisme féminin au Moyen Âge’. Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 22 (1979): 235–62.
Boulton, Maureen, and Barry McCann. The Song in the Story: Lyric Insertions in French Narrative Fiction, 1200–1400. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.
Burns, E. Jane. Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
——— Sea of Silk: A Textile Geography of Women’s Work in Medieval French Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.
Doss-Quinby, Eglal, Joan Tasker Grimbert, Wendy Pfeffer, and Elizabeth Aubrey, eds. Songs of the Women Trouveres. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
Faral, Edmond. ‘Les chansons de toile ou chansons d’histoire’. Romania 69 (1946–47): 433–62.
Farmer, Sharon. ‘Biffes, Tiretaines et Aumonieres: The Role of Paris in the International Textile Markets of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries’. In Medieval Clothing and Textiles, 2, ed. Robin Netherton and Gale R. Owen-Crocker, 73–89. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006.
Jonin, Pierre. ‘Les types féminins dans les chansons de toile’. Romania 91 (1970): 433–66.
Kinoshita, Sharon. Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
Maillard, Francois, ed. Comptes royaux, 1314–1328. 2 vols. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1961.
Renart, Jean. Le Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole. Ed. Félix Lecoy. Paris: Champion, 1962.
Renaut. Galeran de Bretagne. Ed. Lucien Foulet. Paris: Champion, 1925.
Staniland, Kay. Embroiderers. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.
Terry, Patricia, and Nancy Vine Durling, trans. The Romance of the Rose or Guillaume de Dole. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.
Zink, Michel, ed. Les chansons de toile. Paris: Champion, 1977.