Against Folquet of Marseilles scores of troubadours might be named, who boldly espoused the cause of their country and of liberty against Frenchmen and priests. The opposition to the encroachments of the latter was of course not confined to Provence. The weaknesses of the clergy were known equally well to trouvères and troubadours, to Walther von der Vogelweide and the German minnesingers, and to Chaucer, and the author of ‘Piers the Ploughman.’ But nowhere was the conflict between clerical and temporal powers more bitter, nowhere were the questions at stake more important and more universally felt to be such, than in the South of France. Moreover, the satire of many of the troubadours received additional sting from personal injury. The prolonged siege which Guy of Cavaillon had to sustain in his castle was not likely to incline him favourably towards his oppressors, and the furious onslaught on the avarice of the French conquerors from the pen of Boniface de Castellane is evidently founded on bitterest and most immediate experience. Neither is there cause for wonder that the gentry in black gowns and white hoods, mentioned by Guillem de Montanhagol in his powerful sirventes against the cruelties and folly of the Inquisition, were not an altogether lovely sight in the eyes of that poet.

Amongst the troubadours prominently engaged in the great struggle of their time, two distinct types may be recognised. One is the poetic freelance impatient of all restraint, and therefore doubly incensed at the oppression of both moral and religious liberties, the word ‘liberty,’ in his parlance, being not unfrequently a synonym of ‘licence.’ A man of this stamp was Guillem Figueira, the hater of priests. ‘He was,’ the manuscript says, ‘of Toulouse, the son of a tailor, and a tailor himself. When the French took Toulouse, he went to live in Lombardy, and he knew well how to make songs and how to sing them; and he became a joglar among the citizens. He was not a man to get on with barons or gentle-folks, but he made himself most agreeable to loose women and landlords and pothouse-keepers; and whenever he saw a good courtier come near him he grew wroth and melancholy, and at once he set about humiliating him.’

This by no means flattering portrait ought to be received with caution; maybe it was drawn by one of the ‘good courtiers’ who had experienced the poet’s cynical humour. A cynic Guillem no doubt was, a lover of low-life realism, defying polite society among his boon companions of the tavern, a genius akin to Rutebœuf, and Villon, and Rabelais. But there is nothing debased or debauched in his poetry, as far as we can judge by the specimens remaining to us, although the unreserved violence of his invective is remarkable even amongst the works of those keenest of satirists, the troubadours. One of his sirventeses is noticeable by the word ‘Rome,’ uttered with the emphasis of hatred at the beginning of every stanza. In it the Church is held responsible for an infinitude of political and moral crimes, and the climax of invective is reached in the final outburst of angry passion.

‘Rome, with wily prudence thou layest thy snares, and many a vile morsel thou devourest in spite of the hungry. Thou hast the semblance of the lamb, thy countenance is so innocent, but in thy heart thou art a rabid wolf, a crowned snake engendered by a viper, wherefore the devil greets thee as the friend of his heart.’

It is a curious fact that the Church on this occasion was valiantly defended by a lady, Gomonde of Montpelier, who pays the furious poet in his own coin, and threatens him with the death of the heretic.

Another sirventes by Guillem directed against the vices of the clergy is marked by the same immoderate language, but a foundation of truth is unmistakably at the bottom of his extravagant structure of abuse. The following stanza, for instance, is eminently characteristic of orthodox tactics:—

‘If you say a word against them (the priests), they accuse you, and you find yourself excommunicated. If you refuse to pay, there is no peace or friendship to be hoped from them. Holy Virgin, Lady Mary, let me see the day when I need no longer go in fear of them.’

A man of a very different stamp from the well-meaning but somewhat inconsiderate and irresponsible Guillem Figueira, was the great Peire Cardinal, who may represent the second and much higher type of the anti-clerical troubadour. A biographical notice of about twenty lines, signed by one Michael de la Tor, is all the information we possess of the poet’s life. According to this sketch, Peire Cardinal was born at Puy Notre Dame, in the province of Velay, or Veillac, as the old manuscript calls it. He was of good parentage, ‘the son of a knight and a lady,’ and was in his childhood destined for the Church. ‘And when he came to man’s estate he was attracted by the vanity of the world, for he found himself gay and handsome and young. And he made many beautiful poems and songs; few canzos, but many sirventeses fine and excellent. And in these sirventeses he gave many good reasons and examples for those who rightly understand them; and he greatly reproached the false clergy, as is shown by his sirventeses. And he went to the courts of kings and gentle barons with his joglar, who sang his sirventeses.’ According to the same account, Peire Cardinal lived up to nearly a hundred years. Another remarkable circumstance told of him is his knowledge of reading and writing—an accomplishment by no means common amongst troubadours—which he owed to his early training for the Church.

Peire Cardinal is the unrivalled master of the sirventes, in its most important forms—the personal, the political, the moral, and the religious. The last two only concern us here more immediately. But a few remarks are necessary to indicate the poet’s manner and his general conception of the world. This conception is melancholy to a degree. Like most great masters of satire and humour, Peire Cardinal is a confirmed pessimist. The world appears to him as one vast conglomeration of selfishness and vice—a madhouse, inhabited by fools, whose remaining sense is just sufficient for them to recognise and hate a man of genius. This moody philosophy he has embodied in the original and striking treatment of a well-known story, which deserves our particular attention as one of the very few instances of narrative illustration in the poems of the troubadours.

‘There was a city,’ Peire Cardinal says, ‘I don’t know where, in which rain fell one day of such a kind, that all the inhabitants who were touched by it lost their reason. All went mad but one, who happened to be asleep in his house at the time. This one, when he woke, rose, and, as the rain had ceased, went out amongst the people, who were all raving mad. One had his clothes on, the other was naked; one was spitting up to the sky, another threw stones, another logs of wood, another tore his gown.... One thought he was a king, and put on noble airs; another jumped over benches. Some threatened, others cursed; some were crying, some laughing, others talking they knew not what about, others making grimaces. He who had kept his sense was much astonished, for he saw they were mad; and he looked up and down to see if he could discover any one reasonable, but in vain: there was none. And he was greatly surprised at them, but much more were they at him when they saw he remained reasonable. They were sure he must be mad, as he failed to do as they did.’

The surprise of the fools soon is converted into rage. They knock him down, and trample on him; they push him, and pull him, and beat him; at last, he is glad to escape into his house, thrashed, covered with mud, and more dead than alive.

‘This fable,’ the poet exclaims, ‘depicts the world and all who inhabit it; and our age is the city chokeful of madmen. The highest wisdom is to love and fear God, and to obey his commandments. But now that wisdom is lost, the rain has fallen: covetousness has come, and pride and viciousness, which have attacked all the people. And if God honours one amongst them, the others think him mad, and revile him, for God’s wisdom appears to them folly. But the friend of God, wherever he be, knows them to be the fools, for they have lost the wisdom of God; and they think him mad, because he has abandoned the wisdom of the world.’

These are words of a man of genius, who has experienced the buffetings of adverse fortune, and the scorn of a world incapable or unwilling to fathom his depth. Morbid words, if the reader likes, but forcibly uttered, and instinct with a noble disdain of the fashions and follies of the day. But Peire Cardinal’s grievances were not of a narrow, egotistic kind. His poems reflect the sad time in which he lived, and the national disaster which he witnessed with deepest indignation. The avarice and selfishness of clergy and laity, the want of patriotic feeling, the barbarism prevailing amongst the nobles, and other evils fostered by those troublous times of internal and external warfare, are the favourite subjects of the poet’s satire. It need hardly be added that his sympathies were all with the South against the North. Raimon VI. is his chosen hero, whom he encourages with his songs, and in whose temporary success he rejoices. ‘At Toulouse,’ he sings, ‘there is Raimon the Count; may God protect him! As water flows from the fountain, so chivalry comes from him. Against the worst of men—nay, against the whole world—he defends himself. Frenchmen and priests cannot resist him. To the good he is humble and condescending; the wicked he destroys.’

In his accusations of the clergy, Peire is violent and sweeping; almost as violent as Guillem Figueira himself. But his censure almost always proceeds from a general motive; the difference between the two is that between a scholar and politician and a pamphleteer. Peire’s language, when he speaks of the domineering propensities of the priests, is as bitter as can be imagined, but his anger is founded on historic considerations of deepest import. It is the decay of the temporal power he deplores. ‘Formerly, kings and emperors, dukes, counts and comtors⁠[29] and knights used to govern the world; but now priests have usurped its dominion with rapine and treachery and hypocrisy, with force and persuasion. They are incensed if everything is not conceded to them, and it must be done sooner or later.’ In another sirventes, Peire Cardinal alludes to the amiable habit of the priests—also mentioned by Guillem Figueira—of calling everyone a Vaudois or heretic who dares to resist their encroachments.

One of the most forcible of Peire’s songs is directed against the avarice and covetousness of the priests, whom he compares to vultures scenting a dead body. In the same sirventes we meet with one of those grand reflections which raise Peire Cardinal from the level of the mere satirist to that of the great moral poet. ‘Do you know,’ he says, ‘what becomes of the riches of those who have unjustly acquired them? A mighty robber will come, who will leave them nothing. His name is Death; he will prostrate them, and entangle them in a net four yards in length, and they will be sent to a house of misery.’

It remains to point out one more feature of Peire’s works, which distinguishes them from those of all his brother poets. The troubadours, it has been said, had a wise and beneficial horror of theology. There is, as far as the present writer is aware, not a trace in their works of the slightest interest taken by any of them in the scholastic controversies of Catholics and heretics. The only exception to this rule is a sirventes by Peire Cardinal, to which short reference has previously been made. Peire, as has been mentioned before, had received a learned education; he could read and write, and was evidently not without considerable claims to scholarship, according to the standard of his age. He was no doubt well versed in the absurd and hideously realistic conceptions of hell and purgatory with which mediæval theologians and preachers loved to fill the imagination of their audiences. His poem reads like a gentle satire, from the poet’s point of view, on their barren discussions. The boldness of his conception and language is at the same time astonishing in a writer of the thirteenth century,

‘I will begin a new sirventes,’ he says, ‘which I shall repeat on the day of judgment to Him who made and fashioned me out of nothing. If He reproaches me of anything, and wishes to give me over to damnation, I shall say: ‘Lord, have mercy on me, for I have struggled with the wicked world all my life; now save me by your grace from torment.’

‘And His whole court shall wonder when they hear my plea. For I say that He is unjust towards His own if He delivers them to eternal punishment. For he who loses what he might gain cannot complain of his loss. Therefore He ought to be gentle and indulgent so as to retain the souls of sinners.

‘His gate ought not to be guarded, and St. Peter has little honour through being the porter. Every soul that wishes ought to be allowed to enter smiling. For that court is little to my liking where one laughs while others cry; and however great the king may be we shall find fault with him if he refuses us entrance.

‘I will not despair, and on you, O Lord, my good hope is founded. Therefore you must save my soul and body, and comfort me in the hour of death. And I will propose to you a good alternative. Either send me back to where I came from on the day of my birth, or forgive me my faults. For I should not have committed them if I had not been born.’

And with this poem, which teaches a deep truth in a half-playful manner, we must take leave of Peire Cardinal. His character is of an elevated type, and his gifts would do honour to any literature. He is undoubtedly the foremost representative of moral poetry amongst the troubadours.