There is yet one other important character in which I should wish to introduce the lady of Provence to the gentle reader. It has already been pointed out that to her influence the refinement of manners and the high conception of the duties of gallantry in the early middle ages are mainly due. But nowhere did her gentle sway exercise a more irresistible power than in that truest domain of womanhood—love. This love was little restrained in Provence by the legitimate bounds of marriage, but it was not altogether lawless for that reason. There were certain rules of conduct instinctively felt rather than definitely formulated, but which, nevertheless, no lady or gallant cavalier could transgress with impunity. Discretion, for instance, was a demand most strictly enforced by these self-imposed laws of the loving community. No lady of good feeling would have accepted the services of a knight who had failed in this respect to a former mistress. Neither was it thought compatible with correct principles for a lady to deprive another lady of her lover. Inquiries into the antecedents of intended cicisbeos were of frequent occurrence, and only when a troubadour could prove his ‘being off with the old love’ could he hope for a favourable reception of his vows. We indeed know of one case at least where a lady, although herself desirous of the services of a poet, effected his reconciliation with a rival beauty. But this loyal feeling did not extend to that bugbear and scapegoat of gallant society in Provence—the husband. No amount of verbal falsehood or hypocrisy was thought unjustifiable in the endeavour to dupe his well-founded suspicion. His resentment of injuries received was, on the other hand, punished by the general interdict of polite society. Such, at least, is the no doubt somewhat high-coloured picture drawn by Provençal poets and romancers.

To the great influence of noble ladies on public opinion, and to the esprit de corps evinced by their recorded words and doings, we have to trace back the general and time-honoured idea of the ladies’ tribunal, or ‘court of love.’ To us in England Chaucer’s poem of that title has sanctioned the name.⁠[30] A prettier picture moreover can hardly be imagined than that drawn by many old and modern writers of an assembly of beautiful women sitting in judgment on guilty lovers, and gravely deciding knotty points of the amorous code. The slight tinge of pedantry in such a picture only adds to its mediæval quaintness. The only drawback is that, like so many other pretty and quaint pictures, it has no counterpart in the reality of things; not as far, at least, as the south of France and the times of the troubadours are concerned. Friederich Diez, the lately deceased great philologist to whom the history of Romance literature and languages owes so much, has once and for ever destroyed the fable of the ‘courts of love’ in connection with the troubadours. This was done in 1825; but ever since the uprooted notion has gone on producing fresh and powerful shoots in the fertile soil of periodical and generally unscientific literature. It is, indeed, one of the few dainties of genuine or pseudo-Provençal composition which have been frequently and ad nauseam dished up to the general reader of this country.

The state of the case is briefly this:—

In 1817 the well-known French scholar, M. Raynouard, published his large collection of Provençal poems, entitled ‘Choix des Poésies originales des Troubadours.’ In the second volume of this work he has inserted a long and elaborate inquiry of his own into the subject of the ‘courts of love.’ He determines the period of their duration as the time from the middle of the twelfth to the end of the fourteenth century or thereabouts, and gives a somewhat minute description of the legal and polite customs observed at these extraordinary tribunals. According to him the members of the court were noble ladies guided by a written code of love, their decisions again making precedent. An appeal to a different tribunal was admissible. The parties had, as a rule, to plead their cause in person; at other times, however, written documents—affidavits, as we should say—were accepted, the latter frequently taking the form of tensos. To these tensos, therefore, we ought to look for some confirmation of these statements; and, according to Raynouard, such confirmation is forthcoming in more than sufficient abundance. It is, as we know, the custom in these songs of contention for the two disputants to refer their case to the arbitration of third parties. ‘This tenso will last for ever,’ says one troubadour, after having exhausted his arguments. ‘Let us take our cause to the Dauphin; he will decide and conclude it in peace.’ But here is the rub. The umpires mentioned on this and many other occasions are always one or two, more rarely three, individuals, generally friends of the contending parties, or else well-meaning and courteous persons, men or women, who decide according to the rules of common sense, or quote the opinions of celebrated troubadours by way of rule and guidance. Not once is a ‘court of love’ mentioned in these tensos, nor indeed in any other poem, by a genuine troubadour, The expression as well as the thing was unknown to them. Both belong to a much later time.

The period of spontaneous production in the literature of most nations is followed by that of classification. Byzantine scholarship and Athenian tragedy belong to different phases of intellectual life. When the poetry of the troubadours began to decay, grammarians and metrical scholars sprang up, and artificial poetry flourished at the Jeux Floraux. In the same sense it may be said that ‘courts of love’ could not exist while love itself was alive. The laws of gallantry were inscribed in the hearts of ladies and troubadours while the brilliant, buoyant life of Southern France was in its acme. When this civilisation was crushed, when these beautiful times lived but in the remembrance of a few, it might become necessary to preserve in dead formulas and codes the remnants of a better past. But even in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the south of France seems not to have been a favourable soil for the ‘courts of love,’ as certain amateur societies of gallant and literary ladies and gentlemen then began to be called. The chief witness on the subject, Andreas Capellanus, who quotes several sentences delivered by these curiæ dominarum, seems to refer chiefly to the north of France.⁠[31] Another Frenchman, Martial d’Auvergne, an advocate in Paris, has introduced the technical language of the law into these amorous discussions; much to the edification of his contemporaries (he lived in the fifteenth century), to judge from the number of editions published of his work.

The sober truth arrived at by these and many other considerations too long to mention may be summed up thus: ‘Courts of love,’ as established tribunals with written codes, are altogether fictitious. Amateur societies of that name occur in the late middle ages, but chiefly in the north of France. To the troubadours the name and essence of ‘courts of love’ were entirely unknown.