THE ROMANCE OF LE HEM

The Romance of Le Hem is a detailed account of a festival of jousting held in October 1278 at Le Hem, now the village of Hem-Monacu, on the banks of the Somme to the east of Amiens in north-eastern France. It was written by an eyewitness, the otherwise unknown Sarrasin, based on ‘the notes I took’. That he intended from the outset to write the account is suggested both by his taking of detailed notes and by the maiden Forteche, while watching the jousts alongside him, urging him to ‘record the good and omit the bad. All good, true knights will love and cherish you for it.’ And immediately afterwards he is commissioned to write his book by the presiding ‘queen’, the sister of the lord of Longueval, with payment guaranteed by the lord of Bazentin, and Sarrasin pledges to deliver the completed work ‘before the year is out’. There is no reason to suppose that he was late.

So, invaluably, we have a detailed, eyewitness record probably written within weeks of the events described. But on first reading, Sarrasin's account may seem anything but down-to-earth and reliable. It may in fact strike the first-time reader as downright fanciful. Written in the verse-form – octosyllabic rhyming couplets – of many an Arthurian romance, it not only introduces early on a symbolic figure, the personification of Courtesy, giving guidance to the lords of Bazentin and Longueval in their organisation of their jousting festival, but rapidly interrupts proceedings to tell a story – for all the world lifted straight from a romance – of ‘the Knight of the Lion’ rescuing four damsels from the castle of an abductor. What on earth, one could be forgiven for asking, is going on? Is this really a serious account of what happened?

Yes, it is. Careful reading makes plain that every element of Sarrasin's text, however outlandish it may initially seem, records in a perfectly logical way the planned thinking that underlay the elaborate mixture of martial sport and theatre that constituted the festival at Le Hem. For theatre as well as jousting, and jousting in the context of enacted stories, were central to what occurred there. It makes The Romance of Le Hem an intriguing source of material for scholars not only of medieval chivalry and tournaments but also of performance.