Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Editors’ Note
- Abbreviations
- 1 Kings as Catechumens: Royal Conversion Narratives and Easter in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica
- 2 Death on the Dorset Ridgeway: A Viking Murder Mystery
- 3 The Historiographical Construction of a Northern French First Crusade
- 4 The Fate of the Priests’ Sons in Normandy with Special Reference to Serlo of Bayeux
- 5 Contextualizing the Past at Durham Cathedral Priory, c. 1090–1130: Uses of History in the Annals of Durham, Dean and Chapter Library, MS Hunter 100
- 6 Imagining Justice in the Anglo-Saxon Past: Eadric Streona, Kingship, and the Search for Community
- 7 England’s Defending Kings in Twelfth-Century Historical Writing
- 8 Taming the Wilderness: The Exploration of Anglo-Norman Kingship in the Vie de Saint Gilles
- 9 Instructing the Disciples of Nero: The Uncertain Prospects for Moral Education in Gerald of Wales’ Speculum duorum
- 10 Weathering Thirteenth-Century Warfare: The Case of Blanche of Navarre
- 11 The Charters of the Thirteenth-Century Inheriting Countesses of Ponthieu
- 12 Imagining the Conqueror: The Changing Image of William the Conqueror, 1830–1945
11 - The Charters of the Thirteenth-Century Inheriting Countesses of Ponthieu
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Editors’ Note
- Abbreviations
- 1 Kings as Catechumens: Royal Conversion Narratives and Easter in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica
- 2 Death on the Dorset Ridgeway: A Viking Murder Mystery
- 3 The Historiographical Construction of a Northern French First Crusade
- 4 The Fate of the Priests’ Sons in Normandy with Special Reference to Serlo of Bayeux
- 5 Contextualizing the Past at Durham Cathedral Priory, c. 1090–1130: Uses of History in the Annals of Durham, Dean and Chapter Library, MS Hunter 100
- 6 Imagining Justice in the Anglo-Saxon Past: Eadric Streona, Kingship, and the Search for Community
- 7 England’s Defending Kings in Twelfth-Century Historical Writing
- 8 Taming the Wilderness: The Exploration of Anglo-Norman Kingship in the Vie de Saint Gilles
- 9 Instructing the Disciples of Nero: The Uncertain Prospects for Moral Education in Gerald of Wales’ Speculum duorum
- 10 Weathering Thirteenth-Century Warfare: The Case of Blanche of Navarre
- 11 The Charters of the Thirteenth-Century Inheriting Countesses of Ponthieu
- 12 Imagining the Conqueror: The Changing Image of William the Conqueror, 1830–1945
Summary
Found appended to a genealogy in Latin of the counts of Boulogne, at the end of a thirteenth-century manuscript now in the municipal library in Arras (Arras, Bibliothèque Municipale, 163), five stanzas of an Old French planctus deplore the death of the countess of Boulogne. Although the poem does not name the specific countess whose loss it laments, it most likely refers to Mathilde II, daughter of Ide de Boulogne and Renaud de Dammartin, both because her second husband, Alfonso of Portugal, is the last count mentioned in the list of the counts of Boulogne that precedes the poem, and because her death in 1260 left Boulogne without an obvious heir, a situation that fits well with the poet’s description of a county bereft.
Using the well known ubi sunt motif, in which the writer expresses the virtues and benefits of his subject by asking, rhetorically, where these shall be found, the last stanza of the poem lists things the countess’s death will deny to the people of Boulogne:
Qui fera mais bele feste criée?
Qui fera mais ne joie ne baudor?
Qui donra mais parement ne collé
A chevalier novel, ne bel ator,
Quant cele a fait de cest siècle retor
Qui des dames estoit rubins et flor,
Et son païs sostenoit en vigor?
Par qui ert mais povre dame gardée
Ne pucele de faire désonor?
Who will henceforth offer fine fêtes?
Who will henceforth cause joy or rejoicing?
Who will henceforth give the altar clothes or the ritual strike
to a new knight, or a fine outfit.
when she has left this world,
she who was the ruby and flower of ladies
and who sustained her lands in vigor?
By whom will henceforth poor ladies be protected
or maidens kept from dishonor?
After deploring the loss of pleasures in the first two lines of the stanza, the poet turns to the more serious implications of the countess’s death. First, the poet addresses the elements of the knighting ceremony: ‘Who will now give altar clothes or the (ritual) blow to new knights, or good equipment’, (lines 30–1); then he turns to the protection of poor women and maidens, ‘by whom will poor women ever be protected and maidens kept from dishonor’ (lines 45–6)?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Haskins Society Journal 252013. Studies in Medieval History, pp. 223 - 244Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014