The corpus of Old French crusade songs includes two early pieces in single manuscripts from a marginal tradition of English provenance, both containing neumatic musical notation. One is the well-known song with the refrain Chevalier mult estes guariz (RS 1548a), transcribed in the second half of the twelfth century by an Anglo- Norman scribe on fol. 88 of the composite codex Erfurt, Universitätsbibliothek, MS Codex Amplonianus 8o 32. It is the first of a small series of texts contained within the parchment unit vi at the end of the copy of a summary version of Gregory the Great's Moralia in Iob (fols 45–77 and 85–8), which also contains the Latin sequence Axe Phoebus aureo with musical accompaniment (fols 89v–89r sic), and the short Latin prose text Experimentum in dubiis (fol. 89r). While Schum assigns the two Latin additions to early thirteenth-century northern France, the somewhat damaged transcription of Chevalier mult estes guariz was made in England in approximately the twelfth century by the same copyist who transcribed Gregory's text. It represents an appeal to join the Second Crusade following the news of the fall of Edessa, whose author, a Frenchman from the western regions, is probably a knight supporting Louis VII.

Though composed on the occasion of the Third Crusade, the other song, Parti de mal e a bien aturné (RS 401), was copied at about the same time as Chevalier mult estes guariz, and contrary to what has hitherto been supposed should also be dated to the twelfth century. It is the only Old French lyric ‘crusade’ text to emanate from a genuinely Plantagenet environment. It is transcribed onto a parchment leaf inserted at the end of London, British Library, MS Harley 1717, known as B1 to the editors of the Chronique des ducs de Normandie of Benoît de Sainte-Maure – the latest testimony (early thirteenth century, probably of insular provenance) – and ascribed the siglum o in Old French lyric inventories. The song was previously published, without the last three lines, by l'Abbé de la Rue, who considered Benoît its author, and Leroux de Lincy, who reprinted and translated de la Rue's text, but without attributing its paternity to Benoît, which he judged ‘sans fondement’ (‘without foundation’), followed by Édélestand Du Méril, who reproduces the same erroneous text of de la Rue in a note on p. 414, as does Eugene Crépet.