The passages in Guillaume de Dole suggest an idea of how much cash was needed to finance a courtly event: several hundred to a thousand marks or pounds per special occasion. Jehan et Blonde depicts the importance of money for a young knight with a remarkable sensitivity to realistic detail. The text begins as Jehan is resolved to leave home to seek a fortune abroad, a necessity given his father’s reduced income:
Tere avoit bien cinc cens livrees,
Se toutes fuissent delivrees de detes et d’assenemens.
En sa joneche a fait despens Pour les tournois k’il maintenoit, dont or volentiers s’aquitoit.304
His land income was 500 pounds a year
If it were all free
Of debts and mortgages.
In his youth he had made great expenditures
On the tournaments he frequented,
From which he would now rather be free.
When Jehan leaves he takes only “Un cheval, sans plus, bien portant,/ Et vint livres tant seulement,/ Et un gar9on qui le siura” (a sturdy horse, nothing more, and only twenty pounds, and a valet who would follow him, lines 91-4). This is certainly not enough money to even get him to his first tournament: he needs an heiress. Happily, he finds one in Blonde of Oxford, and successfully absconds with her. In this, he resembles the hero of Le vair palefroi (late thirteenth century), whose small landholding was worth only 200 livres a year; but fortunately, his beloved was a “tres haute damoisele,” daughter of a “prince vaillant,” who had lands worth more than a thousand pounds a year, ensuring their financial viability.305 While still a fantasy economic scheme, marrying an heiress is a much more practical strategy than attracting a wealthy fairy. Duby suggests that the marriage-driven romances of this period reminded listeners of ancestors from a century and a half earlier, when marriage customs allowed marginalized sons the possibility of increasing their status by capturing an heiress, offering a distorted memory of an earlier reality.306 The contemporary impossibility of such marriages supports the view that such stories represent social and economic fantasies, an attempt to dream a way out of spending requirements exceeding the ready supplies of cash.
When, at the end of Jehan et Blonde, King Louis makes Jehan a knight and elevates the Dammartin lands to the level of a county, this generosity is not left to vague description. Philippe is very specific that the king gave Jehan an income worth exactly six thousand pounds and more. Moreover, the king gives him letters in which that was clearly spelled out and certified with the king’s own seal (lines 4979-95, 5011-16), establishing a guarantee of Jehan’s status. This kind of realistic, bureaucratic guarantee of income was not necessary to the narration in earlier or more fantastic romances. It is interesting that this income (and this is only his French holdings) is more than twelve times that of Jehan’s indebted father, who would have had to divide his aforementioned 500 pounds between two daughters and four sons.
In contrast, men not expected to live as knights, with the heavy equipment and social expenses that entailed, could live comfortably on much less. in order to gain the loyalty of the boatman who helps the escaping couple cross the channel ahead of the rival fiance, Jehan pays him well, and further, in thanks for helping his daughter the count of Oxford gives him enough to retire: fifty marks was enough to give him a comfortable living (lines 5472-87; 5529-35; 5625-8).
World History
