Textual Situations. Andrew Taylor
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be taken to mean no more than that the conteurs are accustomed to mangling a good story, but taken more literally, it accuses them of breaking the story into pieces, which is exactly what performers must often have been obliged to do as they anticipated and played upon their audience’s response. The story of Taillefer playing as he rode to his death at Hastings, however legendary it may be, provides a more plausible instance of what an actual performance might have been like than does Gautier’s vision of the dignified séance épique. Under these conditions, a jongleur might hope to sing fifty, or a hundred, or at best a few hundred lines, with little prospect of picking up where he left off. In short, the evidence suggests that sustained recitation of the kind that would have been needed to complete a poem the length of the Digby Roland was not common. The implication, and it is an alarming one, is that when minstrels recited chansons de geste these oral performances were significantly different from the written versions that have been passed down to us.
This is not to claim that the notion of sustained recitation or the séance épique is merely the product of the romantic imagination. The main source of evidence is the written chansons de geste themselves, which present themselves in a number of ways as oral performance. In Huon de Bordeaux, one of the most discussed examples, the narrator tells his listeners that it is growing dark and he is getting thirsty and will stop for the night, but that if they pay him well enough he will return on the morrow.170 Apparently they do return, but not with quite enough money, for the narrator resumes the tale but after only five hundred lines stops to make his pitch again, this time threatening to use the power of Oberon, the fairy king, to excommunicate those who do not help fill his purse when his wife brings it around.171 Here would seem to be a persuasive example of sequential performance.172 But the example is not without difficulties. It is clearly impossible for a poet to predict in advance just when a jongleur might find it appropriate to appeal to his audience, so a jongleur would be singularly ill advised to attempt to deliver Huon de Bordeaux verbatim. If we are to read the appeals as strictly functional, therefore, the only plausible explanation seems to be that the lines were copied directly from a specific live performance in which a particular jongleur improvised them.173 There is little evidence, however, to suggest that this kind of ethnographic reporting was at all common in the Middle Ages.174 It was not that the technology was lacking: although full systems of shorthand were not developed until the sixteenth century, the combination of systems of heavy abbreviation, such as those first developed in Tironian notes, with a trained memory certainly allowed for detailed reportationes of sermons.175 But the desire to reproduce an authentic transcription of a specific oral performance, down to its calls for drink and appeals for money, reflects concerns for ethnographic exactitude or for catching the true voice of folk culture that would be surprising in a medieval cleric.176
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