HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

LEGENDARY HISTORY: HISTORIA AND FABULA 413then on (it was presumably supposed), would guarantee the authenticityof any serious work. However, Damian-Grint cautions us againstreaching over-hasty conclusions, reminding us that assertions of thiskind were occasionally made in verse compositions at around the sametime, an observation which he supports with a quotation taken froma short chanson de geste, the Mort Aymerie de Narbonne by Bertrand deBar-sur-Aube (ca. 1180):Nus hom ne puet chançon de geste direQue il ne mente la ou li vers define,As mos drecier et a tailler la rime.Ce est bien voirs, gramaire le devise,Uns hom la fist de l’anciene vie,Hues ot non, si la mist un livreEt seela el mostier Saint Denise.La ou les jestes de France sont escrites. (ll. 3055–62, ed. Courayedu Parc, Paris: Firmin Didot, 1884; Johnson Reprint, 1966)Damian-Grint also refers us to Benoît’s Chronique des ducs de Normandieand to its author’s desire to avoid all fauseté and mençonge:Translatee ai l’estoire e diteD’eissi cum l’ai trovee escrite;N’ai mis fauseté ne mençonge. (Chronique, vv. 42035–37)What predominates in these assertions is the desire, always present,to speak the truth. The same is true of the prose version of theChronique du pseudo-Turpin attributed to ‘Jehan’, in which the writerlinks for the first time a spurning of rhyme to the consequentialintegrity of his estoire:Et por ce que rime se velt afeiter de moz conqueilliz hors de l’estoire,voust li cuens que cist livres fust sanz rime selonc le latin de l’estoireque Torpins l’arcevesque de Reins traita et escrist si com il le vit t oï. 85What counts, after all, is not to distort the narrative—believed tobe the spoken words of Archbishop Turpin himself, companion ofCharlemagne and of Roland. The text of the Nicolas version evenoffers the reader a letter of confirmation supposedly written by thelegendary archbishop himself, in which he claims that what he haswritten down was witnessed by his very own eyes. 8685See Jehan, The Old French Johannes Translation of the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle, ed.Ronald N. Walpole (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976), 10–14.86Bertrand de Bar-sur-Aube, Chronique dite Saintongeaise, ed. de Mandach, 257.