lfonso or Don Roberto, "I _serve_
your wife--such or such another serves mine, what harm can there be in
it?" ("Io servo vostra moglie, Don Eugenio favorisce la mia; che male c'
e?" I am quoting from memory.) And as a fact, we hear little of
jealousy; the amusement of En Barral when Peire Vidal came in and kissed
his sleeping wife; and the indignation of all Provence for the murder of
Guillems de Cabestanh (buried in the same tomb with the lady who had
been made to eat of his heart)--showing from opposite sides how the
society accustomed to Courts of Love looked upon the duties of husbands.

Such was the social life in those feudal courts whence first arises the
song of mediaeval love, and that this is the case is proved by the whole
huge body of early mediaeval poetry. We must not judge, as I have said,
either by poems of much earlier date, like the Nibelungen and the
Carolingian _chansons de geste_, which merely received a new form in the
early Middle Ages; still less from the prose romances of Melusine,
Milles et Amys, Palemon and Arcite, and a host of others which were
elaborated only later and under the influence of the quite unfeudal
habits of the great cities; and least of all from that strange late
southern cycle of the Amadises, from which, odd as it seems, many of our
notions of chivalric love have, through our ancestors, through the
satirists or burlesque poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
been inherited. We must look at the tales which, as we are constantly
being told by trouveres, troubadours, and minnesingers, were the
fashionable reading of the feudal classes of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries: the tales best known to us in the colourless respectability
of the collection made in the reign of Edward IV. by Sir Thomas Malory,
and called by him the "Morte d'Arthur"--of the ladies and knights of
Arthur's court; of the quest of the Grail by spotless knights who were
bastards and fathers of bastards; of the intrigues of Tristram of
Lyoness and Queen Yseult; of Launcelot and Guenevere; the tales which
Francesca and Paolo read together. We must look, above all, at the lyric
poetry of France, Provence, Germany, and Sicily in the early Middle
Ages.

Vos qui tres bien ameis i petit mentendeis
Por l'amor de Ihesu les pucelles ameis.
Nos trouvons en escris de sainte auctoriteis
Ke pucelle est la fleur de loyaulment ameir.

This strange entreaty to love the maidens for the