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10 History as Fabliau and Fabliau as History The Murder of Charles the Good and Du provost a l’aumuche lisa h. CooPer & mary agnes eDsall When Charles the Good was murdered in his own chapel on the second day of March in 1127, his death sparked turbulent times in the city of Bruges and the surrounding land of Flanders, gripping the popular imagination . In his De multro, traditione, et occisione gloriosi Karoli comitis Flandriarum , Galbert of Bruges expresses astonishment over how fast the story spread from Bruges to England and France. “No one,” he writes of the quickly moving news, “could have spanned these intervals of time or space so quickly either by horse or by ship.”1 The reports of the count’s assassination not only spread quickly by word of mouth, but also rapidly inspired a variety of written texts. These ranged from verse encomia of Charles’s life to poetic lamentations upon his death, and from brief accounts of the event in historical record to Galbert’s own extended daily record, itself a narrative that deploys a wide range of genres—chronicle, encomium, martyrology , even a gesture toward epic—in its presentation of what Galbert insists is “the truth of things,” the rerum veritas of unfolding events.2 This essay makes two different but related arguments, both of which seek to broaden awareness of the discursive field created by those unfold215 1. “Intervalla ergo vel temporum vel locorum nec equo nec navigo quisquam transisse tam velociter poterat” (Galbert, [12], 53/55; trans., 114). 2. Galbert, [Prologue], 16; trans., 80. For a description of martyrological themes in Galbert ’s book, see chapter 3 of Jeff Rider, God’s Scribe, 50–76. Galbert’s description of the death of Baldwin of Aalst by “a trivial cause, that is, while blowing a horn” (leviori occasione mortis, dum scilicet cornu flaret; Galbert [91], 4/5; trans., 263–64) is almost certainly an ironic allusion to the Chanson de Roland (see the preceding essay in this volume by Robert M. Stein). 216 l. h. CooPer & m. a. eDsall ing events and particularly by the perceived villainy of the Erembalds, the family widely deemed responsible for Count Charles’s murder. We show that while what happened in Bruges was clearly no laughing matter, Galbert ’s narrative of the Erembald family’s social trajectory, their crime, and their subsequent punishment makes use at key points of a satirical mode strikingly similar to the discourse of the fabliaux, a genre that more often than not concerns itself with trickery and unwarranted (or unmerited) social aspiration. We then argue that while the treachery of the Erembalds led Galbert to briefly explore the comic mode, it also seems to have led another (anonymous) author to create a comic text, the fabliau Du provost a l’aumuche, which we believe belongs to the family of works composed in reaction to the events at Bruges in 1127–28. Both Galbert’s account of what James Bruce Ross calls the Erembald family’s “rise and fall”3 and this little-studied fabliau share a number of crucial details that suggest that the two texts arose in response to the same set of historical circumstances; both also negotiate the telling of their respective tales in remarkably similar ways. Galbert’s chronicle repeatedly and emphatically depicts the transgression of class boundaries as the origin of the strife that led directly to Charles’s murder and all that followed from that catastrophic act. Devoting an entire section of his chronicle to an account of how the Erembalds were revealed to be of servile origin, Galbert also goes out of his way to explain how this family had aspired to, illegally and violently acquired, and then continued to grasp at social and political positions well beyond their station, thus bringing Bruges to and then over the brink of disaster; he then depicts in grisly detail the violent punishment meted out to them in return. The fabliau Du provost a l’aumuche, like many other narratives of its kind, also concerns itself with social transgression and deception. But where the central characters of most fabliaux are nameless, in this case both transgression and deception are performed by a provost with the family name of Erembald—a provost, moreover, of apparently servile origins—who is then punished for his crimes with what is, even for a fabliau, an unusually unamusing degree of violence. This essay, we hasten to make clear, argues neither for the contemporaneity of chronicle and...

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