Introduction

Since 2010, the news from northern Nigeria has been dominated by Boko Haram, the radical sect that has been terrorizing the north-east in particular. But notwithstanding all the people they have killed and the other kinds of damage they have caused, Boko Haram comprises only a tiny fraction of northern Muslims. They are discussed in this chapter; but the more important aim is to describe the full spectrum of Muslims in Nigeria's north, in all their diversity of religious belief and practice. Ethnic diversity also comes in, because of its links to sectarian difference. There is a history of sectarian conflict, as new groups enter and compete for followers, but also what appears to be increasing Muslim tolerance of religious diversity among themselves. The richness of civil society among the Muslims is illustrated with circumstantial details of some of the groups they form and the programmes of da'wah and good works they undertake. Government is an important factor, both as a system of mostly non-Islamic institutions to which Muslim attitudes may differ, and as a sometimes-heavy-handed regulator of religious practice, including preaching and proselytization. Other aspects of the complex scene are sketched ad hoc.

Northern Nigeria

The term ‘Northern Nigeria’ formerly designated one of the country's principal administrative units, along with Eastern Nigeria and Western Nigeria. In 1954, when Nigeria became a federation, the Northern, Eastern and Western Regions were the federating partners, and they remained so at Independence in 1960. But beginning in 1967 the regions were subdivided into states: 12 in 1967, now 36 plus the Federal Capital Territory of Abuja (FCT). One can only now speak, more vaguely, of ‘northern Nigeria’, with the adjective un-capitalized. Sometimes this is used to mean all of the 19 states (plus FCT) that have been carved out of the old Northern Region. Sometimes it is used more narrowly to mean ‘the far north’, comprising today's 12 ‘Sharia states’ (Ostien 2007; Ostien & Dekker 2010). Map 2.1 clarifies these distinctions. This chapter discusses the Muslim population of northern Nigeria in the broader sense.

Ethnic difference in the north

The seven more southerly states of the ex-Northern Region – Kwara, Kogi, Nasarawa, Benue, Plateau, Taraba and Adamawa – resisted the Sharia implementation impulse that swept the farther north in the early 2000s, enacting none of the relevant legislation.

Introduction

The protracted conflicts in Plateau State between 2001 and 2015 inevitably led to a series of efforts to achieve peace and, since 2015, some semblance of peace seems to have returned to Jos, albeit tentatively. The general situation is no longer as tense and alarming as it was during the crisis years. Still, this peace cannot be taken for granted, given the recursive nature of the violence from 2001. Furthermore, it is important to learn any lessons from this peace process. This chapter examines the Jos peace processes. Specifically, it compares the efficacy of top-down and bottom-up approaches to peace building in Jos. We examine how individuals and neighbourhoods cope with insecurity at the bottom of society, and how state institutions – the Plateau State governments, and successive federal governments – have responded to the cycle of violence in Jos. At the community level, we show how the violence has re-shaped individuals’ social networks and accelerated the process of neighbourhood segregation. We examine how individuals and neighbourhoods seek safety through strategies of communal segregation and vigilantism, which have only started to be relaxed after 2015. At the state level, we examine the serial establishment of commissions of inquiry, both judicial and administrative, and the repeated inability to implement the recommendations of any. At the federal level, we examine the responses of the executive and legislature branches, and highlight the damaging tension between federal and state authorities in the management of the crises in Jos. Finally, we argue that Nigerian society has tended to approach the conflict in Jos through two opposed normative principles: (i) supporting inclusive civic citizenship which privileges the rights of individuals; or (ii) respecting the cultural and territorial rights of indigenous minority groups who are seen to be threatened by bigger and better-endowed ethnic groups. We argue that this binary approach – variously justified under the banner of individual rights or group rights – has played into the hands of intransigent and opportunistic politicians who have made it difficult to find a mutually agreeable route to peace. We emphasize local-level confidence-building measures, which address every-day fears and insecurities of the warring groups as a first step toward peace. Afterwards, the give and take of mutual recognition can set the basis for broaching the more substantive issues of individual and group constitutional rights.

The rise of the coal trades from the Tyne and the Wear were inescapable facts of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, both intimately related to the growing domestic market for coal in London and the development of salt panning, glass making and sugar refining on both rivers. Historians have long explored these relationships in detail: Nef and Dietz examined the great growth in coal shipments from the north-east to the English capital, while Wrigley explored the reciprocal impact this could have on Newcastle's consumer economy. Yet more recently scholars have begun to question the prominence afforded to the coal trade and the ‘Tyne–Thames’ link within the region's historiography. In focusing upon north-east England's commercial relationship with London, some sight has been lost of the complexities of the region's economy and its trade with other areas. As a consequence of the coal trade's dominance within the regional historiography, ‘the monotony of … workaday traffic’ in fabrics and foodstuffs, which has served as the basis for the study of other ports, has been neglected in relation to much of the north-east. Peter Wright addresses this in the preceding chapter. This chapter does not seek to dismiss the strong links between north-eastern England and London or the impact the latter had upon the region's economic and cultural development, but instead aims to contextualise this relationship within a wider geographical setting.

This chapter will examine the nature and extent of Scottish trade with north-eastern England over the course of regal and political union between 1580 and 1750. It will consider how industrial similarities between the Tyne, Wear and Forth affected the trade between them, both across the border and along the east coast, and how this related to wider networks of domestic and overseas commerce. This is particularly important as Scotland has hitherto occupied a limited position within north-east England's historiography, being the supplier of border reevers and invading armies. Some attention has been given to Scottish economic migration to the Tyne in the form of keelmen and colliers, whereas studies of those crossing the border to trade have largely been restricted to the western borders or individual trades, such as those in cattle or linen. Instead, this chapter refocuses attention on the eastern borders and Scottish trade in its entirety.

Introduction

Better known under the nickname Boko Haram (‘Western education is sacrilege’), the ‘Sunni Community for the Propagation of the Prophet's Teachings and Jihad’ (Jama'atu Ahlis-Sunnah Lidda'awati Wal Jihad) emerged as a sect in the Borno region of north-east Nigeria, bordering Niger, Chad and Cameroon. In March 2015, one of the factions of the group paid allegiance to Daesh (ISIS) and decided to be called the Islamic State in West Africa (Wilayat Gharb Ifriqiyah). Some in the media have presented this insurgency as part of a global jihad or, in the Nigerian context, a clash of civilization between Muslims and Christians. But the reality on ground has been quite different. Muslims have been the main victims of the group for a simple demographic reason: they are a majority in the north-east of Nigeria and civilians bear the brunt of the conflict. In fact, Boko Haram has attacked both Muslims and Christians. If the group has sometimes targeted Christian minorities, it has mainly killed Muslims who rejected its doctrine or cooperated with the security forces.

Paradoxically, the realization of this common terrorist threat may have fostered the sense of national unity that propelled both Muslims and Chris tians to vote together for a democratic change in 2015, when President Muhammadu Buhari was elected. Today, Boko Haram, or what remains of it, is very fragmented, and it is important to go beyond the issue of religious fanaticism to analyse properly the local dynamics that explain how the sect mobilized combatants. The group has gone through four principal phases of recruitment, mainly in the region of Borno: firstly, a period of Islamic preaching (da'awah) under Mohammed Yusuf between 2003 and 2009; then, a descent into terrorism under Abubakar Shekau from 2010; a transformation into a guerrilla movement after the declaration of emergency rule in North-East Nigeria in 2013; and finally a spatial expansion of attacks after the launch of an international coalition made up of Nigerian, Nigerien, Chadian and Cameroonian armies in 2015.

Christian minorities in the north-east and Boko Haram: the context

Studying the sociology of a rebellion is always a challenge due to the inherent insecurity. My investigation started along the Niger/Nigeria border as far back as 2005 to analyse the ‘Talebans of Nigeria’, the seeds of a movement that would later become Boko Haram.

The last few years have seen a flourishing of academic activity on the medieval historiographical tradition of the First Crusade. New editions and accompanying studies of many of the key Latin texts have emerged, with more to appear in the near future. In spite of this, the relationship between the various accounts of the First Crusade in the two centuries after the expedition, in Latin and French, confounds easy comprehension. The crusade texts fail to exhibit any simple hierarchical relationship of copying material. The variance of these texts is, in fact, much better suited to a more fluid model of understanding textual transmission, and the question of whether it might not be profitable to view the corpus of material in the crusade texts in light of Zumthor's mouvance is increasingly being raised.

Moving away from considering texts as discrete, archetypal artefacts, and instead viewing them as manifestations of a wider underlying tradition, has the side effect of rendering null the earlier dismissal of texts as ‘derivative’. Nineteenth-century textual categorization, with a formal approach to compositional hierarchies, saw some texts as reworked versions of others, and therefore less unique, or valuable: for example, the previous titling of the Gesta Francorum ‘Tudebodus abbreviatus’. Famously, the Chanson d'Antioche, recently translated and comprehensively studied by Edgington and Sweetenham, contains no ‘historical’ information which could not already be established from the Latin texts. It does not follow, however, that this text, and others like it, have nothing to contribute to knowledge of the textual memorialization, historiography, and wider social conception of the First Crusade. This is especially pertinent since it is now near-unanimously agreed that a reservoir of popular, possibly oral, material predated the Antioche, and was utilized in other vernacular and Latin texts.

The text which is the subject of this chapter, the unedited-in-full Siege d'Antioche, is one which has been, since its discovery in the mid-nineteenth-century, largely neglected in terms of its potential to add useful historical information to our understanding of the First Crusade. However, this lengthy work is testament to the developing social narrative of that crusade, as the cultural habit of crusading itself underwent revision and revivification in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Farming mattered as much as coal mining in the making of the British world. Agriculture furnished the food while coal provided the fuel for England's early industrialisation and subsequent Industrial Revolution. Despite unprecedented levels of urbanisation and a rising population, Britain largely fed itself during the eighteenth century. This national achievement rested upon regional specialisation in agriculture, and farming was integral to the economy and culture of early industrial north-east England. Hughes described Tyneside as England's ‘oldest industrial region’ with ‘an agricultural shell’. Across the north-east counties of Durham and Northumberland there was a graduated agriculture from hills to coast, orientated on feeding the working population in the industrialising districts on Tyneside and Wearside, as well as export. Commercial farming for a cash profit at market came to characterise even upland farming. A centralising and rationalising force, market-orientated farming was as prevalent on the upland fells reserved for summer grazing, with hay and fodder grown in newly enclosed fields on the valley floor, as it was on the richer loamy soils of the lowlands, enclosed to produce greater quantities of grain, particularly rye, oats and wheat, as well as specialist crops of rapeseed, mustard and flax. Farming for the urban-industrial market encouraged meat production, with affordable beef and cheap mutton from cattle and sheep selectively bred to suit regional soils and meet the consumption demands of a regionalised food market. These processes culminated in that wonder of the early 1800s, the Durham Ox. Yet the use of land and livestock for profit brought not only the exploitation of animals but the marginalisation of smaller landholders, as the creation of larger farms forced many to become dependent upon waged labour and purchase their food. Historians have tended either to celebrate the achievements or denigrate the consequences of commercial farming. As with coal mining, pride and regret are only partial routes to historical understanding. In their stead, we can investigate agriculture as a part of regionalised economies and cultures.

Agriculture and regionalization

The emergence of a market economy in agriculture contributed to the creation of an integrated region. Food supply created webs of connection between north Northumberland and south Durham; from the Pennine fells and Border hills to the North Sea coast.

This collection seeks to contribute to our understanding of early modern England in two ways. Substantively, it provides a set of complementary studies of aspects of economic, social and cultural change in north-east England; a relatively neglected region, yet one that can reasonably claim to have played a major role in the making of modern Britain. As such it is the direct outcome of the quickening of research on the area stimulated by the activities of the North East England History Institute. Interpretatively, it attempts to explore the interconnections between economic expansion and cultural change (using a broad definition of ‘culture’ which encompasses institutions and practices as well as attitudes and understandings, values and motivations).

The adoption of a regional approach needs no defence. A quarter of a century has passed since Pat Hudson pointed out the misleading, even distorting, consequences of studying economic change at ‘aggregate national level’ and redirected attention to the ‘regional perspective’. As she argued, major economic change usually occurs ‘within regions rather than within nations as a whole’ and in the long process we call the Industrial Revolution ‘both economic structure and human agency … in important respects, operated at regional level’, in ‘provincial concentrations’. Close regional studies, then, are essential to the understanding of economic change and to the appreciation of ‘the variety of experience and motivation which makes up the whole’.

In this respect these essays have a good deal to offer. It would be wrong to argue that the economic and social history of the north-east between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries has been wholly neglected. Nevertheless, coverage of the area's early modern history remains distinctly uneven, chronologically, thematically and socially. Despite a number of valuable overviews, the developments of the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries remain much less fully researched than those of the late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth. The great exception, of course, is the early history of the coal industry, in which the contribution of the Durham and Northumberland coalfield has a justifiably central place. Other aspects of economic and social change which accompanied the rise of ‘carboniferous capitalism’, however, have been subject to preliminary exploration rather than sustained analysis.

From the moment on 27 November 1095 that Pope Urban II made the call for the expedition which became known as the First Crusade, anecdotes concerning particular incidents related to the expedition began to circulate among contemporaries. Such stories were perpetuated by both participants and non-participants. Several recent publications have investigated the transmission of these micronarratives in Latin Christendom. In 2014, Carol Sweetenham explored how anecdotes may have originated as spoken tales on the expedition before evolving into written reports which were included in a number of early twelfth-century texts. She noted that short narratives included in written texts were often intended to have exemplary functions, and offered a helpful definition of a crusade anecdote as an instance when, in a text, ‘a particular episode and/or character stands out for a moment against the collectivized heroism of the crusade’. In 2015, the present author published an article which considered the socio-cultural impulses which underpinned how twelfth-century oral traditions on the First Crusade circulated. The aim of the present chapter is to build upon this emergent strand of writing on the transmission of short narratives concerning the First Crusade in the century after its conclusion. To this end, it explores in detail the development of the best known and most widely circulated twelfth-century micronarrative concerning the crusade. The tale concerns Godfrey of Bouillon (c. 1060–1100), a leading participant in the expedition. Various twelfth- century texts relate that during a battle which took place on about 6 March 1098, during the First Crusaders’ siege of the city of Antioch, Godfrey, with a single blow of his sword, cut an armoured Muslim warrior clean in two. It is no coincidence that it was Godfrey who was the focus of this bisection story. In the centuries after his death, he emerged as a totemic cultural paradigm of the crusades. A range of medieval observers cited this anecdote as evidence of his martial ability, and the story came to form a cornerstone of his reputation. The chapter will scrutinize a number of different textual renditions of the feat, and seek to offer an explanation for the micronarrative's evolution over the twelfth century.

This book has been long in the making. It began its life in 2010 as a collaborative research project on Islam and interfaith relations in northern Nigeria. Together with other members of the Nigeria Research Network, Raufu Mustapha and I undertook to map out the region's religious diversity and to study the ways in which the three main faiths – Christianity, Islam, and traditional spirituality – interact in what we have come to call Nigeria's religious encounter. As all the chapters demonstrate, this encounter has been varied and ever-shifting, involving violent confrontation as well as compromise and nonviolent competition, conversion, and cooperation between members of the different faiths. But over the last decades, it appears that violence has become more and more prominent, through riots, communal clashes, and even the full-blown insurgency of Boko Haram. The aim of this book is to explore northern Nigeria's religious encounter and suggest explanations for, as well as possible solutions to, the increasing violence that characterises it.

To my great sadness, Raufu passed away in the months leading up to the publication of this volume. As many have said, written and recognized, his passing is a great loss to all who knew him, as well as to the field of African studies and Nigerian politics in particular. Yet, at the same time, it is heartening and inspiring to recognize how many people have benefited from his guidance, advice and collaboration, and to realize the extent of the intellectual legacy he built through his publications, policy engagement, teaching, and supervision.

It is also very satisfying to see our volume finally going to press. As my doctoral supervisor and mentor, as well as colleague and friend, Raufu taught me much of what I know about Nigeria, Africa, and working in the academy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the present volume touches on many of these lessons, of which I will highlight a few. Most importantly, the book aims to analyse Nigeria's religious encounter as it is, rather than as it is assumed or hypothesized to be. It aims to faithfully describe variation, nuance and complexity, acknowledging the many problems Nigerians face in their everyday lives, but also ensuring that we do not underappreciate the ways in which they creatively solve them.

This volume explores the economy and culture of those who lived through one of the earliest episodes of industrialisation. Two centuries before the cotton mills of Manchester, an early Industrial Revolution occurred on the coal field of north-east England: emerging in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, maturing in the eighteenth century and providing the platform for everything that was to be built on the Great Northern Coal Field of the nineteenth century. Much of this industrial infrastructure would be dismantled in the later twentieth century. Yet, historically, the area was among the first industrial regions in the world, a vital node in the larger region of north-western Europe, in which the conditions for industrial society more generally took hold. This early industrial revolution was accompanied by agricultural and consumer revolutions – all of which turned upon the exploitation of coal. But explaining the region's economy and culture in terms of coal alone overlooks the complexity and changing character of activity between 1500 and 1800 and obscures the processes of change that forged the region. Historical preoccupations with the origins of the English working class and of organised labour can lead us to miss the cultural dynamics that initially created the conditions historians have denigrated and solidarities often still celebrated. In looking beyond coal and class, the essays collected here offer a series of perspectives on early modern north-east England. This introductory essay sets these studies in the context of regionalisation as a transformative force in early modern Europe.

As part of the North-East England History Institute's ‘Regions and Regionalism in History’ series, this volume adds to the research presented in Regional Identities in North-East England 1300–2000, edited by Green and Pollard. That study was focused on finding evidence for self-conscious regional identities and conclusively demonstrated that you can search too hard for something that was not there. Only with the advent of broadcasting in the twentieth century did the familiar articulation of a self-conscious ‘North-East’ appear, and only in the context of contemporary preoccupations with political devolution amid a broader cultural response to electronic communication at the turn of the twenty-first century did ‘identities’ suddenly become a pressing concern among regional historians. In a more face-to-face world, dominated by work rather than communication, identities did not require endless self-reflection. Before 1800, only the innovation of commercially printed newspapers provided a mechanism for anything like an imagined regional community.

The period of the crusades to the Holy Land, from the first expedition of 1096–9 to the final loss of all Latin possessions there in 1291, covers the entire sweep of medieval romance lyric, from its origins to the decline of the troubadours and the change of direction in the Old French lyric between the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth. So it is understandable that the crusade song should follow the same trajectory in parallel with the Occitan courtly canso and the French grand chant courtois. There are no known vernacular lyric texts which concern the First Crusade, but from the time of the Second Crusade of 1145–9 short poems with explicit references to the oriental expeditions begin to bloom in both Occitan and Old French.

In the troubadour lyric, especially in its earliest phase, the crusade song generally takes on the form and tone of the sirventes4 and is characterized by versification calqued on a pre-existing love song or canso, as well as by the sirventes’ predominantly political, religious, or moral tone. This consists primarily of exhortation to go on crusade to the Holy Land, and also includes sporadic caustic polemical attacks on kings and nobles and, later on, clerical inconsistency and hypocrisy. The crusade song is firmly rooted in current events and provides us with a clear reflection of the various positions taken by the audience on the subject of crusading.

The Old French crusade song gradually tends to diverge from its Occitan counterparts, first through the introduction of the courtly love theme typical of the grand chant courtois, and then by the development of this theme at the expense of homiletic-type exhortations or the polemical and sarcastic tone typical of Occitan songs.

This development is probably emphasized and amplified by the particularities of the Old French manuscript tradition. If the Occitan tradition is inclusive and open to all the possible realizations of troubadour lyric compositions, from dialogue forms (tenso) to sirventes, enueg and plazer, dawn songs, crusade songs and other forms rich in specific historical allusions, the French songbooks generally appear more markedly aristocratic. More luxurious as material objects, they focus at first on an exclusive, monothematic canon of love songs and then on a rigid distinction between genres and the proliferation of fixed forms.

This chapter focuses on the case study of late sixteenth-century Berwickupon- Tweed to demonstrate that the regulation of the material environment – the disposal of waste, the installation of water supply and drainage infrastructure, the storage, sale and movement of economically valuable manure, the scouring of open sewers and the cleaning of household forefronts and streets – is a highly illuminating lens through which to analyse urban history. Environmental regulation deserves to be recognised alongside topographical setting as an ‘analytical category’ for the study of urban society, culture and mentality, equally as valid as the other more familiar categories employed by urban historians investigating wealth, gender, status, religion or occupation. Towns also need to be understood in regional context.

Firstly, the chapter introduces Berwick in its unique geographical and political context. While it is important to compare the town to other urban settlements, notably York and Carlisle, it is also crucial to situate the town in relation to its wider region, on the edge of north-east England. Secondly, the chapter focuses on Berwick's material, urban environment, analysing in depth the changes which the corporation endeavoured to make to its sanitation infrastructure, waste-disposal systems and processes and environmental regulation, before explaining the problematic contradiction between Berwick's increasingly improved urban landscape and its simultaneously rural character in the persistent practice of agricultural activities, payment systems and ceremonies. This second section illuminates the often overlooked, yet historically important, sensory experiences and socio-environmental entanglements between people and key natural aspects of Berwick's townscape, including air, water, human and animal excrement, blood and urine, which shaped both the daily lives of the town's inhabitants and the potentially powerful perceptions of its visitors.

A growing sub-field of medieval and early modern urban history is currently highlighting the importance of understanding how environmental perception, engagement and regulation shaped daily lives. It is also illuminating the governmental compromise necessarily negotiated between the powerful environmental self-governance conducted by inhabitants from the bottom upwards and the bylaws, street inspections and court presentments through which local governors regulated the material environment from the top downwards.

While the Third Crusade (1189–92) re-established Latin Christian control of the coastal regions of the Holy Land, arguably the most long-lasting consequence of the crusade was Richard the Lionheart's conquest of the island of Cyprus in 1191. The Anglo-Norman crusading army, accompanied by leading Templars and Hospitallers, overthrew the Greek Orthodox ruler Isaac Ducas Comnenus and took control of the island as a supply base for the forthcoming campaign on the Syrian-Palestinian mainland. Richard subsequently sold the island to the Templars, but when they decided not to keep it he sold it to the deposed former Latin king of Jerusalem Guy of Lusignan. Guy and his successors established a Latin dynasty which ruled Cyprus until the 1480s.

During 1392 and 1393 the French writer Jean d'Arras composed a story of the Lusignans’ legendary fairy ancestress, Mélusine, which depicted their acquisition of Cyprus rather differently. In this account the Lusignans acquired Cyprus through marriage and the heroism of Mélusine's sons, with the assistance of the Order of St John of Rhodes – otherwise known as the Hospitallers. Jean d'Arras claimed to have based his work on historical sources, but he was very selective in the information that he used, excluding the dominant versions of history in favour of an invented past which gave the Lusignans free agency and full ownership of the island. This chapter will consider Jean's use of both past and present, and what he could have intended to gain for his patrons by restating the Lusignans’ rights over Cyprus at a time when their control of the island was being challenged.

The legend of the fairy ancestress of the rulers of the castle of Lusignan in Poitou, the kings of Jerusalem and Cyprus, and the counts of La Marche and Parthenay already existed before 1362, although no written version has survived. Jean d'Arras's story tied the legend into historical events and particularly to war against Sarrazins – a generic term for non-Christians, especially Muslims. He stated that he was writing for Jean, duke of Berry, and his sister Mary, duchess of Bar, who were children of King Jean II the Good of France (reigned 1350–64). The kings of France had long been leading proponents of the crusade.

The corpus of Old French crusade songs includes two early pieces in single manuscripts from a marginal tradition of English provenance, both containing neumatic musical notation. One is the well-known song with the refrain Chevalier mult estes guariz (RS 1548a), transcribed in the second half of the twelfth century by an Anglo- Norman scribe on fol. 88 of the composite codex Erfurt, Universitätsbibliothek, MS Codex Amplonianus 8o 32. It is the first of a small series of texts contained within the parchment unit vi at the end of the copy of a summary version of Gregory the Great's Moralia in Iob (fols 45–77 and 85–8), which also contains the Latin sequence Axe Phoebus aureo with musical accompaniment (fols 89v–89r sic), and the short Latin prose text Experimentum in dubiis (fol. 89r). While Schum assigns the two Latin additions to early thirteenth-century northern France, the somewhat damaged transcription of Chevalier mult estes guariz was made in England in approximately the twelfth century by the same copyist who transcribed Gregory's text. It represents an appeal to join the Second Crusade following the news of the fall of Edessa, whose author, a Frenchman from the western regions, is probably a knight supporting Louis VII.

Though composed on the occasion of the Third Crusade, the other song, Parti de mal e a bien aturné (RS 401), was copied at about the same time as Chevalier mult estes guariz, and contrary to what has hitherto been supposed should also be dated to the twelfth century. It is the only Old French lyric ‘crusade’ text to emanate from a genuinely Plantagenet environment. It is transcribed onto a parchment leaf inserted at the end of London, British Library, MS Harley 1717, known as B1 to the editors of the Chronique des ducs de Normandie of Benoît de Sainte-Maure – the latest testimony (early thirteenth century, probably of insular provenance) – and ascribed the siglum o in Old French lyric inventories. The song was previously published, without the last three lines, by l'Abbé de la Rue, who considered Benoît its author, and Leroux de Lincy, who reprinted and translated de la Rue's text, but without attributing its paternity to Benoît, which he judged ‘sans fondement’ (‘without foundation’), followed by Édélestand Du Méril, who reproduces the same erroneous text of de la Rue in a note on p. 414, as does Eugene Crépet.