SOURCE: Blakey, Brian. “Truth and Falsehood in the Tristran of Béroul.” In History and Structure of French: Essays in Honour of Professor T. B. W. Reid, edited by F. J. Barnett, A. D. Crow, C. A. Robson, et al., pp. 19-29. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972.

[In the following essay, Blakey points out how a proper understanding of the medieval interpretation of oaths can inform the critical debate regarding God's apparent support for the lovers in Tristran.]

If a resurrected Tristran and Iseut were once more to stand before us charged with perjury, it seems they would have no lack of prosecutors. As one modern critic would have it, the pair are guilty of ‘shameless deceit and untruthfulness’, because ‘they lie and commit perjury without turning a hair’.¹ Another critic, while tacitly admitting their offence, pleads in mitigation a ‘sympathie béroulienne’, a ‘zèle partial et vindicatif’ on the poet's part that overlays and disguises the lovers' falseness.² This latter plea may attract our sympathy, for it is consonant with the medieval belief that truth cannot exist without God, a belief that underpinned the system of ordeals and trials by combat; consequently, we are asked to believe, because God preserves the lovers throughout their tribulations, they are innocent ipso facto and must be considered exempt from the accepted social and judicial rules of their age. Yet it is difficult to reconcile such a convenient and sweeping exoneration with the general abhorrence of perjury so prevalent in those same Middle Ages, witness Alain Chartier in La ballade de Fougères:

A Dieu et aux gens detestable
Est menterie et trahison,
Pour ce n'est point mis à la table
Des preux l'image de Jason,
Qui pour emporter la toison
De Colcos se veult parjurer.(3)

In the absence of contrary proof, one is led to believe that for a medieval aristocrat the alleged ‘shameless deceit and untruthfulness’ could not but result in dishonour and disgrace. There is no reason to suppose that the public for which Béroul was writing would have accepted or even understood that the supposed deceit and treachery of the lovers could be justified in any sense by the evident sympathy of the author, however convenient it may be for us moderns to have recourse to a facile explanation of this kind. Still less convincing is Pierre Le Gentil's argument that, irrespective of right or wrong, the very violence of the lovers' suffering aroused compassion: ‘Est-ce que la passion lorsqu'elle se déchaîne n'est pas capable des pires excès? Est-ce qu'elle ne trouve pas dans sa violence même une excuse et une justification? Du moins, dominée qu'elle est par une sorte de fatalité, ne doit-elle pas bénéficier de beaucoup d'indulgence et de pitié?’⁴; this interpretation is a curious anachronism, unjustifiable in the medieval context. For if the lovers are guilty as charged, then by implication Béroul is portraying God as the supporter and abettor of a blatant untruth, which would constitute a denial of the religious and judicial systems of his day and a subversion of the feudal society that was largely sustained by those very concepts of faith and law. Is Béroul then a cynic and subversive, however implausible that may seem, or does he rather employ a system of truth and falsehood with which we are unfamiliar and which in consequence we misunderstand?

In the assessment of Béroul's handling of truth and falsehood in his Tristran, critical attention has tended, understandably, to focus on the spectacular ambiguous oath sworn by Iseut at Mal Pas. Pierre Jonin alone appears to have taken into account other oaths employed in the text, but he considers only those of Iseut and examines them only to assess the author's religiosity.⁵ Yet the Tristran contains a series of oaths, of which Iseut's sensational deraisne is but one example, and it would appear to be a fault of method to concentrate on the solitary case without examining the entire series of oaths present in what remains to us of Béroul's version, for we are aware of the extreme importance accorded to the sworn word in medieval society; for instance, the chronicles abound in examples, both of the solemn oath sworn on relics and witnessed by high dignitaries, and of the less formal oath, sworn spontaneously at moments of intense emotion.

A few examples drawn from the chronicles indicate the social and judicial rôle of the oath and also illustrate its mechanisms:

I. The Black Prince, incensed at the faithlessness of Jean du Cros, Bishop of Limoges, who had helped negotiate the handing over of that city to the French, ‘swore on the soul of his father—an oath which he never broke—that he would attend to no other business until he had won the city back and had made the traitors pay dearly for their disloyalty’. When the English army arrived before Limoges, the Prince ‘swore that he would not leave until he had it at his mercy’. After the city was stormed, three thousand of the besieged were put to the sword; the bishop was seized and brought before the Prince, who ‘looked at him very grimly. The kindest word he could find to say was that, by God and St. George, he would have his head cut off’. Later, the Duke of Lancaster requested his brother to deliver the prisoner to him, after which, through the intercession of the bishop's friends, Pope Urban V asked the Duke to hand over his prisoner ‘in such persuasive and amicable terms that the Duke felt unable to refuse’.⁶

II. Jean de Joinville, annoyed by a quarrelsome knight in his retinue, ordered the offender to leave, saying to him ‘for, so God help me, you shall never again be one of my men’. The errant knight appealed for help to Gilles le Brun, Constable of France, who interceded on his behalf, but Joinville claimed that he could take the knight back into his quarters only if the legate were to release him from his oath. Accordingly, the Constable and the knight went to the legate and told him what had happened. The legate replied that he could not release Joinville from his oath, because it was a reasonable one since the knight well merited this punishment. The incident is narrated not to illustrate the dangers of quarrelsome behaviour, but so that the reader ‘may refrain from taking any oath without reasonable justification. For, as the wise man says, “Whoever swears too lightly, just as lightly he breaks his oath”.’⁷

III. Elsewhere, Joinville relates how he advised King Louis to ask the Templars for a loan of 30,000 livres needed to ransom the King's brother, the Count of Poitiers. Étienne d'Otricourt, Commander of the Temple, refused the King's request, claiming that ‘all the money placed in our charge is left with us on condition of our swearing never to hand it over except to those who entrusted it to us’. After a bitter exchange between Joinville and the Commander, the issue was resolved by the Marshal of the Temple, Renaud de Vichiers, who agreed with the Commander that ‘we could not advance any of this money without breaking our oath’, but went on to observe that the King could always seize the money, if he saw fit to do so. Joinville was ordered to effect the seizure; the Marshal said that he would accompany him ‘and be a witness of the violence I [Joinville] should do him’. When they reached the treasure, which was kept in the hold of a galley, the Treasurer of the Temple, unaware of the real situation and seeing Joinville weak with illness, refused to deliver up the keys. Joinville took an axe to break open the door, whereupon the Marshal intervened, saying ‘Since you evidently intend to use force against us, we will let you have the keys.’⁸

IV. The Estoire d'Eracles relates how the son of Saladin, having requested permission to cross the land of Count Raymond of Tripoli, was authorised to do so, on condition that he went and returned between sunrise and sunset and that he took nothing, either in any town or any house. The outward journey passed without incident, Count Raymond having instructed his people to lie low; however, on the return journey, the strong Saracen party was attacked in open country by a much inferior force of Crusaders led by the Master of the Temple. Of the one hundred and forty attackers, only four escaped; many of the inhabitants of Nazareth, believing the Saracens routed, went out of the city in search of plunder and were in their turn captured by the Saracens, who then re-crossed the river before night fell. The chronicler observes that Saladin's son ‘kept his promise to the Count of Tripoli well, for they [the Saracens] did no damage either in castle or town or house, except to those whom they found in the fields’.⁹

In these four examples we may see in operation most of the elements usual in the oath situation. In the first two, the swearers consider themselves bound by their words, even though the oath was employed informally and in anger, and although Joinville, especially, clearly regrets his hastiness; we may surmise that the Black Prince, too, having regained his calm, realized the political expediency of sparing the bishop. If the swearer considers himself bound by his oath but wishes to avoid fulfilment of its conditions, either he may ask for the oath to be dissolved by the Church, or he may have recourse to the stratagem whereby responsibility is transferred to another, as when the Black Prince releases his prisoner to the Duke of Lancaster and thereby loses the power to fulfil his oath. In the third and fourth examples, from Joinville and the Estoire d'Eracles, both examples of more deliberate and legalistic oaths, we see the importance attached to exact conformance with the formal provisions: the Marshal of the Temple adheres strictly to his oath by refusing to lend the money, but sees no wrong in suggesting a way to circumvent the difficulty, if this will assist the king, although he is at the same time careful to safeguard his own honour and reputation by a token claim of submission to force majeure; the Saracen prince adheres unswervingly to the literal word of his engagement towards Raymond of Tripoli and thereby escapes any censure by the Christian chronicler. (Indeed, blame in the matter is reserved for a Crusader, Reynald de Châtillon, who by his breaking of a sworn truce has irritated the Saracens and who shortly afterwards pays for his faithlessness at the hands of Saladin himself.¹⁰) The insistence on formal observance of the oath is characteristic; the same insistence on formal correctness extended to the initial swearing of the oath, for we know that a slip of the tongue while swearing nullified the oath, except in the case of foreigners, whose faulty command of the language exempted them from this otherwise accepted convention.¹¹ To complete this sketch of the oath-mechanism, it is perhaps necessary to state an obvious fact: in the absence of his sworn word, medieval man often did not scruple to manipulate the truth, if we are to judge by the chroniclers' accounts of intrigue, disloyalty and treacherousness.

When one approaches the Tristran with these ideas in mind, it is evident that Iseut, in swearing the ambiguous oath at Mal Pas: ‘Q'entre mes cuises n'entra home, Fors le ladre qui fist soi some [Tristran in disguise], Qui me porta outre les guez, Et li rois Marc mes esposez’ (ll. 4205-08),¹² escapes being struck down by a vengeful God, not because God is indulgent of a blatant lie, but because her oath is true in form. Iseut is clearly aware of this distinction, since she stipulates in advance that the form of the oath shall be hers to choose: ‘Escondit mais ne lor ferai, Fors un que je deviserai’ (ll. 3233-4). Had she been forced into using an unambiguous form of words, she could not have sworn for fear of divine retribution. In this way, Iseut herself gives us a further demonstration, if that were necessary, of the mechanism of the oath, wherein the form of words is vital to the oath's acceptance, for God would not be willing to countenance a lie. The form of the oath satisfies the world of men, because they are misled by it; because it is not untrue, it is acceptable to God, who acts as supreme and all-knowing arbiter.¹³

Having thus defined the underlying machinery of the oath by examination of the four examples drawn from chroniclers and of the most striking case in Béroul's text, we may test against it those instances in the poem where God is invoked by the lovers as guarantor of their veracity. By invocation of God is to be understood a statement with which God's name is associated; although it has been claimed¹⁴ that locutions of the type si m'aït Dex and par Deu omnipotent ‘n'ont plus qu'un sens exclamatif’, it is far from proven that in such cases ‘les mérites de Dieu sont évoqués sans raison et n'ont aucun rapport avec le contexte’. Especially would it seem hazardous to argue from the usage in Aucassin et Nicolette, a work noted for its irreligious flavour, that in any other text the same formulas must therefore be considered so many empty phrases; until a particular case is proven, we must assume that these formulas retained much of their original significance for author and public, the more so in a serious work such as the Tristran, which is perhaps lacking in doctrinal expertise but is nonetheless permeated with the more spontaneous religiosity so typical of its age. After all, in the following century even, did not a citizen of Paris have his lips and nose seared for a simple blasphemy, on the orders of Louis IX, who was wont to say: ‘I would willingly allow myself to be branded with a hot iron on condition that all wicked oaths were banished from my realm’?¹⁵ As we have already seen in considering Iseut's comportment in the ambiguous oath episode, the queen is at great pains to avoid blasphemy: why should this be, if the sin means nothing to her or to the contemporary reader? Therefore we must accept, at least as a working hypothesis, that blasphemy is unthinkable for the lovers and that each statement containing an invocation of God represents the truth as Tristran and Iseut see it.

In the opening lines of the Béroul fragment, Iseut calls God's vengeance upon herself if she is guilty of untruth in her claim never to have loved any other than the one who took her maidenhead: ‘Mais Dex plevis ma loiauté, Qui sor mon cors mete flaele, S'onques fors cil qui m'ot pucele Out m'amistié nul jor!’ (ll. 22-5). This is essentially the same oath that she later swears solemnly at Mal Pas, with a slight variation in the terms. If the one is acceptable to God, then so is the other. In the course of her first encounter with the hermit Ogrin, Iseut is completely truthful: ‘Sire, por Deu omnipotent, Il ne m'aime pas, ne je lui, Fors par un herbé dont je bui, Et il en but …’ (ll. 1412-15), thus she need not hesitate in calling upon God to vouch for the truth of her statement. When Tristran assures Mark: ‘Ainz nu pensames, Dex le set’ (l. 561), this is again the literal truth, for God knows indeed that the lovers' fault was never intended. A last example of swearing in God's name is Iseut's affirmation to Tristran: ‘Ne je, par Deu omnipotent, N'ai corage de drüerie Qui tort a nule vilanie’ (ll. 32-4). The exact wording of this informal oath is highly significant, in that the queen qualifies her denial of drüerie by the restrictive qui tort a nule vilanie, thus relying on God to differentiate—as Heavenly Judge—between drüerie, of which she is guilty in the eyes of men, and drüerie qui tort a nule vilanie, of which she considers herself innocent.

Thus, of five cases where the lovers call upon God to guarantee the truth of their statements, only one represents an oath where form and intent coincide, that of Iseut to Ogrin at their first meeting; the four others depend on a legalistic interpretation of the form of words, as in the third and fourth chronicle examples. Yet it is true to say that, whenever God's name is invoked, Béroul never allows his two principal characters to use a demonstrable untruth, so avoiding blasphemy on his part and on theirs. If such a system must be categorized either as cynicism or as a naïvely subtle conception of justice,¹⁶ one cannot but endorse the latter view. On the initial charge of perjury, it would appear that Tristran and Iseut are not guilty, if judged in accordance with the morality of their age; it is paradoxical that certain modern critics should have arrived at the opposite verdict by applying a medieval doctrine—‘Le fait juge l'homme’—which does not fit the case. There remains the additional count of lying. As we remarked earlier, lying and perjury were sharply distinguished in the Middle Ages, much as they are in our modern courts of law; perjury was and is a serious and punishable offence, whereas lying was in medieval times a more venial fault, so far as we can ascertain. If Tristran and Iseut shrink from perjury, do they feel the same constraint in the avoidance of all falsehood?

Having seen that Iseut was not guilty of perjury when she swore her innocence of drüerie qui tort a nule vilanie, we must accept that Tristran is not lying either when he claims: ‘C'onques nul jor, n'en fait n'en dit, N'oi o vos point de drüerie Qui li tornast a vilanie’ (ll. 2228-30). There is no invocation of God at this point—understandably, since he is addressing Iseut, whom he has no need to convince—but the form of words is identical to that earlier used solemnly by the queen.¹⁷ In view of this confirmation, it is difficult to share the shocked concern of Pierre Le Gentil, who asks, in the later of his two articles on the Tristran: ‘N'offre-t-il pas une fois de plus, avec une confondante audace, de soutenir par les armes qu'entre Iseut et lui il n'y a jamais eu “druerie tournant à vilenie”?’¹⁸ Why should Tristran not reaffirm what God has already accepted from Iseut as a true account of their condition? Again, two other apparent lies are formally true: ‘… Que nos amors jostent ensemble, Sire, vos n'en avez talent’ (ll. 30-31), says Iseut to Tristran, who in turn affirms: ‘Onques n'oi talent de tel rage’ (l. 253); these statements are almost an echo of Tristran's earlier explanation: ‘Ainz nu pensames, Dex le set’, which is guaranteed by God, as we have already seen. That neither of the lovers had a will to commit adultery is undeniably true, and the same can be said of Tristran's claim in his letter to Mark: ‘Qu'onques amor nen out vers moi, Ne je vers lui, par nul desroi’ (ll. 2573-4), since their error was unwitting. In the course of Iseut's second encounter with Ogrin, she asserts: ‘De la comune de mon cors Et je du suen somes tuit fors’ (ll. 2329-30), a claim that one is compelled to accept as truthful, despite the speculations of M. Le Gentil to the contrary,¹⁹ for there is nothing in Béroul's text to suggest a continuance of physical love-making after this point in the narrative.

We are left with four cases where the lovers appear to lie unequivocally. Iseut tells Tristran, in the hearing of Mark: ‘Sire, molt t'ai por lui amé, Et j'en ai tot perdu son gré’ (ll. 79-80). It is untrue that Iseut has loved Tristran for Mark's sake; the only mitigating factor is that in this early scene Mark is spying on the lovers, who therefore have little compunction in misleading him. It would have been tempting to see irony in Iseut's remark, with a play on the words por lui—‘in place of him’—but Iseut is here repeating an argument she has just used: ‘Por ce qu'eres du parenté Vos avoie je en cherté’ (ll. 71-2), which admits of no such interpretation. The three remaining instances of lying are all on Tristran's side: firstly when he tricks his captors at the chapel by escaping after he has promised to return to them: ‘Et quant je Dé proié avrai, A vos eisinc lors revendrai’ (ll. 937-8), which would seem condonable as a ruse de guerre, especially as Tristran considers himself unjustly and harshly treated and has not given his parole; on two other occasions he apparently denies his adultery: ‘Ainz me lairoie par le col Pendre a un arbre q'en ma vie O vos preïse drüerie’ (ll. 128-30), and again: ‘C'onques o lié n'oi drüerie, Ne ele o moi, jor de ma vie’ (ll. 2857-8), unless we are to suppose that Tristran uses the word drüerie to denote that amor de puteé of which he considers himself innocent, an explanation which is perhaps not impossible when one remembers the care taken elsewhere by Béroul's protagonists in their choice of words.

Where is the ‘shameless deceit and untruthfulness’? Five times we have heard the lovers invoke God to guarantee the truth of their utterances, which are indeed true in form; we had seen earlier, in the historical examples, how adherence to the formal wording of an oath was held to be honourable and above reproach. Four times the lovers employ the same formulas that elsewhere are guaranteed by God, so that we cannot doubt their veracity. On only four occasions do Tristran and Iseut make statements which are not obviously true in form or intent: the hero employs a ruse de guerre, the heroine misleads a spy, both actions we can condone; in the light of this evidence of Béroul's scrupulous concern for the lovers' reputation, how can we be sure that Tristran's use of drüerie is a departure from the truth?

Contrast with this careful handling of the lovers' affirmations Béroul's consistent portrayal of King Mark as a liar and oath-breaker, either directly, as when the king misleads his barons as to his motive for leaving court, claiming he has a rendezvous with a pucele whereas he is in fact going with the forester to seek out the lovers in Morrois (ll. 1931-7), and again on his return: ‘Li rois lor ment, pas n'i connut Ou il ala ne que il quist Ne de faisance que il fist’ (ll. 2060-62); or indirectly, as when he consistently fails to accomplish what he has sworn or said that he will do:

Par ire a juré saint Thomas
Ne laira n'en face justise
Et qu'en ce fu ne soit la mise.

(ll. 1126-8)

Et dist mex veut estre penduz
Qu'il ne prenge de ceus venjance
Que li ont fait tel avilance.

(ll. 1954-6)

Iriez s'en torne, sovent dit
Q'or veut morir s'il nes ocit.

(ll. 1985-6)

Mark does none of these things. Even his three felons say of him: ‘Ja n'i tendra ne fei ne veu’ (l. 3094). All this in studied opposition, as we have seen, to the poet's painstaking preservation of the lovers' credibility.²⁰

After this analysis and comparison of cases drawn from the chronicles and from Béroul's text, is it necessary to state that Béroul is neither cynical nor more naïve than his contemporaries? He is adhering to a system of truth, or rather truthfulness, patently different from our own, a system in which one was not bound to be truthful, unless one had sworn to be so. Perjury was universally abhorred, because it involved a denial of God, which was the ultimate blasphemy; private lying was socially admissible, especially if the individual felt in any way constrained to lie. The combination of these two factors, the individual's tendency to lie and the general abhorrence of perjury, conferred upon the oath a peculiar importance in medieval society, both as a formal judicial procedure and also as a spontaneous indication of personal veracity. For us it is perhaps easier to accept the ritual that often surrounded the swearing of an oath than it is to understand the rigorous formalism with which its provisions were undoubtedly interpreted; nevertheless, it is essential to our understanding of medieval life and letters that we do not under-estimate the almost magical power of the sworn word, cornerstone of the political, social and judicial systems of an age.

Notes

1. J. Crosland, Medieval French literature, Oxford, 1956, pp. 102-3.

2. P. Le Gentil, ‘La légende de Tristan vue par Béroul et Thomas’, Romance Philology, VII (1953-4), p. 112.

3. Cited by J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, New York, 1954, pp. 87-8.

4. In ‘L'épisode du Morois et la signification du Tristan de Béroul’, Studia philologica et litteraria in honorem L. Spitzer, Bern, 1958, p. 272.

5. P. Jonin, Les personnages féminins dans les romans français de Tristan au XII^e siècle (Publications des Annales de la Faculté des Lettres, Aix-en-Provence, nouv. sér. n° 22), Gap, 1958, pp. 339 ff.

6. Froissart, Chronicles. … Translated and edited by G. Brereton, Baltimore, 1968, pp. 175-80. The Black Prince's oaths varied in frangibility, to judge by Froissart's parenthesis; one is reminded of Louis XI, who sent specially to Angers for the cross of St. Laud to take an oath upon, for he distinguished between oaths taken on one relic and on another (cited by J. Huizinga, op. cit., p. 187).

7. Joinville, in Joinville et Villehardouin, Chronicles of the Crusades. Translated … by M. R. B. Shaw, Baltimore, 1963, p. 307.

8. Joinville, op. cit., pp. 258-9.

9. Estoire d'Eracles, cited by R. Pernoud, The Crusades. … Translated by E. McLeod, New York, 1964, pp. 159-61.

10. Ibid., p. 169.

11. See J. Huizinga, op. cit., p. 233.

12. Quotations are taken from A. Ewert's edition, The romance of Tristran by Béroul, 2 vols., Oxford, 1958-70.

13. It is difficult to share Helaine Newstead's view that ‘the validity of Isolt's oath is tested not by an ordeal, as in Thomas, but by the judgement of King Arthur’ (‘The equivocal oath in the Tristan legend’, Mélanges offerts à Rita Lejeune, 2 vols., Gembloux, 1969, p. 1083); Arthur's function is not to judge the oath but to defend the right, once God's acceptance of the deraisne is manifest.

14. By P. Jonin, op. cit., pp. 340-43.

15. Joinville, ed. cit., p. 336.

16. A phrase (‘conception naïvement subtile de la justice’) used by J. Bédier in his Roman de Tristan par Thomas (SATF), Paris, 1905, tom. II, p. 184.

17. King Arthur employs a similar qualification when he indicates the intended scope of Iseut's disclaimer: ‘Qu'el onques n'ot amor conmune A ton nevo, ne deus ne une, Que l'en tornast a vilanie, N'amor ne prist par puterie’ (ll. 4163-6) and again: ‘Que Tristran n'ot vers vos amor De puteé ne de folor’ (ll. 4193-4).

18. ‘L'épisode du Morois’, p. 272.

19. Ibid., p. 273.

20. A. Ewert's mistranslation of: ‘Tant ait plus [mis, beau] sire Ogrin, Vostre merci, el parchemin, Que je ne m'os en lui fïer’ (ll. 2411-3) as ‘However much is put in the letter … I dare not trust him’ (ed. cit., vol. II, p. 204) would make Tristran sound unduly suspicious of Mark's good faith; the true sense of these words is surely ‘Let there be added to the letter … that I dare not trust him’, i.e. until Mark has replied to Tristran's letter and agreed to the terms proposed.