"Sir William, I ask you to discard your knighthood for a season and become a wandering minstrel."
Okay, I wasn’t very imaginative with my title. The Minstrel and Her Knight is exactly what the label suggests – a historical romance starring medieval minstrels. My hero, Sir William, is an English knight who has been emotionally scarred by fighting in France. He would much prefer to live a minstrel life. The only problem is that this is a one-way decision, and that way is precipitously down. Wandering entertainers were considered the dregs of society. Once Will has come out as a minstrel, his father will disown him and he’ll no longer be a privileged nobleman. What’s more, he’ll never be able to marry well, for what lady would ever wed a disreputable minstrel?
So Will hesitates. He doesn’t dare to follow his dream – until he is offered the chance to protect a talented musician through France while pretending to be a minstrel. Will leaps at the chance. The problem is, he doesn’t realise the young man he accompanies is also in disguise.
So why were medieval minstrels considered the lowest of the low? It was partly because many of them wandered from place to place for a living. A few respectable minstrels settled down with a rich patron or took a regular job in a town. But wandering entertainers were deeply suspect. Most medieval people were firmly tied to one location. Serfs had to live on their manor, lords were similarly defined by their properties, and townspeople fought hard for citizen-status of a specific town. Itinerant minstrels, however, had no community or lord to hold them accountable – which meant they probably got up to all kinds of lawless mischief.
But wandering was only part of the image problem. A minstrel made his or her living by entertaining people. People of lofty moral standards (church men for example) deemed such entertainment detrimental to the soul. Medieval theologian Thomas of Chobham, for example, looked down his celibate nose at musicians who “take part in public drinking-bouts and licentious gatherings, where they sing licentious songs to induce people to lasciviousness.” Sexy singing leads to general debauchery. Thomas, you’re such a prude.
There is yet another side to medieval music and poetry – that of the singer of courtly love, the troubadour. This is a far more respectable form of entertainment. My hero, Sir William, combines all three. He yearns for the free wandering life and to create beautiful music, but there’s also something about him that would raise Thomas of Chobham’s hackles, as my heroine, Azalais, notes when she first hears Will sing:
"Even before he sang a word, she knew it: this man was a performer. He knew how to command his audience. It seemed even the birds fell silent. Azalais too was no better than a spellbound sparrow.
Then he began to sing:
I love to see the lark hurl himself
Into the air, against the falling sunbeams,
And rise until he alights
On leaves trembling in the wind.
She knew the song, and William sang it as it should be sung – in the language of southern France, the langue d’oc. It was centuries old, a troubadour’s tune from the Golden Age of minstrels. All this she registered on some distant, logical level. But his voice, that seized hold of her senses. It wrapped a fist about her very heart and sent a shivering tingle through every fingertip – a voice as velvety as his speaking tone, only richer and fuller. It slid over the notes effortlessly, sounding the words with soft precision and weighing them with meaning only for her.
He looked at her as he sang. Those dark eyes flickered with secrets and his mouth … ah, his mouth was too fascinating to linger upon."
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