Eustache Deschamps

Somehow, in 770 posts on this blog, I never talked about Eustache Deschamps before. He was an extremely prolific poet who lived from 1346 until 1406/7. Born in northeast France, he studied under Guillaume de Machaut (about whom I have posted). Then, after studying law at Orleans University, he became a diplomatic messenger for King Charles V. He was granted other significant titles and duties during his life, including governor of the the commune Fisme.

Fisme suffered during the Hundred Years War between the English and French, and for this and other reasons Deschamps hated the English, using his poetry to express his feelings.

Deschamps wrote over 1100 ballades. To be fair, ballades were fairly short. The medieval ballade consisted of three eight-line stanzas with a repeating refrain. Most of them are satirical attacks on the English. He had praise for one Englishman though: he wrote one ballade praising Geoffrey Chaucer as a philosopher and poet. Chaucer, in turn, was inspired by Deschamp's one long poem, over 12,000 lines o the subject of women.

He also wrote a treatise on French poetry, in which he outlined the "rules" for different kinds of verse. He also shares his theory about music versus poetry. Music he considers "artificial" because anyone can learn it (it was a major course of study in universities), whereas poetry was "natural" because without being born with the talent for poetry, you would not be any good at it.

At least one line of his you might have heard. He wrote "Friends are relatives you make for yourself."

Next, I want to tell you a little about his university.

The Gittern

The 14th century French poet Eustache Deschamps said “at royal courts everyone wants to play the trumpet, gittern, and rebebe.” You know what a trumpet is. The rebebe was a bowed instrument. The gittern has been called:

"one of the most important plucked fingerboard instruments of the late medieval period. Loved by all levels of society, it was played by royal appointment, in religious service, in taverns, for singing, for dancing, and in duets with the lute." [link]

The naming of medieval musical instruments was very confusing, with different names for the same instrument and multiple instruments being called by the same name. It didn't help that the same instrument could be of varied construction.

The gittern could have anywhere from two to five gut strings, played with a plectrum made from a quill. It was shaped like a smaller lute with a pear-shaped body. The body and the neck were a single piece of wood, unlike many other stringed instruments.

The popularity of the gittern may have led to its scarcity now. When something is extremely common, it is not always valued properly. In consequence, despite its popularity, we have very few extant gitterns today. You can see one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there's one in the Wartburg Castle Museum in Eisenach, Germany. These were the only two known, until one was recognized in a medieval outhouse in Poland.

The image above is of a modern recreation from a maker of musical instruments. If you would like to hear a gittern being played, click here.

But who was Eustache Deschamps, who made such a bold statement about the gittern? I'll gladly talk about him tomorrow.