Chardon de Croisilles

Who is Chardon de Croisilles?

Chardon de Croisilles or de Reims was an Old French trouvère and possibly an Occitan troubadour. He was probably from Croisilles, but perhaps Reims. He is associated with the school of trouvères in and around Arras. Chardon wrote four chansons d'amour, two jeux partis, and one partimen.

In two of his chansons Chardon represented Marguerite de Bourbon, the wife of Theobald I of Navarre, in acrostics. Based on this and another internal reference to the castle of Monreal near Pamplona, whereat Theobald was staying in 1237, it is thought that Chardon joined Theobald's Crusade, which left for the Holy Land in 1237. Henry II of Bar, who adjudicated one of Chardon's jeux partis, also went on Crusade with Theobald.

All Chardon's French poems use pedes and cauda: the chansons are decasyllabic, the jeux partis octosyllabic. His only surviving melodies, for Mar vit raison covoite trop haut and Rose ne lis ne me done talent, are non-repetitive. A fifth chanson, no longer ascribed to Chardon, Li departirs de la douce contree, is notable for the simplicity of its melody compared to the "floridity" of that of Rose ne lis.

A poet named Chardo wrote a partimen with an otherwise unidentified poet named Uc. The rubric La tenzo del chardo e den ugo appears in the manuscript. While Chardo's half, N'Ugo, cauzetz, avans que respondatz, survives, Uc's poem has disappeared. Oskar Schultz-Gora first proposed to identify the troubadour with the trouvère, an identification accepted by Hermann Suchier in his edition, followed by G. Huet, Adolphe Guesnon and István Frank. The identification was disputed by Vincenzo De Bartholomaeis and John H. Marshall. Suchier dated the partimen to c. 1240.