The Charroi de Nîmes is an Old French

Old French

Old French was the Romance dialect continuum spoken in territories that span roughly the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium and Switzerland from the 9th century to the 14th century...

 chanson de geste

Chanson de geste

The chansons de geste, Old French for "songs of heroic deeds", are the epic poems that appear at the dawn of French literature. The earliest known examples date from the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, nearly a hundred years before the emergence of the lyric poetry of the trouvères and...

from the first half of the twelfth-century, part of the cycle of chansons concerning Guillaume (or William) of Orange

William of Gellone

Saint William of Gellone was the second Count of Toulouse from 790 until his replacement in 811. His Occitan name is Guilhem, and he is known in French as Guillaume d'Orange, Guillaume Fierabrace, and the Marquis au court nez.He is the hero of the Chanson de Guillaume, an early chanson de geste,...

, generally referred to collectively as the Geste de Guillaume d'Orange.

The poem exists in 8 manuscripts which all include other chansons from the same cycle. The poem comprises 1,486 decasyllable

Decasyllable

Decasyllable is a poetic meter of ten syllables used in poetic traditions of syllabic verse...

 verses in 57 assonance

Assonance

Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences, and together with alliteration and consonance serves as one of the building blocks of verse. For example, in the phrase "Do you like blue?", the is repeated within the sentence and is...

d laisse

Laisse

A laisse is a type of stanza, of varying length, found in medieval French literature, specifically medieval French epic poetry , such as The Song of Roland. In early works, each laisse was made up of assonanced verses, although the appearance of rhymed laisses was increasingly common in later...

s; there is no shorter syllable lines (found in some of the other chansons concerning William). 63% of the lines are in direct discourse, which give this chanson a distinctly spoken character.

The first modern edition was printed in 1857-1867 in Vol. 1 of the collected chansons about William of Orange published in The Hague

The Hague

The Hague is the capital city of the province of South Holland in the Netherlands. With a population of 500,000 inhabitants , it is the third largest city of the Netherlands, after Amsterdam and Rotterdam...

 by the Dutch scholar Jonkbloet.

Plot

The story is as follows: on returning home from a hunt, William learns that King Louis

Louis the Pious

Louis the Pious , also called the Fair, and the Debonaire, was the King of Aquitaine from 781. He was also King of the Franks and co-Emperor with his father, Charlemagne, from 813...

 (Charlemagne

Charlemagne

Charlemagne was King of the Franks from 768 and Emperor of the Romans from 800 to his death in 814. He expanded the Frankish kingdom into an empire that incorporated much of Western and Central Europe. During his reign, he conquered Italy and was crowned by Pope Leo III on 25 December 800...

's son) has forgotten him in the distribution of fiefs. William reminds the king of his past service (as told in the chanson Li coronemenz Looïs

Li coronemenz Looïs

Li coronemenz Looïs, or Le coronement Looïs is an anonymous twelfth-century Old French chanson de geste. It is sometimes attributed to Bertrand de Bar-sur-Aube and dated 1137. The first modern critical edition of the text was published in 1888 by Ernest Langlois under the title Le Couronnement de...

), and he is eventually accorded the right to an expeditionary force to conquer Nîmes

Nîmes

Nîmes is the capital of the Gard department in the Languedoc-Roussillon region in southern France. Nîmes has a rich history, dating back to the Roman Empire, and is a popular tourist destination.-History:...

 from the Saracen

Saracen

Saracen was a term used by the ancient Romans to refer to a people who lived in desert areas in and around the Roman province of Arabia, and who were distinguished from Arabs. In Europe during the Middle Ages the term was expanded to include Arabs, and then all who professed the religion of Islam...

s. Disguising himself as a merchant leading a convoy of carts, and hiding his troops in barrels on the carts, William is able to come into the city and seize it (echoing the ruse of the Trojan Horse

Trojan Horse

The Trojan Horse is a tale from the Trojan War about the stratagem that allowed the Greeks finally to enter the city of Troy and end the conflict. In the canonical version, after a fruitless 10-year siege, the Greeks constructed a huge wooden horse, and hid a select force of men inside...

).