The Prise d'Orange 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 end 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. Its plot concerns William's conquest of the city of Orange

Orange, Vaucluse

Orange is a commune in the Vaucluse department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region in southeastern France.It has a primarily agricultural economy...

 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 and of his marriage to its queen Orable, renamed Guibourc.

The poem comprises 1,888 decasyllable

Decasyllable

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

 verses in 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. The poem exists in a number of manuscripts with other chansons from the same cycle. Compared to earlier chansons de geste, its tone is frequently playful, comic and parodic and it introduces romantic (courtly love) elements taken from the medieval romance

Romance (genre)

As a literary genre of high culture, romance or chivalric romance is a style of heroic prose and verse narrative that was popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a knight errant portrayed as...

.

Plot

The story is as follows: an escaped prisoner from Orange (Guillebert) comes to William in 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:...

and describes to him the beauties of the Saracen held city and of its queen Orable. William decides to see it for himself and succeeds in wooing the queen. After a series of adventures, William takes the city and marries a newly baptized Orable, renamed Guibourc.