_Jourdains de Blaivies_, the sequel to _Amis et Amiles_, contains, besides much other interesting matter, the incident which forms the centre of the plot of _Pericles_. _Les Quatre Fils Aymon_ or _Renaut de Montauban_[34] is the foundation of one of the most popular French chap-books. _Les Saisnes_[35] deals with Charlemagne's wars with Witekind. _Berte aus grans Pies_[36] is a very graceful story of womanly innocence. _Doon de Mayence_[37], though not early, includes a charming love-episode. _Gerard de Viane_[38] contains the famous battle of Roland and Oliver. The _Voyage de Charlemagne a Constantinople_[39] is semi-burlesque in tone and one of the earliest in which that tone is perceptible. [Sidenote: Social and Literary Characteristics.] In these numerous poems there is recognisable in the first place a distinct family likeness which is common to the earliest and latest, and in the second, the natural difference of manners which the lapse of three hundred years might be expected to occasion. There is a sameness which almost amounts to monotony in the plot of most Chansons de Gestes: the hero is almost always either falsely accused of some crime, or else treacherously exposed to the attacks of Saracens, or of his own countrymen. The agents of this treachery are commonly of the blood of the arch-traitor Ganelon, and are almost invariably discomfited by the good knight or his friends and avengers. The part[40] which Charlemagne plays in these poems is not usually dignified: he is represented as easily gulled, capricious, and almost ferocious in temper, ungrateful, and ready to accept bribes and gifts. His good angel is always Duke Naimes of Bavaria, the Nestor of the Carlovingian epic. In the earliest Chansons the part played by women is not so conspicuous as in the later, but in all except _Roland_ it has considerable prominence. Sometimes the heroine is the wife, daughter, or niece of Charlemagne, sometimes a Saracen princess. But in either case she is apt to respond without much delay to the hero's advances, which, indeed, she sometimes anticipates. The conduct of knights to their ladies is also far from being what we now consider chivalrous. Blows are very common, and seem to be taken by the weaker sex as matters of course. The prevailing legal forms are simple and rather sanguinary. The judgment of God, as shown by ordeal of battle, settles all disputes; but battle is not permitted unless several nobles of weight and substance come forward as sponsors for each champion; and sponsors as well as principal risk their lives in case of the principal's defeat, unless they can tempt the king's cupidity. These common features are necessarily in the case of so large a number of poems mixed with much individual difference, nor are the Chansons by any means monotonous reading. Their versification is pleasing to the ear, and their language, considering its age, is of surprising strength, expressiveness, and even wealth.