But the originality of a great lord turning troubadour was accompanied by less admirable eccentricities. In one of the earliest known examples of heraldry he had his concubine Dangerosa’s likeness painted on his shield, explaining repeatedly that he wanted her over him in battle just as he was over her in bed.
He announced his intention of building a special whore house for his convenience, just outside Niort, in the shape of a small nunnery.
His frivolity, his satirical wit and his cynicism disturbed contemporaries. ‘Brave and gallant but too much of a jester, behaving like some comedian with joke upon joke’, Orderic Vitalis says of him, and Orderic is supported by William of Malmesbury, who speaks of the duke as a giddy, unsettled kind of man ‘finding pleasure only in one nonsense after another, listening to jests with his mouth wide open in a constant guffaw’.
Source:
Seward, Desmond. “Aquitaine and the Troubadours.” Eleanor of Aquitaine. New York: Times , 1979. 17. Print.
Further Reading:
Dangerosa / Dangereuse de l'Isle Bouchard
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