The vocabulary of “romance” and “chivalry” brought the biggest culture shock to England since Alfred set out to re-educate the people: but where Alfred did this for God and for unity, the court of Henry and Eleanor did it for culture and pleasure. Eleanor was considered the most cultured woman in Europe. She attempted to change the sensibility of this doom-struck, crushed, occupied outpost of an island and it was she more than anyone else who patronised poets and troubadours whose verses and songs created the Romantic image of the Middle Ages as the Age of Chivalry — a glorious vision, little,
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