Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

Composing songs of courtly love and war in the high Middle Ages, the troubadours were the poet musicians of Western and Southern Europe,

especially Southern France. But were they really the lovesick wandering minstrels that popular

culture would have as believe? Or was there more to their artistry? Speaking to Emily

Griffith, Professor Linda Patterson, author of The Trubedores, answers your top questions on their lives and their enduring poetic and musical legacy.

As with all of our everything you wanted to know episodes, we have lots of lovely listener questions for you.

But as we're talking about Trubours today, I think we need to

start with the broad strokes, the contextual question. What exactly was a troubadour? Okay. Well, a troubadour

was a poet musician, active in the south of France and many other places in the 12th and 13th centuries,

starting actually at the very end of the 11th century,

and they sang in a language which we call OxyTam, which is a fancy word for Provencal.

Perfect. And this is a question we have had from Dinah Stanford on Facebook,

who's just asked, could we say they were essentially medieval buskers?

Yes, I like that question.

In a way, but I think it's important to make a distinction between troubadours and janglers,

or jugglers, as they said in Oxtan.

Just to keep it simple, there's a difference between a troubadour who is a composer and a jangler who is a performer, a singer, although they could be the same person and somebody could start

off as a jangler and become a composer or vice versa. They're going to be mainly interested

in performing where people are going to pay them well or give them a

nice present, like a horse or a cloak, say. And so the courts are important. And a court is either

somewhere static, like you go to someone's house or palace and you perform there, or it could be

actually travelling around with a lord because a court is

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