Engles (
fl.
''Floruit'' (; abbreviated fl. or occasionally flor.; from Latin for "they flourished") denotes a date or period during which a person was known to have been alive or active. In English, the unabbreviated word may also be used as a noun indicatin ...
1253), also spelled Englés, was a
Navarrese jongleur
A minstrel was an entertainer, initially in medieval Europe. It originally described any type of entertainer such as a musician, juggler, acrobat, singer or fool; later, from the sixteenth century, it came to mean a specialist entertainer who ...
and
troubadour of the mid 13th century. His lone ''
tenso'' survives only in fragments and is chiefly of interest to historians for its commentary on court life in
Pamplona under
Theobald I.
The jongleur with whom Engles is debating is anonymous. The poem has been dated to 1253. First, Engles accuses Theobald of avarice and thriftiness, to which the anonymous replies that Engles—whose name implies that he was
English—is anti-French (since Theobald was a Frenchman). Engles finishes the poem by indicating that he is leaving Pamplona for the court of
Aragon
Aragon ( , ; Spanish and an, Aragón ; ca, Aragó ) is an autonomous community in Spain, coextensive with the medieval Kingdom of Aragon. In northeastern Spain, the Aragonese autonomous community comprises three provinces (from north to sou ...
. Engles makes humorous use of a pun on the words ''cort'' (court) and ''corta'' (short):
Peire Guilhem de Tolosa also attacked Theobald I of Navarres, who was a prolific
trouvère and commissioner of the ''
chansonnier
A chansonnier ( ca, cançoner, oc, cançonièr, Galician and pt, cancioneiro, it, canzoniere or ''canzoniéro'', es, cancionero) is a manuscript or printed book which contains a collection of chansons, or polyphonic and monophonic settings o ...
du roi'', which includes many troubadour poems.
Sources
*
Riquer, Martín de. ''Los trovadores: historia literaria y textos''. 3 vol. Barcelona: Planeta, 1975.
13th-century Spanish troubadours
People from Navarre
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