Charlemagne or his successor was still at Aix, and the Moors were still in Spain.  Archbishop Turpin of Rheims had fought with sword and mace in Spain, while Bishop Odo of Bayeux was to marshal his men at Hastings, like a modern general, with a staff, but both were equally at home on the field of battle.  Verse by verse, the song was a literal mirror of the Mount.  The battle of Hastings was to be fought on the Archangel’s Day.  What happened to Roland at Roncesvalles was to happen to Harold at Hastings, and Harold, as he was dying like Roland, was to see his brother Gyrth die like Oliver.  Even Taillefer was to be a part, and a distinguished part, of his chanson.  Sooner or later, all were to die in the large and simple way of the eleventh century.  Duke William himself, twenty years later, was to meet a violent death at Mantes in the same spirit, and if Bishop Odo did not die in battle, he died, at least, like an eleventh-century hero, on the first crusade.  First or last, the whole company died in fight, or in prison, or on crusade, while the monks shrived them and prayed.

Then Taillefer certainly sang the great death-scenes.  Even to this day every French school-boy, if he knows no other poetry, knows these verses by heart.  In the eleventh century they wrung the heart of every man-at-arms in Europe, whose school was the field of battle and the hand-to-hand fight.  No modern singer ever enjoys such power over an audience as Taillefer exercised over these men who were actors as well as listeners.  In the melee at Roncesvalles, overborne by innumerable Saracens, Oliver at last calls for help:—­

Munjoie escriet e haltement e cler. 
 Rollant apelet sun ami e sun per;
 “Sire compainz a mei kar vus justez. 
 A grant dulur ermes hoi deserveret.”  Aoi.

“Montjoie!” he cries, loud and clear,
 Roland he calls, his friend and peer;
 “Sir Friend! ride now to help me here! 
 Parted today, great pity were.”

Of course the full value of the verse cannot be regained.  One knows neither how it was sung nor even how it was pronounced.  The assonances are beyond recovering; the “laisse” or leash of verses or assonances with the concluding cry, “Aoi,” has long ago vanished from verse or song.  The sense is as simple as the “Ballad of Chevy Chase,” but one must imagine the voice and acting.  Doubtless Taillefer acted each motive; when Oliver called loud and clear, Taillefer’s voice rose; when Roland spoke “doulcement et suef,” the singer must have sung gently and soft; and when the two friends, with the singular courtesy of knighthood and dignity of soldiers, bowed to each other in parting and turned to face their deaths, Taillefer may have indicated the movement as he sang.  The verses gave room for great acting.  Hearing Oliver’s cry for help, Roland rode up, and at sight of the desperate field, lost for a moment his consciousness:—­