55r La Nouvele Complainte doutremer

and rescue Acre and the Temple.
Downy-faced young squire,
I greatly lament your folly,
for you have no plans to do good
and no intention of mending your ways.
Yet you are the sons of great prudhommes^{1check for previous note},
(I know them and name them as such)
and you are lazy and half-witted,
and you do not concern yourself with your duties.
You are ashamed to encounter a prudhomme.
Your sparrowhawks are better trained
than you are, that is true.
For there are those that, when you release them,
return a lark to your hand.
Shame on him who praises you,
since neither God nor your country does so.
The wisest among you is a true fool.
When you ought to do something good
that would be to your benefit,
you do the complete opposite.
For you vilely take the
honor of poor young girls.
Then, they can longer have honorable men
and they become one of the many.
That is but one of the sins that weighs upon you.
You trample upon your poor neighbors:
you even go to the market
to sell your wheat and livestock
alongside these other poor wretches.
You wipe away all gentillesse.
You do not care about what you do
until old age renders you invisible,
when your face is wrinkled and
you are old and grey-haired.
Because of this, people will say you are

of Gilemeir's lineage^{1Gilemeir is said to be the uncle of Ganelon from the Song of Roland. See Zink note 1, pp 986-7}
which is something you would not want.
You were born into knighthood
and therefore you have some fear of reproach.
But if you loved honor
and feared dishonor
and loved your lineage
then you would be a wise man and a prudhomme.
When you have lived out your time
and no pagan^{3the word "pagan" was often used to refer to Muslims, and can be related to the erroneous attribution of Muslim practice to idol worship and polytheism} has ever seen your shield,
what might you ask of Him who
made a sacrifice of Himself?
With God as my witness, I do not know,
since you are not holding to the right path.
Prelates, clerics, knights, bourgeois,^{4a person living in a town or burg}
you who, at your whim, let three weeks of a month go by
without serving God and the Holy Church,
tell me, do you know in which book
one finds how long a man will live?
I do not know, I cannot find it.
But I can rightly prove to you
that once a man is born
he has little time to be in this world.
He does not know when he will have to depart.
What is more certain
is that death will run us down.
Less certain is at what hour.
Prelates on your Norwegian palfreys,²
you who know well by what ³barbaric deed
the son of God was put on the cross
to confound his enemies,
you sermonize to the little people
and the poor grey-haired old ladies
that they should be full of righteousness.