The Lais of Marie de France

In Brittany, a knight whose wife just gave birth to twin sons rejoices and tells his neighbor. The neighbor’s wife, who is “prone to slander and envy” (61), spreads the rumor that the knight’s wife gave birth to twins because she had sex with two men.

Later in the year, when the slanderer gives birth to twin daughters, she is convinced that her own reputation will be ruined. Her first plan is to kill one of the daughters, but a maid of noble birth has the idea that one of the twins should be abandoned in a church, where some worthy man will find her and take her in. The woman wraps up the baby in brocade and ties a ring around her arm with a ribbon. The lady’s damsel takes the baby to an abbey and puts her in the shade of an ash tree. A porter finds the child, and an abbess eventually adopts her, raising her as a niece. They call the baby le Fresne, the old French name for the ash-tree she was found under. The girl grows up to be a beauty.

In the nearby town of Dol, the lord Gurun hears of the maiden’s beauty, and finds a way to meet with her by increasing the abbey’s land in an exchange for a lord’s dwelling-rights.