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The discovery, made by Ernest Langlois in 1910, of a notated musical staff at the end of a little-known parodic laisse probably written within the 13th century by an otherwise unknown Thomas de Bailleul (MS London, BL, Royal 20 A XVII) immediately raised the interest of medieval musicologists, who have debated its function and interpretation until recent times, whereas Romance philologists haven’t payed due attention to this intriguing and unique musical evidence, undoubtedly related to an Old French chanson de geste. In this paper I shall defend Georg Schläger’s forgotten hypothesis that the musical staff could well represent a vocalized ‘short line’ (petit vers), arguing that this question should be brought back to the issues concerning the formal aspects of epic laisse and to the field of Romance philology as a whole.
