This book has been written in the belief that it is possible, by carefully re-examining the manuscript versions of lyric texts that have come down to us and the historical circumstances in which they were originally composed, to tease out fresh historical information and insights into lay views of the crusades. These texts speak to us in a variety of voices. Their hundred or more composers may express their own individual concerns and opinions, but they also, and more often, speak for others, for they need to please and be meaningful to at least part of their audience: a powerful member of the high nobility, a group of local aristocracy with its aspirations and discontents, other poets, a settled court imbued with courtly and knightly ideology, a court in transit to a crusading expedition, an army camp, people under siege.

The troubadours and trouvères were composing songs for oral performance at particular times and places, in front of particular audiences. Their contemporaries and successors did not see their songs as ephemeral, occasional pieces, for they preserved them through a long process of oral and written transmission. We have seen how political songs could be passed on orally and still resonate seventy years later as the voice of lasting political dissidence. At the oral stage of performance and transmission, memorable, memorised and repeatable songs could be a powerful medium for putting pressure on leaders and others conscious of their reputation and for reinforcing socially accepted values. For us the songs survive in written form, arranged in medieval anthologies compiled from the thirteenth century onwards, sometimes a hundred years or more after their original composition. The various purposes of these anthologies are still to be fully explored. Some evidently sought to create prestigious cultural objects for their aristocratic patrons, as was the case for a number of Italian manuscripts and the French aristocratic songbooks. The latter, as we have seen, generally excluded political and other material which surfaces in marginal sources or collections. Other, all-inclusive, compilations represent a retrospective, all-encompassing, symbolic monument designed to preserve the poetic and cultural baggage of a tradition. As Marisa Galvez has observed, the collecting and ordering of lyric texts into a codex ‘was a fluid, often ad hoc process’ reflecting ‘the shifting horizons of the songbook's medieval public’.