Audefroi le Bastart was a French

Old French

Old French was the Romance dialect continuum spoken in territories that span roughly the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium and Switzerland from the 9th century to the 14th century...

 trouvère

Trouvère

Trouvère , sometimes spelled trouveur , is the Northern French form of the word trobador . It refers to poet-composers who were roughly contemporary with and influenced by the troubadours but who composed their works in the northern dialects of France...

 from Artois

Artois

Artois is a former province of northern France. Its territory has an area of around 4000 km² and a population of about one million. Its principal cities are Arras , Saint-Omer, Lens and Béthune.-Location:...

, who flourished in the early thirteenth century.

Of his life nothing is known, though he is certainly the illegitimate child of a noble or upper-class bourgeouis family, but his family is not to be identified with the noble family Arras or with the bourgeouis family of Louchart, also from Arras; Audefroi himself is not to be identified with Gautier d'Arras

Gautier d'Arras

Gautier d'Arras was a Flemish or French trouvère.He is called Galterus attrebatensis or Walterus de Altrebat in many contemporary Latin documents, the first of which dates from 1160, where he is mentioned as a property owner in Arras...

. The Seigneur de Nesles, to whom some of his songs are addressed, is probably the Châtelain

Châtelain

Châtelain was originally merely the French equivalent of the English castellan, i.e. the commander of a castle....

 of Bruges

Bruges

Bruges is the capital and largest city of the province of West Flanders in the Flemish Region of Belgium. It is located in the northwest of the country....

 who joined the Fourth Crusade

Fourth Crusade

The Fourth Crusade was originally intended to conquer Muslim-controlled Jerusalem by means of an invasion through Egypt. Instead, in April 1204, the Crusaders of Western Europe invaded and conquered the Christian city of Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman Empire...

.

Audefroi was the author of ten chansons d'amour

Grand chant

The gran chan or, in modern French, chanson courtoise or chanson d'amour, often abbreviated chanson, was a genre of Old French lyric poetry devised by the trouvères. It was adopted from the Occitan canso of the troubadours, but scholars stress that it was a distinct genre...

 and five chansons de toile

Chanson de toile

The Chanson de toile was a genre of narrative Old French lyric poetry devised by the trouvères which flourished in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century. Some fifteen of them remain; five were written by Audefroi le Bastart, the others are anonymous...

: "Argentine," "Belle Idoine," "Belle Isabeau," "Belle Emmelos," and "Biatrix." These five follow older chanson

Chanson

A chanson is in general any lyric-driven French song, usually polyphonic and secular. A singer specialising in chansons is known as a "chanteur" or "chanteuse" ; a collection of chansons, especially from the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, is also known as a chansonnier.-Chanson de geste:The...

s in subject, but the smoothness of the verse and beauty of detail readily compensate for the spontaneity of the shorter form.