A tale of jailed remunerated weavers in Yvain ou le chevalier au Lion of Chrétien de Troyes (1178/80)

Yvain ou le chevalier au Lion is an Arthurian romance written in verse by Chrétien de Troyes between 1176 and 1181 in French based on Gaelic legends. In the romance, Yvain not only has personal problems with his wife (a woman he conquers by killing her husband and protecting her castle), he also saves various characters just for fun – or for justice, at least without self-interest. He saves a lion from a snake; he frees the daughter and the sons of a lord from a cruel giant, just before saving a maid from a death sentence by defeating the champion of the grieving party. On his way to another duel as champion of another damsel in distress, he arrives to the Castle of Ill Adventure. There he finds three hundred damsels jailed in the castle weaving silk clothes and eventually rescues them by defeating two demons. The episode of the silk weavers is a challenging source for the historians of medieval textile production because the maidens are forced to work but receive a remuneration. Even if the text has a fictional and even fantastical character, we need to understand how the labour condition is conceived in order to seize the conceptual frame of the episode. For that purpose, tagging action phrases and analysing the different phases of labour compulsion (entry, extraction, exit) are useful.