The best-known of the chansons is the twelfth century Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland), the centerpiece of the story-cycle about the adventures of Charlemagne and his knights or paladins, called "the Carolingian Cycle" or "The Matter of France" (as contrasted to tales of Arthur and his knights, called "The Matter of Britain").
The Chansons de Geste, dreary and monotonous enough to our impatient modern sense, yet often redeemed by a sudden note of rugged pathos, ... drag their slow length along through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Their language, so full of the rough gutturals of the North, must have been the despair of the would-be lyric poet; but farther South, where the sun was kind and life more gay and leisured, the lingua romana developed rapidly, and Provence probably had a flourishing school of poetry before the singers of Picardy and Champagne had learnt their art. The elaborate and chivalrous etiquette of Provençal society was reflected faithfully in the songs of the troubadours; it was a peculiarly artificial civilization with oddly candid immoralities, and in its poems there is often a comic contrast between the subtlety of the form and the naïveté of the subject.The ideals of knighthood and chivalry expressed in the chansons de geste and the songs of the troubadors profoundly influenced literature in the Middle Ages well beyond the borders of France, creating hero-tales entirely different from those that had gone before.... When exactly the poetry of the troubadours first began to influence the North of France is a vexed question; probably it was about the time when Richard Coeur de Lyon was lying in a German prison and Bertran de Born riding to battle at the head of the lords of Aquitaine. The Courts of the North were visited by the troubadours; those of Eleanor of Poitiers {and Aquitaine], wife of [England's] Henry II, and of her daughter Marie of Champagne, became famous for their refinement; and early in the thirteenth century the singers of Champagne and Picardy began to use the most characteristic forms of Provençal verse ...
[from the Introduction to The Oxford Book of French Verse, 1908]