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La Fresne Social Status

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This paper will focus on how nobility affects social status, opportunities and how it provides a luxurious life to nobles. From La Fresne, I will study the fact that La Fresne’s luxurious possessions (blanket and fine ring), set her fate. Because of it she received an education and a decent living, and eventually met her parents. If she didn’t show “signs” of nobility her life would have turned out very differently, she could have been abandoned or worse. In Marie de France’s “Le Fresne”, a mother who is frightened of being misjudged seeks to abandon one of her twin daughters, due to the fact that having twins hinted at the idea of infidelity. The mother contemplates outrageous solutions to this problem, such as murder, but after sound advice from her beloved maid, she decides against it, and together formulate a plan to get rid of one of her daughters. They decide to abandon the child in a church so that she could be adopted and raised by someone else. Before giving up her child, the mother wraps her baby in a lavish brocade that her husband had brought back from the Crusades and tied to it a fine ring. The maid leaves the child on an ash tree around the church, where she was found and automatically assumed to be nobility. As stated in “To Follow in Their Footsteps” by Nicholas Paul, when the First Crusades ended, happy crusaders returned to Europe bringing with them stories, memorabilia, sacred relics, fine jewelry and weapons. The Crusaders brought with them lavish
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