Champenois

The Champenois are the people of Champagne, the plains between Paris and the Holy Roman Empire, centred on Troyes, Reims and the Marne valley. Their tongue is an Oïl Romance language with dialects from Ardennais to Langrois, and it holds a real literary heritage: the trouvere Theobald the Songwriter, count of Champagne and king of Navarre, composed in it.

The County of Champagne became a commercial wonder of medieval Europe through its trade fairs, which drew merchants from Flanders, the Rhine, Italy and England and made Troyes a centre of finance and a literary court graced by Chretien de Troyes. The country was also the cradle of the Cistercian order at Clairvaux and sent knights to every crusade between 1095 and 1270.

From 1234 its counts ruled Navarre too, and the marriage of Queen Joan I of Navarre to Philip IV of France carried the county into the French royal domain in the early fourteenth century. After that Parisian French slowly overshadowed the regional speech.