Arras, the capital of Artois in the north of France, was a wealthy commercial/industrial city which became will known as a center of art, crafts, music, tapestries (Polonius hid behind an arras), and literary societies, most notable of which was the Confrerie de la Ste. Chandelle, a "societe des jongleurs et des bourgeois d'Arras." It was responsible for the care and stweardship of a candle which had been seen in a vision of two mistrels when Arras was ravaged by sickness in the early twelfth century. The drippings from the candle was said to have effected some miraculous cures. The membership of the Confrerie included wealthy citizens as well as artists and of course, minstrels. One of the activities of the Confrerie was the presentation of plays. It spawned two notable playwrights:

Jean Bodel (ca. 1165-1210) was born in Arras. He is said to be the author of Le Jeu de S. Nicolas (The Play of St. Nicholas) to commemorate the transfer of the miraculous candle from the small chapel of the Hôpital of St. Nicolas to larger quarters. Bodel no doubt had his minstrel confreres in mind when he wrote it. Le Jeu de S. Nicolas comes after five Latin versions of the saint's legend and is the earliest version in the vernacular. Some claim it is the earliest know miracle play in the vernacular. Written while funds wer being raised for the Fourth Crusade, the play tells the story of the invasion of the Christians, the call to arms of the Saracens, the arrival of the Chirstian knights and their slaughter in battle ending with a single Christian "holding fast to his St. Nicholas." Woven into the epic are three thieves who drink, gamble, and fight in a tavern run by a tight-fisted host and a rascally servant-boy. At the end, St. Nicholas arrives as a deus ex machine saving the Good Christian Soldier, driving off the thieves and converting the infidel king! Bodel contracted leprosy and, in 1202, entered a lazar house where he died in 1210.

Adam de la Halle AKA Bossu d'Arras (ca. 1235-88), also born in Arras, was the son of a minor civil servant who could not afford to educate Adam on his own. Adam was, accordingly, sent to a Cistercian monastery where he completed his early studies. He probably joined the Confrerie de la Ste. Chandelle when he returned to Arras. He married a girl as poor as himself and wrote Le jeu de la feuillée (The Play of the Canopy or the Bower or the Green Leaves), a satiric vaudeville-like series of sketches that poke fun at himself, his father, his wife, and all the people of Arras.

Following a brief, unsuccessful stint at the Sorbonne, Adam returned to Arras and joined the wealthy citizens in pamphleteering against a special tax levied by Louis IX to pay for the increasingly unpopular Eighth Crusade. Their resistance to the will of the crown resulted in their being exiled to Douai until the death of Louis IX in 1271. His successor, Philip III, lifted the tax as was the exile.

Adam was taken into the household of Robert, Count of Artois. In 1282, Robert took his entire court to aid his uncle, Charles of Anjou, the King of Naples following the famous Vespers Massacre in which the Sicilians rebelled against the French. Robert's gesture proved too little too late, but during the stay in Naples, de la Halle probably composed the work for which he is best known, an idyllic pastourelle called Le jeu de Robin et Marion.

A pastourelle is one class of dramatic ballads. The text always tells the story of a knight who makes love to a shepherdess who usually gives in after a suitable amount of resistance. Sometimes, the shepherdess' screams summon her lover or her brother who drives off the knight after a good brawl. The earliest pastourelles were monologues, but it was a very natural step to create a dialogue between the knight and the shepherdess, and then in a now-familiar pattern, add scenes in which the rescuer appeared with a group of rustics with more and more music and acting opportunities. A few pastourelles even had sophisticated polyphonic settings.

Most scholars credit de la Halle with reforming this often coarse form into a new and delicate and pretty form that anticipates the neo- (or pseudo-) classicism of Torquato Tasso and Guarini. In de la Halle's play, Robin and Marion are the traditional shepherd and shepherdess, the pretty young lovers we shall see more and more of. Marion is captured by a knight who is overwhelmed by her beauty, but the stalwart marion remains true to her Robin so the knight with, in Jerry Pickering's words, "reasonably good grace," withdraws, leaving the happy couple to celebrate a happy ending with a song and a dance reminiscent of Old Comedy. According to D. J. Grout, it is uncertain whether the songs were written by de la Halle himself or were popular chansons incorporated into the play. The idyllic setting of a sort of fairy-tale France must have appealed to the court so far from home in Naples.