open mistresses, and so abstinence or not condemning the sin led to imagined guilt. Lanval, by saying that he did not want to betray the king, implied that the queen was behaving traitorously. By declaring him a homosexual, Guinevere reflected that charge back on him because everyone was endangered by that sin, according to common belief. Lanval's economic situation at the beginning of the Lai also has basis in history. Lanval is depicted as a knight that experiences personal alienation in reflection of the actual alienation of 12th-century lower nobility that primarily consisted of younger, unmarried sons. During the crisis of aristocracy, caused by the reconstitution of monarchy and through the rise of the urban middle class, the bacheliers or jeunes found themselves in a position of being without land or in the need to sell that which they did own in order to pay off their debts. Lanval is poor not just because of neglect but also because he has spent all that he has inherited. His condition reflects both a class and generation whose dispossession is the result of a matrimonial model that works against the interest of women and younger sons, under which if the eldest son survived to the age of marriage and reproduction, the younger siblings were left to wander far from home, much like depicted within the opening lines of Lanval. His wandering into the countryside and encounter with the fairy mistress represent the dream of possession. She serves as a foil to reality; while he is exiled, she has left her own country to find him and while he is neglected by Arthur, she holds him above all other knights. Most importantly while Lanval is poor, she is rich beyond measure. Lanval can be read as a sort of parody of the numerous damsel in distress tales in which a valiant knight rescues a maiden, whereas within Lanval it is the fairy mistress saving the valiant knight from distress instead. She is the literary incarnation of a fantasized solution to class issues which persisted in actual history during the 12th century for young knights. This lai makes a number of references to ancient history. When describing the opulence of the fairy lady's lodgings, Marie de France describes them as being superior to those of the Assyrian queen Semiramis and the Roman emperor Octavian. Another example is Guinevere's denouncement of Lanval, which is an