Simon d'Authie or d'Autie (born 1180/90; died after 1235) was a lawyer, priest and Old French trouvère. He was from Authie, and died at Amiens. Up to eleven songs are attributed to him, but only five are certain. He is also the respondent in three jeux-partis.
From at least 1223 Simon served as a canon, and in 1228 as dean of the chapter, at Amiens Cathedral. He worked as a lawyer for the Abbey of Saint Vaast in a lawsuit against lay assessors (1222–26) and a case involving the chapter of Arras Cathedral (1232).[1]
Simon was respondent in a jeu-parti with Gilles le Vinier ("Maistre Simon, d'un esample nouvel") and in another two with Hue le Maronnier ("Symon, le quel emploie" and "Symon, or me faites"). The latter two were judged by the trouvère Adam de Givenchi. Both Gilles and Adam appear in the same documents relating to Amiens and Saint Vaast.
Eleven songs are ascribed to Simon in the standard catalogue.[2] They have varying levels of competing attributions in other sources. The assessment of probability of his authorship below takes into account whether the ascription is in witnesses from more than one manuscript family.[3]
Despite a competing attribution to Thibaut de Champagne in TrouvC, in which the composer attributions were added slightly later and which is notoriously unreliable,[4] the most secure attribution is for RS525 because it is attributed to Simon in witnesses from two different independent manuscript families: TrouvM and TrouvT on the one hand and three members of the KNPX group(all but TrouvX) on the other.
Six songs have a high likelihood of being by Simon but lack corroborating witnesses outside their appearance in the collection of his attributed songs in MSS TrouvM and TrouvT, which are in the same family. For five of these songs, witnesses outside that family are anonymous; for RS487 there is additionally an attribution to a composer local to the Messine manuscript TrouvC, Gautier d'Espinal.
For RS1460 the two different manuscript families are internally consistent but split in their attribution, with the KNPX group attributing it consistently to Richard de Fournival, who likely overlapped with Simon at Amiens Cathedral. While RS183 is only in the two main sources for Simon's work, TrouvT and TrouvM, the former includes it among the run of his songs, whereas the latter attributes it to Gace Brulé and copies it with his songs. In both cases, the likelihood of ascription must rest on factors that make the competing attribution more or less likely.
Two songs appear to be by someone else. RS327 is attributed not to Simon but to Sauval Cosset in the two central sources for Simon's work, TrouvT and TrouvM. It also appears in three members of the KNPX group (not in TrouvX) but its attribution there varies: TrouvK and TrouvP ascribe it to Simon, but TrouvN names Jehan l'Orgueneur; TrouvC transmits it anonymously. The very widely copied song, RS882, is absent from TrouvM, anonymous in three other sources, and ascribed to the Chastelain de Couci in the three members of the KNPX group that carry it (all but TrouvN). While these two songs are similar in strength of attribution to those in the category above, the presence of more than one competing name for the former and the reduction of the later's attribution to a single witness in a large group of copies make them perhaps slightly weaker.
Simon is the respondent in three jeux-partis. Two, RS289 and RS1818, are unica and are with Hue le Maronnier, about whom nothing more is known. The third, RS572, is in two manuscripts where it is ascribed to in one of which it is clearly ascribed to Gilles le Vinier. Little is known about how the composition of jeux-partis' stanzas and melody was divided up between the two named participants; it may be that Simon is only the author of the even-numbered stanzas in which he is the 'je'.