In most of the early pastourelles, the poet knight meets a shepherdess who bests him in a battle of wit and who displays general coyness.
The narrator usually has sexual relations, either consensual or rape, with the shepherdess, and there is a departure or escape.
Later developments moved toward pastoral poetry by having a shepherd and sometimes a love quarrel.
This troubadour form melded with goliard poetry and was practiced in France and Occitania until the Carmina Burana of c. 1230.
Adam de la Halle's Jeu de Robin et Marion (the game of Robin and Maid Marion) is a dramatization of a pastourelle, and as late as Edmund Spenser the pastourelle is referred to in book six of Faerie Queene.