So I started reading Le Roman de Silence, a 13th century French chivalric romance about a girl raised as a boy in a kingdom where women can't inherit. Her name is Silence, and she goes on knightly adventures.
The author begins this tale of adventure with a 3-page rant about the greed of rich people ruining the world, and then literally says (at least in the English translation) "I just had to get this out of my system before telling my tale."
@TarkabarkaHolgy It's referenced in my computer game The Exile Princes: the hardest difficulty setting is named after it, on the grounds that it's the one where nature itself doesn't really want you to succeed as a knight :)
@JubalBarca lol that's nifty