This classical form, so rigidly withholding knowledge from the grasp of the ignorant, had also its disadvantage; for many a mediaeval pen, that could have flown across the vellum in joyful intimacy in its owner’s tongue, stumbled clumsily amidst Latin constructions, leaving in the end not a spontaneous record of current events, but a ‘dry-as-dust’ catalogue, in bad imitation of some Latin stylist. The modern world is more grateful to mediaeval culture for such lapses as Dante’s _Divina Commedia_ than for all the heavy Latin tomes, whose authors hoped for laurelled immortality.
For those in England and France who could not easily master Latin or found its stately periods too cumbrous for ordinary conversation, French, descended from the spoken Latin of the Roman soldier or merchant in Gaul, was in the Middle Ages, as to-day, the language of polite society. It possessed two distinct dialects, the ‘langue d’œil’ and the ‘langue d’oc’, so called because the northern Frenchman, including the Norman, was supposed to pronounce _oui_ as _œil_, while his southern fellow countryman pronounced it as _oc_.
England, where, ever since the Conquest of William I, French had been the natural tongue of a semi-foreign court, owed an enormous literary impulse to the ‘langue d’œil’ during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; while the ‘langue d’oc’ that gave its name to a district in the south of France shared its poetry and romance between Provençals and Catalans. The descendants of the former are to-day French, of the latter Spanish: but in the eleventh century they were fellow subjects of the Counts of Toulouse, who ruled over a district stretching from the source of the Rhone to the Mediterranean, from the Italian Alps to the Ebro.
In this semi-independent kingdom there developed a civilization and culture of hot-house growth, precocious in its appreciation of the less violent pleasures of life, such as love, art, music, literature, but often corrupt in their enjoyment. The gay court of Toulouse paid no heed to St. Augustine’s hell, whose fears haunted the rest of Europe in its more thoughtful moments. Joyous and inconsequent, it lived for the passing hour, and out of its atmosphere of dalliance and culture was born a race of poet-singers. These troubadours (_trouvers_ = discoverers) sang of love, whose silken fetters could hold in thrall knights and fair ladies; and their golden lyrics, now plaintive, now gay, were carried to the crowded cities of Italy and Spain, or found schools of imitators elsewhere, as in Germany amongst her thirteenth-century _minnesingers_ (love-singers). In the north of France and in England appeared minstrels also, but their themes were less of love than of battle; and audiences revelled by castle and camp-fire in the ‘gestes’ or ‘deeds’ of Charlemagne and his Paladins, the chivalry of Arthur and his Knights, or in stirring Border ballads such as Chevy Chase.