a considerable stage of
previous development. At what point this development began and what
influences stimulated its progress are questions which still remain in [7]
dispute. Three theories have been proposed. It is, in the first place,
obviously tempting to explain the origin of Provencal poetry as being a
continuation of Latin poetry in its decadence. When the Romans settled
in Gaul they brought with them their amusements as well as their laws
and institutions. Their _scurrae_, _thymelici_ and _joculatores_, the
tumblers, clowns and mountebanks, who amused the common people by day
and the nobles after their banquets by night and travelled from town to
town in pursuit of their livelihood, were accustomed to accompany their
performances by some sort of rude song and music. In the uncivilised
North they remained buffoons; but in the South, where the greater
refinement of life demanded more artistic performance, the musical part
of their entertainment became predominant and the _joculator_ became the
_joglar_ (Northern French, _jongleur_), a wandering musician and
eventually a troubadour, a composer of his own poems. These latter were
no longer the gross and coarse songs of the earlier mountebank age,
which Alcuin characterised as _turpissima_ and _vanissima_, but the
grave and artificially wrought stanzas of the troubadour _chanso_.

Secondly, it has been felt that some explanation is required to account
for the extreme complexity and artificiality of troubadour poetry in its
most highly developed stage. Some nine hundred different forms of stanza [8]
construction are to be found in the body of troubadour poetry,[5] and
few, if any schools of lyric poetry in the world, can show a higher
degree of technical perfection in point of metrical diversity, complex
stanza construction and accuracy in the use of rime. This result has
been ascribed to Arabic influence during the eighth century; but no
sufficient proof has ever been produced that the complexities of Arabic
and Provencal poetry have sufficient in common to make this hypothesis
anything more than an ingenious conjecture.

One important fact stands in contradiction to these theories. All
indications go to prove that the origin of troubadour poetry can be
definitely localised in a particular part of Southern France. We have
seen that the Limousin dialect became the basis of the literary
language, and that the first troubadour known to us belonged to Poitou.
It