uence were poets, the proportion of these is, on the whole,
considerably less than in France proper or in Provence. The German
noble was not so much literary as a patron of literature, like that
Landgrave Hermann of Thuringia, whose court saw the fabulous or
semi-fabulous "War of the Wartburg," with Wolfram von Eschenbach and
Heinrich von Ofterdingen as chief champions. Indeed this court was the
main resort of German poets and minstrels till Saint Elizabeth of
Hungary in the next generation proved herself a rather "sair sanct"
for literature, which has since returned her good for evil.

To return to our four selected poets. Gottfried is supposed to have
been neither noble, nor even directly attached to a noble household,
nor a professional minstrel, but a burgher of the town which gives him
his name--indeed a caution is necessary to the effect that the _von_
of these early designations, like the _de_ of their French originals,
is by no means, as a rule, a sign of nobility. Hartmann von Aue,
though rather attached to than a member of the noble family of the
same name from which he has taken the hero of _Der Arme Heinrich_,
seems to have been admitted to knightly society, was a crusader, and
appears to have been of somewhat higher rank than Gottfried, whom,
however, he resembled in this point, that both were evidently men of
considerable education. We rise again in status, though probably not
in wealth, and certainly not in education, when we come to Wolfram von
Eschenbach. He was of a family of Northern Bavaria or Middle
Franconia; he bore (for there are diversities on this heraldic point)
two axe-blades argent on a field gules, or a bunch of five flowers
argent springing from a water-bouget gules; and he is said by
witnesses in 1608 to have been described on his tombstone as a knight.
But he was certainly poor, had not received much education, and he was
attached in the usual guest-dependant fashion of the time to the
Margrave of Vohburg (whose wife, Elizabeth of Bavaria, received his
poetical declarations) and to Hermann of Thuringia. He was a married
man, and had a daughter.

Lastly, Walther von der Vogelweide appears to have been actually a
"working poet," as we may say--a _trouvere_, who sang his own poems as
he wandered about, and whose surname was purely a decorative one. He
lived, no doubt, by gifts; indeed, the historians are proud to record
that a bishop gave him a fur coat precisely on the 12th of November
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