8 
have little or nothing in common with those of our songs. Here 
we are dealing with two worlds apart: the one, the high Latin 
tradition, and the other, the earlier influx of southern culture 
through folk channels, after the Roman conquest. 
On the other hand, there were the jongleurs errants and 
jongleurs de foire of ancient times, whose pranks were derided in 
the manuscripts of the troubadours and the minstrels. The jon- 
gleurs were the butt of society. As they did not use writing, no 
evidence is left to vindicate their memory. But students of 
mediaeval literature have pointed out that while the troubadours 
had their day in the south, an obscure literary upheaval, free 
from Latin influence, took place in the provinces of the Loire 
river and the north — exactly in the home of our traditional lore. 
Who were the local poets if not the jongleurs themselves? What 
were their songs if not those that have survived and come down 
to us through the unbroken oral tradition of the same provinces? 
Whatever those Loire River bards be called, they were by 
no means devoid of culture. At their best they composed songs 
that not only courted the popular fancy but which, because of 
their vitality and charm, outlived the forms of academic poetry. 
Besides, their independent prosodic resources were not only 
copious, but they went back to the bedrock of the Gallo-roman 
languages. Unlike the troubadours who belonged to the lineage 
of mediaeval Latinity, those northern poets had never given their 
allegiance to a foreign language since the birth, before the fifth 
century of Christianity, of the Low Latin vernaculars, in France, 
Spain, Portugal, and Italy. They had inherited and conserved 
the older traditions of the land. Presumably they were the 
heirs of the ancient Druids and the Celtic culture that had under- 
gone a mutation without altogether going out of existence. 
In other words, the folk-songs of France as recovered in 
America — more numerous and better preserved than at home— 
mostly represent an ancient stratum of French literature, one 
which despite discredit was never wholly submerged by the influx 
of Neo-Latin influences from the south. 
But the jongleur art went out of existence in France itself 
before the dawn of the seventeenth century, with the appearance 
of printing and broadsheets. If we have true folk-songs of the 
sixteenth century — those of Le Prince d f Orange and Le Prince 
