KINDS AND DATES 69

style which operated from about the middle of the fifteenth century.
With this encouragement men of letters and music took to record-
ing songs which may have had a considerable previous life in
tradition. The absence of historical pieces, save a small number,
prevents our guessing how long that life may have been. The most
striking piece is The hanged Scholars which goes back to an event
at Pontoise in 1259. ^ *s ^ source of the English ballad The two
Clerk*s sons of Oxenford, and of a Catalan ballad also. But such a
date is exceptional, and we should have to allow that transmission
of the necessary knowledge might have occurred otherwise than by
way of traditional verse. Some French adventure pieces are neces-
sarily anterior to the Spanish ones based on them, and other
Spanish adventure poems imply lost French originals at least as
old as the fifteenth century. What really causes the difficulty in
estimating the age of French 'chansons populaires' is the extra-
ordinarily rich and varied artistic life of medieval France, so
markedly superior to all culture but that of the Italian city-states.
Very few French pieces are untouched by artistic fashions, and on
the other hand the greater part of French literature—'chansons de
geste', 'chansons de toile', romances, legends—was familiar in one
form or another to natives of other lands, and so exerted an in-
fluence on their ballads. We have to deal with the effects of Ogier
de Dinamarche in Spain and Denmark, of Tristan in Spain, Iceland,
and Germany, and of the courtly 'pastourelle* everywhere. On the
other hand, one cannot say definitely that much of the twelfth- and
thirteenth-century matter in Bartsch's Romanzen und Pastourellen
is traditional in the narrower sense, or that any of it is irrelevant to
the study of traditional poetry in France or abroad.

As for Italy, outside the Franco-Italian area we find a poetry
based on the 'ottava' and so lyrical as not to admit of sure dates.
Those who trace Sicilian folk-song back to the twelfth century rely
on allusions to the Norman kings which any person who had access
to the monuments at Palermo could have made. One needs a
narrative of some complexity before one can hazard a date of com-
position. The oldest such piece in Sicily is the Princess of Carim,
a story of the year 1565.

In the Spanish peninsula the priority of the Castilian ballads
over all others is indubitable. Gil Vicente (d. 1536 ?) and Camoes
(d. 1580), in Portugal, quote their 'romances' in Castilian, showing
that their entry into Portugal belongs to that century; the same