ly to the north
and north-east of France, and they continued to be put forth by their
rhymers until about 1340, the close of the twelfth and the beginning
of the thirteenth century being the period of their greatest
popularity. Simple and obvious jests sufficed to raise a laugh among
folk disposed to good humour; by degrees something of art and skill
was attained. The misfortunes of husbands supplied an inexhaustible
store of merriment; if woman and the love of woman were idealised
in the romances, the fabliaux took their revenge, and exhibited her
as the pretty traitress of a shameless comedy. If religion was
honoured in the age of faith, the bourgeois spirit found matter of
mirth in the adventures of dissolute priests and self-indulgent monks.
Not a few of the fabliaux are cynically gross--ribald but not
voluptuous. To literary distinction they made small pretence. It
sufficed if the tale ran easily in the current speech, thrown into
rhyming octosyllables; but brevity, frankness, natural movement are
no slight or common merits in mediaeval poetry, and something of the
social life of the time is mirrored in these humorous narratives.

To regard them as a satire of class against class, inspired by
indignation, is to misconceive their true character; they are rather
miniature comedies or caricatures, in which every class in turn
provides material for mirth. It may, however, be said that with the
writers of the fabliaux to hold woman in scorn is almost an article
of faith. Among these writers a few persons of secular rank or
dignified churchmen occasionally appeared; but what we may call the
professional rhymers and reciters were the humbler jongleurs
addressing a bourgeois audience--degraded clerics, unfrocked monks,
wandering students, who led a bohemian life of gaiety alternating
with misery. In the early part of the fourteenth century these errant
jongleurs ceased to be esteemed; the great lord attached a minstrel
to his household, and poetry grew more dignified, more elaborate in
its forms, more edifying in its intention, and in its dignity grew
too often dull. Still for a time fabliaux were written; but the age
of the jongleurs was over. _Virelais_, _rondeaux_, _ballades_,
_chants royaux_ were the newer fashion; and the old versified tale
of mirth and ribaldry was by the middle of the century a thing of
the past.

IV
THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE

The most extraordinary production in verse of the thirteenth century