in the full
zenith of their poetical development, we must believe that their work is
the consummation of a period, that is to say, that they must have had a
long line of predecessors whose works were lost during the period
intervening between the loss of Welsh independence and the rise of
Dafydd ab Gwilym. These men wrote, as we have already said, in South
Wales, a country which was then under the rule of the Norman lords, who,
with the lapse of years and the rise of new systems, were fast becoming
Welsh. It is no wonder, then, that the poets who wrote under their
patronage should show unmistakable traces of Norman influence. Most of
the barons still spoke French, and it was only natural that they should
be well versed in French poetry. The poets followed the lead of their
patrons, and their work was modelled to a very great extent on French
and Provencal poetry. Nor does this account altogether for the wonderful
similarity between Welsh _cywyddau_ and other poems of this period and
the French lays; we must remember that the Welsh poets lived under
conditions similar to those under which the troubadours and the
trouveres lived, and it was natural that the same environments should
produce the same kind of work. The Provencal _alba_ and the French
_aube_, the _serenade_ and other forms, became well known in South Wales
and were of course read by the Welsh poets. We find continual references
in the poets to "books of love" under the name of _llyfr Ofydd_, or the
"book of Ovid," and a reference in one of Dafydd ab Gwilym's poems shows
conclusively that one particular _llyfr Ofydd_ was a work of the French
poet Chrestien de Troyes. Indeed, one of the commonest names among the
poets of this period--the _llatai_,[3] or love-messenger--may be a
Romance word borrowed through the Norman-French from the Italian
_Galeotto_, originally the name of the book of the loves of Galahaad,
but afterwards the ordinary word for a go-between. This book of
Galeotto, by the way, was the book which taught Paolo and Francesca da
Rimini, in Dante's _Divina Commedia_, the tragic secret of love.

Another movement also was favourable to the rise of the new Welsh
poetry. The iron hand of the church, which had been the censor of poetry
for so many centuries, was slowly relaxing its grasp, and the men who a
few years before would have sung religious hymns to the Virgin, now laid
their tributes at the feet of divine womanhood as they saw it in the
Welsh m