first obtained a footing; here the barbarian invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries proved less destructive to civilisation than in Northern France, and the Visigoths seem to have been more amenable to the influences of culture than the Northern Franks.  Thus the towns of Southern Gaul apparently remained centres in which artistic and literary traditions were preserved more or less successfully until the revival of classical studies during the age of Charlemagne.  The climate, again, of Southern France is milder and warmer than that of the North, and these influences produced a difference which may almost be termed racial.  It is a difference visible even to-day and is well expressed by [6] the chronicler Raoul de Caen, who speaks of the Provencal Crusaders, saying that the French were prouder in bearing and more war-like in action than the Provencals, who especially contrasted with them by their skill in procuring food in times of famine:  “inde est, quod adhuc puerorum decantat naenia, Franci ad bella, Provinciales ad victualia".[3] Only a century and a half later than Charlemagne appeared the first poetical productions in Provencal which are known to us, a fragment of a commentary upon the De Consolatione of Boethius[4] and a poem upon St Foy of Agen.  The first troubadour, William, Count of Poitiers, belongs to the close of the eleventh century.

Though the Count of Poitiers is the first troubadour known to us, the relatively high excellence of his technique, as regards stanza construction and rime, and the capacity of his language for expressing lofty and refined ideas in poetical form (in spite of his occasional lapses into coarseness), entirely preclude the supposition that he was the first troubadour in point of time.  The artistic conventions apparent in his poetry and his obviously careful respect for fixed rules oblige us to regard his poetry as the outcome of a considerable stage of previous development.  At what point this development began and what influences stimulated its progress are questions which still remain in [7] dispute.  Three theories have been proposed.  It is, in the first place, obviously tempting to explain the origin of Provencal poetry as being a continuation of Latin poetry in its decadence.  When the Romans settled in Gaul they brought with them their amusements as well as their laws and institutions.  Their scurrae, thymelici and joculatores, the tumblers, clowns and mountebanks, who amused the common people by day and the nobles after their banquets by night and travelled from town to town in pursuit of their livelihood, were accustomed to accompany their performances by some sort of rude song and music.  In the uncivilised North they remained buffoons; but in the South, where the greater refinement of life demanded more artistic performance, the musical part of their entertainment became predominant and the joculator became the joglar (Northern French, jongleur), a wandering musician and eventually a troubadour, a composer of his own poems.  These latter were no longer the gross and coarse songs of the earlier mountebank age, which Alcuin characterised as turpissima and vanissima, but the grave and artificially wrought stanzas of the troubadour chanso.