Santillana slightly overstates his case when he speaks of those who composed _romances_ as ‘contemptible poets’ catering for the rabble. We have seen that Rodrígue de la Cámara and Carvajal both wrote _romances_ in the fourth or fifth decade of the fifteenth century. Santillana cannot have meant to speak contemptuously of his two contemporaries, one a poet at the Castilian court of Juan II., and the other a poet at the Neapolitan court of Alfonso V. of Aragón; he evidently knew nothing of these artistic _romances_, and would have been pained to hear that educated men countenanced such stuff. No doubt other educated men besides Rodríguez de la Cámara and Carvajal wrote in the popular manner; possibly the Lancelot ballad quoted by Nebrija is the work of some court-poet: the conditions were changing, and—though Santillana was perhaps unaware of it—the _romances_ were rising in esteem. But Santillana is right as regards the earlier period. The primitive writers of popular _romances_ were men of humble station, the impoverished representatives of those who had sung the _cantares de gesta_. These _cantares de gesta_ were worked into the substance of histories and chronicles, and then went out of fashion. The _juglares_ or singers came down in the world; in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries they had been welcome at courts and castles where they chanted long epics; by the fourteenth century they sang corrupt abridgments of these epics to less distinguished audiences; by the fifteenth century the epical songs were broken up. The themes were kept alive by oral tradition in the shape of shorter lyrical narratives, and these transformed fragments of the old epics were the primitive _romances_ condemned by Santillana. The subjects of these popular ballads were historical or legendary characters like Roderick, Bernardo del Carpio, the Counts of Castile, Fernán González, the Infantes of Lara, the Cid and his lieutenant, and other local heroes. Later on, the nameless poets of the people were tempted to deal with the sinister stories which crystallised round the name of Peter the Cruel, the long struggle against the Moors, episodes famous in the Arthurian legends and the books of chivalry, exploits recorded in the chronicles of foreign countries, miscellaneous incidents borrowed from diverse sources. It was gradually recognised that the popular instinct had discovered a most effective vehicle of poetic expression; more educated versifiers followed the lead of Rodríguez de la Cámara and Carvajal, but with a certain shamefaced air. The collections of _romances_ published by Alonso de Fuentes and Lorenzo de Sepúlveda (in 1550 and 1551 respectively) are mainly the work of lettered courtiers who, like the ‘Cæsarean Knight’—the _Caballero Cesáreo_ who contributed to the second edition of Sepúlveda’s book—are conscious of their condescension, and withhold their names, under the quaint delusion that they are ‘reserved for greater things.’