Neither in the libraries of the monasteries, nor in the libraries of the great nobles, should we expect to find a true mirror of popular taste. The majority of the people knew no language but English; and the relative scarcity of books of every kind, which even among the educated classes made the hearers far outnumber the readers, was at once a cause and a symptom of illiteracy: the majority of the people could not read. This leads to a generalization that is cardinal for every branch of criticism:—up to Chaucer's day, the greater the popularity of an English poem, the less important becomes the manuscript as a means of early transmission. The text, which would have been comparatively safe in the keeping of scribe, book, and reader, passes to the uncertain guardianship of memorizer, reciter, and listener; so that sometimes it is wholly lost, and sometimes it suffers as much change in a generation as would a classical text in a thousand years. Already Robert Mannyng laments the mutilation of _Sir Tristrem_ by the 'sayers' (who could hardly be expected to avoid faults of improvisation and omission in the recitation of so long a poem from memory);[20] and his regret would have been keener if he could have looked ahead another hundred years to see how the texts of the verse romances paid the price of popularity by the loss of crisp phrases and fresh images, and the intrusion of every mode of triteness. [Foot-note 20: I see in song, in sedgeyng tale Of Erceldoun and of Kendale, Non þam says as þai þam wroght, And in þer sayng it semes noght. Þat may þou here in _Sir Tristrem_— Ouer gestes it has þe steem, Ouer alle þat is or was, If men it sayd as made Thomas: But I here it no man so say, Þat of som copple som is away. (_Chronicle_, Prologue, ll. 93 ff.) Robert blames the vanity of the reciters more than their memories, on the excellence of which Petrarch remarks in his account of the minstrels: _Sunt homines non magni ingenii, magnae vero memoriae, magnaeque diligentiae_ (to Boccaccio, _Rerum Senilium_, Bk. v, ep. ii).]