An earlier native lyric had indeed existed in northern France, known to us only by scanty fragments and allusions. It was a simple and light accompaniment of dancing or of the monotonous household tasks of sewing and spinning. Its theme was love and love-making. Its characteristic outward feature was a recurring refrain. The manner and frequency of repeating this refrain determined different forms, as _rondets_, _ballettes_, and _virelis_ But there are few examples left us of early French lyrics that have not already felt the influence of the art of the Troubadours. Even those that are in a way the most perfect and distinctive products of the earlier period, the fresh and graceful _pastourelles_, with their constant theme of a pretty shepherdess wooed by a knight, may have been imported from the south and have pretty surely been touched by southern influence. From the middle of the twelfth century the native lyric in the north was entirely submerged under the flood of imitations of the Troubadours. The marriage of Eleanor of Poitiers with Louis VII. in 1137 brought Provence and France together, and opened the north, particularly about her court and that of her daughter Marie, Countess of Champagne, at Troyes, to the ideas and manners of the south. The first result was an eager and widespread imitation of the Provençal models. Among these earliest cultivators of literary art in the French language the most noteworthy were CONON DE BÉTHUNE (d. 1224), BLONDEL DE NESLE, GACE BRÛLÉ, GUI DE COUCI (d. 1201), GAUTIER D'ESPINAUS, and THIBAUT DE CHAMPAGNE, King of Navarre (d. 1253). There is in the work of these poets a great sameness. Their one theme was love as the essential principle of perfect courtly conduct, and their treatment was made still more lifeless by the use of allegory which was beginning to reveal its fascination for the mediaeval mind. From all their work the note of individuality is almost completely absent. Their art consisted in saying the same conventional commonplaces in a form that was not just like any other previously devised. So the predominance of the formal element was a matter of necessity. Some variation from existing forms was the one thing required of a piece of verse.