An example of an author-reciter, Jendeus de Brie (he was the maker of the first version of the _Bataille Loquifer_, twelfth century) is instructive. Of Jendeus de Brie it is said that "he wrote the poem, kept it very carefully, taught it to no man, made much gain out of it in Sicily where he sojourned, and left it to his son when he died." Similar statements are made in _Renaus de Montauban_ (the existing late version is of the thirteenth century) about Huon de Villeneuve, who would not part with his poem for horses or furs, or for any price, and about other poets. [Footnote: _Epopees Francaises, Leon Gautier_, vol. i. p. 215, Note I.] These early _jongleurs_ were men of position and distinction; their theme was the _gestes_ of princes; they were not under the ban with which the Church pursued vulgar strollers, men like the Greek rhapsodists. Pindar's story that Homer wrote the _Cypria_ [Footnote: _Pindari Opera_, vol. iii. p. 654. Boeckh.] and gave the copy, as the dowry of his daughter, to Stasinus who married her, could only have arisen in Greece in circumstances exactly like those of Jendeus de Brie. Jendeus lived on his poem by reciting it, and left it to his son when he died. The story of Homer and Stasinus could only have been invented in an age when the possession of the solitary text of a poem was a source of maintenance to the poet. This condition of things could not exist, either when there were no written texts or when such texts were multiplied to serve the wants of a reading public. Again, a poet in the fortunate position of Jendeus would not teach his Epic in a "school" of reciters unless he were extremely well paid. In later years, after his death, his poem came, through copies good or bad, into circulation. Late, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, we hear of a "school" of _jongleurs_ at Beauvais. In Lent they might not ply their profession, so they gathered at Beauvais, where they could learn _cantilenae_, new lays. [Footnote: _Epopees Francaises_, Leon Gautier, vol. ii. pp. 174, 175.] But by that time the epic was decadent and dying? The audiences of the _jongleurs_, too, were no longer, by that time, what they had been. The rich and great, now, had library copies of the epics; not small _jongleurs'_ copies, but folios, richly illuminated and bound, with two or three columns of matter on each page. [Footnote: Ibid., vol. i. p. 228. See, too, photographs of an illuminated, double-columned library copy in _La Chancun de Willame_., London, 1903.]