Until comparatively recent times these immense works, many of which comprise six or seven thousand lines of verse, were practically unknown, even to the generality of literary authorities. [15] As we now possess them they are comparatively late in form, and have undergone much revisal, probably for the worse. But they are the oldest examples of elaborate verse in any modern language, with the exception of English and Norse, and undoubtedly stand in an ancestral relation to all modern European literature. These chansons were intended to be sung in the common halls of feudal dwellings by the itinerant trouvères, who composed or passed them on to one another. Their subject-matter deals more with the clash of arms than the human emotions, though these are at intervals depicted in a masterly manner. The older examples among them are written in batches of lines, varying from one to several score, each of which derives unity from an assonant vowel-rhyme, and known as laisses or tirades. Later, however, rhyme crept into the chansons, the entire laisse, or batch, ending in a single rhyme-sound. Castilian Opposition to the Chansons de Gestes In these poems, which probably originated in the north of France, the genre spreading southward as time progressed, Charlemagne is represented as the great bulwark of Christianity against the Saracens of Spain. Surrounded by his peers, Roland, Oliver, Naymes, Ogier, and William of Orange, he wages constant warfare against the Moors or the 'Saracens' (pagans) of Saxony. Of these poems Gautier has published a list of one hundred and ten, a moiety of which date from the twelfth century. A number of the later chansons are in Provençal, but all attempts to refer the entire cycle in its original condition to that literature have signally failed.