veritable factory of verse. The vignettes[75] to these _Cantigas_ show him surrounded by scribes, pen and parchment in hand, by _joglares_ and _joglaresas_. Poets thronged to his Court and he was in communication with others in foreign lands. Some of the miracles might come to him in verse, the work of a friendly poet or of a sacred _jogral_ such as Pierres de Siglar, whom C. M. 8 shows reciting his poems from church to church: _en todalas eigreias da Uirgen que non a par un seu lais senpre dizia_,[76] and this would account for the variety of metre and treatment. Of raw material for his art there was never a scarcity, nor was the idea of turning it into verse original. In France Gautier de Coincy (1177-1236) had already written his _Miracles de la Sainte Vierge_ in verse, and the Spanish poet Gonzalo de Berceo (1180-1247) had composed the _Milagros de Nuestra Sennora_. But there was no need for direct imitation. If the starry sky were parchment and the ocean ink, the miracles could not all be written down, says King Alfonso (C. M. 110). Churches and rival shrines preserved an unfailing store for collectors. Gautier de Coincy spoke of _tant miracles_, a _grant livre_ of them, and King Alfonso chooses one from among 300 in a book (C. M. 33), finds one written in an ancient book (265) written among many others (258), in a book among many others (284), and refers to a book full of them at Soissons. The miracles were recorded more systematically in France, and the books of Soissons and Rocamadour (_Liber Miraculorum S. Mariae de Rupe Amatoris_) provided the king with many subjects, as did also Vincent de Beauvais’ _Speculum Historiale_, of which he possessed a copy. But the sources in the Peninsula were very copious, as, for instance, the Book of the Miracles of Santiago, of which a copy, in Latin, exists in the Paris Bibliothèque Nationale. Of other miracles the king had had personal experience, or they were recent and came to him by word of mouth. Thus he often does not profess to invent his subject: he merely translates it into verse and sometimes appraises it as he does so. It is ‘a marvellous great miracle’ (C. M. 257), ‘very beautiful’ (82), ‘one in which I have great belief’ (241), ‘one almost incredible’, _mui cruu de creer_ (242), or ‘famous’ (195), ‘known throughout Spain’ (191). Many of these miracles occurred to the peasants and unlettered: then as now the humbler the subject the greater the miracle. Accordingly we find the king in his poems dealing not with the conventional shepherdesses of the _pastorelas_ but with lowly folk of real life, peasants, gleaners, sailors, fishermen, beggars, pilgrims, nuns; and it is one of the king’s titles to be considered a true poet that he takes an evident pleasure in these themes and retains their graphic, artless presentment. The collection abounds in charming glimpses of the life of the people. Indeed, in many of the poems there is more of the people than of King Alfonso,[77]