In the fourteenth century most Spaniards read, a few wrote[129] Portuguese lyrics; and there seems to be no reason why we should rigorously confine them to the reading of verse, to the exclusion of Portuguese prose. There is no means of deciding with certainty whether López de Ayala and Ferrus read _Amadis_ in Spanish or in Portuguese, but there are inherent probabilities in favour of Portuguese. No one without a thesis to support would deny that, generally, the cycle of the Round Table, to which _Amadis_ is so closely related, was more congenial to the Portuguese than to the Spanish temperament, that the geographical position of Portugal facilitated its introduction, and that, in the particular case of _Amadis_, the style and subject of the work, certainly of the first three books, are Portuguese rather than Spanish. Melancholy incidents, sentimental phrases and tears occur on nearly every page. Some critics even discern traces of Portuguese in the language.[130] But if we admit that _Amadis_ was written _c._ 1350, who was its author? It is noteworthy that while in Spanish it had been attributed to many persons, in Portugal tradition has persistently hovered round the name of Lobeira. Unfortunately the Lobeira authorship has given far more trouble than that of prince, Jew, or saint in Spain. Zurara, basing his statement on an earlier fifteenth-century authority, in a perfectly genuine passage of his _Cronica do Conde D. Pedro de Meneses_,[131] written in the middle of the fifteenth century, ascribes _Amadis_ to Vasco de Lobeira. In the next century Dr. João de Barros[132] (not the historian) and Leite Ferreira agree with Zurara.[133] There was no reason why they should say Vasco rather than Pedro or João. According to Nunez de Leam, Vasco de Lobeira was knighted on the field of Aljubarrota (1385), according to Fernam Lopez he was already a knight in 1383.[134] If he was not a young but an old knight at Aljubarrota, it is just possible that he wrote the book thirty-five years earlier, in the same way that the historian Barros wrote _Clarimundo_ in his youth.