Marie makes no claim to originality of theme; in her prologues she tells us she is but rhyming anew the stories "whereof the Bretons have made lays." Just what the source was of the Celtic matter used by Marie and other French writers of the time is a point of dispute among scholars. Some will have it the tales came wholly from the Celts of Brittany, others that they are derived only from those of Wales. But there is reason in both theories, and the tendency now is to unite them. The Normans of the continent had not a little to do with their Breton neighbors of Armorica; sometimes they fought as enemies and sometimes as allies. Again, in England the Normans early settled in South Wales, and intermarriages were frequent. In both regions, then, they may well have learned to know the songs and tales of the folk about them. But were they Welsh or Armorican, both history and romance bear testimony to the popularity of Breton minstrels in France during the twelfth century. No feast was complete without their music. Their lays were sung to the accompaniment of a little harp called the _rote_, and seem to have been given in their own tongue. But constantly in Marie and other writers we find a distinction between the _lai_ and the _conte_, and it seems probable that the songs were preceded by a short prose narrative, or that prose and verse were interspersed after the manner of _Aucassin and Nicolette_. In just what form the tales came to Marie, how much she added to them, we cannot tell. We only know that her rendering of them was to the liking of the time and was long popular. Denis Pyramus tells us her writings were often repeated and often copied, and we have manuscripts of them that date from a hundred years after her time. As the _lai_ was the favorite literature of the courts the _fabliau_ was that of the bourgeoisie, the proper kind of tale for telling at fairs or guild-hall feasts, at gatherings where women were not present. In time they are a little later than the _lais_, for beginning in the twelfth, the thirteenth century is their chief period. They deal not with the fanciful and the sentimental, but with the real and the comic; they forego magic and miracle for the happenings of every-day life. "When a tale is historic," says M. de Montaiglon, who has given us a complete edition of this type of story, "or when it is impossible, when it is devout or didactic, when it is imaginative or romantic, lyric or poetic, it can by no means be classed as a _fabliau_."