The discussion of secular music in the Middle Ages is necessarily beset with difficulties of large proportions, since very few authentic examples of folk-melodies of this period have been preserved. Musical learning was confined almost exclusively to monks and ecclesiastics who had no real interest in the preservation of these wild-flower products. Those that were pressed into service as parts of polyphonic church music undoubtedly underwent melodic and rhythmic alterations to suit their new environment. In all of them words and music were twin-born; but, while many of the beautiful mediæval and earlier poems are extant, their melodies seem to be irretrievably lost.[8] The secular music of the Middle Ages had no direct or immediate bearing on the development of musical art, but the courtly troubadours and minnesingers and, later, the mastersingers of humbler origin, served to keep alive the practice of solo singing with instrumental accompaniment and thus maintained the idea of individual expression which had been banished from the church in the early centuries. The first outburst of popular song that attained the significance of a distinct movement occurred in southeastern France among the nobles of sunny, contented, and cheerful Provence. These troubadours, who flourished throughout southern France, Italy, and Spain from about 1100 to 1300, were concerned largely with the deeds of chivalry, especially that phase of the idea of knightliness that glorified the love of some beautiful or good woman as the inspiration of, or the reward for, deeds of adventure or valor. In the intense feeling and strong lyric impulse of these courtly poet-singers is to be found the beginning of the modern art of lyric poetry. They showed great ingenuity in the invention and elaboration of verse-forms[9] and coupled with this gift was a musical inventiveness of marked power which in time developed a style quite divorced from the influence of plain-song. The melodies, following the rhythmical swing of the verse, frequently approximated the structure and feeling of the modern phrase and phrase-group. The development of this feeling for the organization of melodic units later led to most important results when the secular impulse seized upon the perfected methods of scholastic music.