Parallel with the impulse given to secular song and poetry by the troubadours and trouvères, but beginning a little later, was the growth of the minnesingers, or love-singers, of Germany. This movement, extending through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was limited almost exclusively to men of noble birth and aristocratic rank and was associated with the pomp of courtly life. Its influence on the general trend of musical development was, therefore, less marked than that of the corresponding movement in France, particularly in northern France. Relatively fewer of the minnesongs reached or impressed the popular ear, because of the greater exclusiveness of the minnesingers and the less pleasing outlines of their melodies, especially the earlier ones. The range of their themes was wider than that of their French contemporaries, including nature, qualities of character, patriotism, and piety, as well as love and chivalrous deeds. The minnesongs on the whole display more seriousness than is found in the songs of France, primary emphasis always being given to the words. At first modelled after the declamatory style of Gregorian chant, their melodies lacked the easy flow of the troubadour songs, but the later ones are marked by strongly modern feeling for rhythm, phrase structure, and definite key, and display the delightful naïveté of the German folk-song. Many of them undoubtedly passed into folk-melodies and from thence into the chorale literature of the German Reformation period.