The special historical significance of the troubadours, trouvères, and minnesingers is to be found in the fact that these secular poet-musicians of both high and low degree composed their melodies under the impulsion of natural, spontaneous musical feeling rather than prescribed theoretical law. If they followed the feeling for church modes at all, this feeling instinctively led them to construct their melodies more and more in those modes corresponding to our modern major and minor scales. Naumann, in his ‘History of Music,’[10] gives a number of these melodies in full. One of them, _L’autrier par la matinée_, by Thibaut, King of Navarre (1201-1253), a celebrated troubadour, moves entirely in the key of G major. Another is ‘The Loveliness of Woman’ (_Tritt ein reines Weib daher_), a proverb[11] by the minnesinger Spervogel, dating from the middle of the twelfth century, a refined melody clearly in the key of D major, employing every tone of the scale. A third, ‘Broken Faith,’ a beautiful and touching minnesong by Prince Witzlav, is modern enough in key feeling and melodic structure to have flowed from the pen of Schubert. In all of those quoted the phrases are clearly outlined, a sense of design and melodic cohesion is manifested in the frequent repetition of phrases, and through them all there breathes the spirit of free lyric invention that differentiates them sharply from all existing church models and makes them close kin to the developed songs of the eighteenth century and later. The gradual development of such an untrammelled feeling for free melody among the people explains the comparative rapidity with which art-music, after its secession from the church modes and ecclesiastical methods early in the seventeenth century, developed new forms and expanded into new paths that led to a popular appreciation never before accorded to music. V