To return to our four selected poets. Gottfried is supposed to have been neither noble, nor even directly attached to a noble household, nor a professional minstrel, but a burgher of the town which gives him his name--indeed a caution is necessary to the effect that the _von_ of these early designations, like the _de_ of their French originals, is by no means, as a rule, a sign of nobility. Hartmann von Aue, though rather attached to than a member of the noble family of the same name from which he has taken the hero of _Der Arme Heinrich_, seems to have been admitted to knightly society, was a crusader, and appears to have been of somewhat higher rank than Gottfried, whom, however, he resembled in this point, that both were evidently men of considerable education. We rise again in status, though probably not in wealth, and certainly not in education, when we come to Wolfram von Eschenbach. He was of a family of Northern Bavaria or Middle Franconia; he bore (for there are diversities on this heraldic point) two axe-blades argent on a field gules, or a bunch of five flowers argent springing from a water-bouget gules; and he is said by witnesses in 1608 to have been described on his tombstone as a knight. But he was certainly poor, had not received much education, and he was attached in the usual guest-dependant fashion of the time to the Margrave of Vohburg (whose wife, Elizabeth of Bavaria, received his poetical declarations) and to Hermann of Thuringia. He was a married man, and had a daughter.