With Castilian--that is to say, Spanish proper--the case is very different. It cannot claim any great antiquity: and as is the case with Italian, and to a less degree with French also, the processes by which it came into existence out of Latin are hid from us to a degree surprising, even when we remember the political and social welter in which Europe lay between the fifth and the eleventh centuries. It is, of course, a most natural and constant consideration that the formation of literary languages was delayed in the Romance-speaking countries by the fact that everybody of any education at all had Latin ready to his hands. And the exceptional circumstances of Spain, which, after hardly settling down under the Visigothic conquest, was whelmed afresh by the Moorish invasion, have not been excessively insisted upon by the authorities who have dealt with the subject. But still it cannot but strike us as peculiar that the document--the famous Charter of Aviles,[194] which plays in the history of Spanish something like the same part which the Eulalia hymn and the Strasburg Oaths play in French--dates only from the middle of the twelfth century, more than three hundred years after the Strasburg interchange, and at a time when French was not merely a regularly constituted language, but already had no inconsiderable literature. It is true that the Aviles document is not quite so jargonish as the Strasburg, but the same mark--the presence of undigested Latin--appears in both. [Footnote 194: Extracts of this appear in Ticknor, Appendix A., iii. 352, note.] It is, however, fair to remember that prose is almost invariably later than poetry, and that official prose of all periods has a tendency to the barbarous. If the Aviles charter be genuine, and of its assigned date, it does not follow that at the very same time poetry of a much less uncouth character was not being composed in Spanish. And as a matter of fact we have, independently of the ballads, the great _Poema del Cid_, which has sometimes been supposed to be of antiquity equal to this, and which can hardly be more than some fifty years later. [Sidenote: _Ballads?_]