These Romance languages, as they were called, of the Langue d'oil and the Langue d'oc, were the result of the mixture, in the different localities, of the Gothic, or German language with the Roman, the Latin. The _trouvères_ of Northern France, like the minnesingers and the English minstrels, were singers or reciters of stories. Sir Walter Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel" may give us an idea of the tales that they recited. But, at this moment of our story, say the end of the twelfth century, we are in the midst of the age of chivalry, as it is called. It was the age when the knight thought it right to devote all his services to some lady of his love whose colours--probably a knot of ribbon which she had worn--he carried conspicuously. It was the age of tournaments, which were encounters between mounted and heavily armed knights held before some great lord's castle. It was an age too of constant fighting, some of which was in the sacred name of the Cross against that Crescent which was the badge and the sign of the Saracens. So these rhymesters had plenty of stories for their telling. There was a whole series of tales about the Court of King Arthur in Britain, some of which Tennyson has put for us into modern verse in his "Idylls of the King." There was a series, too, about the Court of Charlemagne and his paladins, as his knights were called. Many, indeed most, of the stories, which may have had some historical and real incident underlying them, were so overlaid with invention that it is quite impossible to tell where truth leaves off and fiction begins. The knights are of quite incredible stature and strength, and the feats they perform are far too good and great to be true. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- {155} [Illustration: A JOUST BETWEEN KNIGHTS IN THE LISTS] (From _The History of Everyday Things_ (Quennell), by permission of Messrs. B. T. Batsford, Ltd.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- We ask ourselves, then, seeing that we cannot accept these stories as true in all their detail, whether or no they are so far true that they do give us an accurate idea of what life was like in those days: {156} whether knights-errant--that is to say, knights "erring" or wandering--really did go about, as they are represented to us, seeking adventures.