Obviously the Romance vernacular literatures had a different commencement. The languages were Latin, simply Latin, in their inception, and never ceased to be legitimate continuations and developments of the popular or Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. But as the speech of children, women, and unlettered people, they were not thought of as literary media. All who could write understood perfectly the better Latin from which these popular dialects were slowly differentiating themselves. And as they progressed to languages, still their life and progress lay among peoples whose ancestral tongue was the proper Latin, which all educated men and women still understood and used in the serious business of life. But sooner or later men will talk and sing and think and compose in the speech which is closest to them. The Romance tongues became literary through this human need of natural expression. There always had been songs in the old Vulgar Latin; and such did not cease as it gradually became what one may call Romance. Moreover, the clergy might be impelled to use the popular speech in preaching to the laity, or some unlearned person might compose religious verses. Almost the oldest monument of Old French is the hymn in honour of Ste. Eulalie. Then as civilization advanced from the tenth to the twelfth century, in southern and northern France for example, and the _langue d’oc_ and the _langue d’oil_ became independent and developed languages, unlearned men, or men with unlearned audiences, would unavoidably set themselves to composing poetry in these tongues. In the North the _chansons de geste_ came into existence; in the South the knightly Troubadours made love-lyrics. Somehow, these poems were written down, and there was literature for men’s eyes as well as for men’s ears. In the twelfth century and the thirteenth, the audiences for Romance poetry, especially through the regions of southern and northern France, increased and became diversified. They were made up of all classes, save the brute serf, and of both sexes. The _chansons de geste_ met the taste of the feudal barons; the Arthurian Cycle charmed the feudal dames; the coarse _fabliaux_ pleased the bourgeoisie; and _chansons_ of all kinds might be found diverting by various people. If the religious side was less strongly represented, it was because the closeness of the language to the clerkly and liturgical Latin left no such need of translations as was felt from the beginning among peoples of Germanic speech. Still the Gospels, especially the apocryphal, were put into Old French, and _miracles de Notre Dame_ without number; also legends of the saints, and devout tales of many kinds.