A further differentiation amongst minstrels was of linguistic origin. This was especially apparent in England. The mime is essentially cosmopolitan. In whatever land he finds himself the few sentences of patter needful to introduce his _tour_ or his _nigremance_ are readily picked up. It is not so with any entertainer whose performances claim to rank, however humbly, as literature. And the Conquest in England brought into existence a class of minstrels who, though they were by no means mimes, were yet obliged to compete with mimes, making their appeal solely to the _bourgeoisie_ and the peasants, because their speech was not that of the Anglo-Norman lords and ladies who formed the more profitable audiences of the castles. The native English gleemen were eclipsed at courts by the Taillefers and Raheres of the invading host. But they still held the road side by side with their rivals, shorn of their dignities, and winning a precarious livelihood from the shrunken purses of those of their own blood and tongue[295]. It was they who sang the unavailing heroisms of Hereward, and, if we may judge by the scanty fragments and records that have come down to us, they remained for long the natural focus and mouthpiece of popular discontent and anti-court sentiment. In the reign of Edward III a gleeman of this type, Laurence Minot, comes to the front, voicing the spirit of an England united in its nationalism by the war against France; the rest are, for the most part, nameless[296]. Naturally the English gleemen did not remain for ever a proscribed and isolated folk. One may suspect that at the outset many of them became bilingual. At any rate they learnt to mingle with their Anglo-Norman _confrères_: they borrowed the themes of continental minstrelsy; translating _roman_, _fabliau_ and _chanson_ into the metres and dialects of the vernacular; and had their share in that gradual fusion of the racial elements of the land, whose completion was the preparation for Chaucer.