Due to the influence of Benedict who had enjoined the use of the Ambrosian hymn, the authentic verse of Ambrose was preserved and extensively imitated among the regular clergy. What had become of the hymn in secular worship? The old prejudice against non-scriptural hymns and in favor of the Psalms had never died out. By a canon of the Council of Laodicea (c. 364), _psalmi idiotici_ or “private hymns” were forbidden, a mandate which was valid during the lifetime of Ambrose who, nevertheless, ignored a restriction intended to safeguard orthodoxy but hardly applicable in his case. In the sixth century the secular clergy of Spain were forbidden to use hymns by the Council of Braga, 563.[5] The paradox of encouraging non-scriptural hymns in the monastery and forbidding their use in the church at large has been explained by reference to the contemporary appearance of early forms of vernacular speech in western Europe. Latin, the language of the church, its liturgy and its clergy, was now threatened by a possible inroad of the vernacular.[6] Hymn writing was regarded, perhaps, as a prerogative of the clergy to be kept within bounds. To throw open to the church everywhere these privileges might be dangerous alike for theology and worship. Learning in the Latin tongue tended to be concentrated in the monastery, for other centers of scholarship were few and far between; hymnology became largely a function of the monastic group. It should be remembered that these centuries embraced a period of the greatest political, economic and social confusion in western Europe during which we know relatively little about Christian worship in widespread congregations except for the rite of the mass. Yet in the sixth century the opposite tendency toward greater freedom in writing and singing hymns was apparent. The Council of Tours, 567, permitted the secular clergy to use Ambrosian and other hymns.[7] If viewed in this light, the religious verse of Fortunatus takes on a new significance, illustrative of the freedom which the Church in Gaul, always highly individual, now experienced in the realm of hymnology.