Against Folquet of Marseilles scores of troubadours might be named, who boldly espoused the cause of their country and of liberty against Frenchmen and priests. The opposition to the encroachments of the latter was of course not confined to Provence. The weaknesses of the clergy were known equally well to trouvères and troubadours, to Walther von der Vogelweide and the German minnesingers, and to Chaucer, and the author of ‘Piers the Ploughman.’ But nowhere was the conflict between clerical and temporal powers more bitter, nowhere were the questions at stake more important and more universally felt to be such, than in the South of France. Moreover, the satire of many of the troubadours received additional sting from personal injury. The prolonged siege which Guy of Cavaillon had to sustain in his castle was not likely to incline him favourably towards his oppressors, and the furious onslaught on the avarice of the French conquerors from the pen of Boniface de Castellane is evidently founded on bitterest and most immediate experience. Neither is there cause for wonder that the gentry in black gowns and white hoods, mentioned by Guillem de Montanhagol in his powerful _sirventes_ against the cruelties and folly of the Inquisition, were not an altogether lovely sight in the eyes of that poet. Amongst the troubadours prominently engaged in the great struggle of their time, two distinct types may be recognised. One is the poetic freelance impatient of all restraint, and therefore doubly incensed at the oppression of both moral and religious liberties, the word ‘liberty,’ in his parlance, being not unfrequently a synonym of ‘licence.’ A man of this stamp was Guillem Figueira, the hater of priests. ‘He was,’ the manuscript says, ‘of Toulouse, the son of a tailor, and a tailor himself. When the French took Toulouse, he went to live in Lombardy, and he knew well how to make songs and how to sing them; and he became a joglar among the citizens. He was not a man to get on with barons or gentle-folks, but he made himself most agreeable to loose women and landlords and pothouse-keepers; and whenever he saw a good courtier come near him he grew wroth and melancholy, and at once he set about humiliating him.’