The reader who might be inclined to see a tinge of scholastic pedantry in this passionate plea for ‘wisdom and knowledge,’ ought to consider the root of the evil combated by Guiraut. The long war with France and the crusaders had left its detrimental mark on the manners and morals of Provençal nobles. Their fortunes were wasted, their castles destroyed, and the new generation brought up in the camp knew little of the taste and refinement of previous ages. Hence the bitter attacks in the poems of the later troubadours directed against the vices of the nobles, their avarice, their stinginess, their coarseness of taste which delighted alone in the vulgar jests of the lowest joglars. It is especially against the encroachments of the latter on the domain of artistic poetry that Guiraut’s angry protest is directed. The mixing up of the two classes of Joglars and Troubadours he believes to be the first cause of the disease, and as the intellect of the time had grown too obtuse to draw the line, he demands an external sign of distinction. Hence the somewhat strange proposal laid down in his celebrated missive to the King of Castile. The ‘Suplicatio qe fes Guiraut Riquier al rey de Castela per lo nom del joglars l’an LXXIII.’ is a most curious document. Nothing would be easier than to draw into ridicule a man who intended to prop a tottering literature with a name, a title. But at the same time this man is so much in earnest himself, and his cause so noble, that one’s smile at his Quixotic notion involuntarily gives way to a feeling of deep sympathy. Guiraut begins his poem with a short exordium of complacent self-laudation, in which he dwells at some length on his competence to treat the subject: Pus dieus m’a dat saber Et entendemen ver De trobar, etc.