‘The _tenso_,’ the _Leys d’amors_ begins its long-winded definition, ‘is a combat and debate, in which each maintains and reasons some word or fact,’ and beyond this somewhat vague piece of information there is little to be got from the old grammarians. They supply us with plenty of technical names, with a neat definition to each of them; but how much of this theory is drawn from the inner consciousness of the learned men, how much from the living practice of the troubadours, is a difficult question to decide. The safest way for us will be, in this and in previous instances, to rely chiefly on the remaining specimens from the best period. For further particulars the curious reader is referred to Raynouard’s work (‘Choix,’ vol. ii. 197), where he may learn, for instance, that when a _tenso_ treated of love, which, by the way, most _tensos_ did, it was for some not very perceptible reason, called _partimen_, while a song of combat, in which more than two disputants took part, received the appropriate name of _torneyamen_, i.e. tournament,—turn and turn about, as we should say. Another name of the _tenso_, _jocx partitz_, of which the French term _jeu parti_ is a literal translation, seems to have been less commonly used in Provence. The principle of ‘turn and turn about’ has at the same time supplied the form of the _tenso_. It was but fair that to the various combatants the same advantages should be granted, and hence the number of stanzas allotted to each is exactly the same. Even the right of a last appeal in the shape of a _tornada_ is free to all. Some advantage might accrue to the first speaker from the choice of rhyme and metre, which had to be repeated exactly by his antagonist or antagonists. The reproduction of one of Arnaut Daniel’s hard-rhymed stanzas might have been a sore task to some of the more popular troubadours. But this slight privilege was more than counterbalanced by a duty. For, as a rule, the _tenso_ begins with a challenge of one poet to another to choose one side of an argument, the first spokesman undertaking to defend the opposite view, whichever it may turn out to be. Impartiality could not well go further.[15] In case of two antagonists only, the rhymes are frequently changed after a couple of stanzas, that is after one argument and counter-argument, but the continuation of the same rhymes throughout the poem is by no means of rare occurrence.