[99] Tacitus, Ann. ii. 88 ‘canitur adhuc barbaras apud gentes.’
[100] Cassiodorus, Var. viii. 9.
[101] Kögel, i. 1. 122, quoting Paulus Diaconus, i. 27.
[102] Kögel, i. 1. 122; i. 2. 220; Gautier, i. 72; G. Paris, Hist. Poét. de Charlemagne, 50; cf. Poeta Saxo (†890) in M. G. H. Scriptores, i. 268 ‘est quoque iam notum; vulgaria carmina magnis laudibus eius avos et proavos celebrant. Pippinos, Karolos, Hludiwicos et Theodricos, et Carlomannos Hlothariosque canunt.’
[103] Gautier, i. 37; Gröber, ii. 1. 447. The shades of opinion on the exact relation of the cantilenae to the chansons de gestes are numerous.
[104] Vita S. Willelmi (Acta SS. Maii, vi. 801) ‘qui chori iuvenum, qui conventus populorum, praecipue militum ac nobilium virorum, quae vigiliae sanctorum dulce non resonant, et modulatis vocibus decantant qualis et quantus fuerit’; cf. Gautier, i. 66. The merest fragments of such folk-song heroic cantilenae are left. A German one, the Ludwigslied, on the battle of Saucourt (881) is in Müllenhoff und Scherer, Denkmäler deutscher Poesie und Prosa (1892), No. xi; cf. Kögel, i. 2. 86; Gautier, i. 62. And a few lines of a (probably) French one on an event in the reign of Clotaire (†620) are translated into Latin in Helgarius (†853-76), Vita S. Faronis (Historiens de France, iii. 505; Mabillon, Acta SS. Benedictinorum, ii. 610). Helgarius calls the song a ‘carmen rusticum’ and says ‘ex qua victoria carmen publicum iuxta rusticitatem per omnium pene volitabat ora ita canentium, feminaeque choros inde plaudendo componebant.’ The Vita S. Faronis in Acta SS. lx. 612, which is possibly an abridgement of Helgarius, says ‘carmine rustico ... suavi cantilena decantabatur’; cf. Gautier, i. 47; Gröber, ii. 1. 446.
[105] Ten Brink, i. 148, quotes from Hist. Ely, ii. 27 (†1166), a fragment of a song on Canute, ‘quae usque hodie in choris publice cantantur,’ and mentions another instance from Wm. of Malmesbury. Cf. de Gestis Herewardi Saxonis (Michel, Chron. Anglo-Norm. ii. 6) ‘mulieres et puellae de eo in choris canebant,’ and for Scotland the song on Bannockburn (1314) which, says Fabyan, Chronicle (ed. Ellis), 420, ‘was after many days sungyn in dances, in carolles of ye maydens and mynstrellys of Scotlande’; cf. also Gummere, B. P. 265.
[106] It is important to recognize that the cantilenae of the folk and those of the professional singers existed side by side. Both are, I think, implied in the account of the St. William songs quoted above: the folk sung them in choruses and on wake-days, the professional singers in the assemblies of warriors. At any rate, in the next (twelfth) cent. Ordericus Vitalis, vi. 3 (ed. Soc. de l’Hist. de France, iii. 5), says of the same Willelmus, ‘Vulgo canitur a ioculatoribus de illo cantilena.’ M. Gautier (ii. 6) will not admit the filiation of the ioculatores to the scôpas, and therefore he is led to suppose (i. 78) that the cantilenae and vulgaria carmina were all folk-song up to the end of the tenth cent. and that then the ioculatores got hold of them and lengthened them into chansons de gestes. But, as we shall see (p. 34), the Franks certainly had their professional singers as early as Clovis, and these cannot well have sung anything but heroic lays. Therefore the cantilenae and vulgaria carmina of the Merovingian and Carolingian periods may have been either folk-song, or scôp-song, or, more probably, both (Gröber, ii. 1. 449). Cantilena really means no more than ‘chant’ of any kind; it includes ecclesiastical chant. So Alcuin uses it (e. g. Ep. civ. in Dümmler, ii. 169); and what Gautier, ii. 65, prints as a folk-song cantilena of S. Eulalia is treated by Gröber, ii. 1. 442, as a sequence.
[107] Gummere, G. O. 260.
[108] Grein, i. 1.