Note 106 — Chapter II · MIMUS AND SCÔP

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.