The first Old French love songs to which we can assign an approximate date are those of Chrétien de Troyes. They were produced in all likelihood around 1160 at the court of Marie de Champagne, or perhaps at that of her mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Modelled on the repertory of the troubadours, which was already well established and quite diverse, the earliest trouvère pieces were little more than ‘cansos in French garb’. From such slavish beginnings, however, would emerge a lively and independent tradition of song, which distinguished itself from that of the Midi not only by its language but also by its eclecticism. Boundaries between aristocratic and popular, borrowed and indigenous, new and old, sacred and secular were crossed and re-crossed with apparent abandon. Women were given a voice. Refrains, vestiges of a more primitive, less pretentious kind of song, came to disrupt the solemn dignity of the grand chant courtois. Literate bourgeois joined the ranks of the trouvères, engaging in spirited debates, or jeux-partis, about the proper behaviour of courtly lovers. The locus of performance gradually shifted from the great hall of a castle to the town square. As time went on, the occasion for song was less frequently a lavish dinner party than a local fair or a professionally sponsored contest known as a puy. The ultimate achievement of the Old French lyric – and arguably the cause of its demise – was the polyphonic motet.