For books on the oral-formulaic theory, as I currently have a cat immobilising my left arm and it's therefore not as simple as it might be to gain access to my bibliography, I'd suggest a Google or Wikipedia search. The key names are Lord, Milman Parry and Bauman - Bauman does a good job of putting the information together. Lord was the one who kicked it off with The Singer of Tales, but some of his conclusions have been challenged, so Richard Bauman is probably the best bet. Another interesting read (but also challenged by linguists) is Walter Ong, who raised the issue of how much technology like writing and printing have altered the whole psychology (for want of a better word) of creating literature (for want of a better word). His key work is called "Orality and Literacy", dated 1982, I think.

I don't think I'm necessarily suggesting that the "lore" of anyone is the same as anyone else's, Steve - I'm suggesting that a lot of what has been recorded as folk tales may have a complicated history, and it's not necessarily a question of affluence or nobility or even formal education. Some of those folk tales then also turn up as folk ballads and it all gets even more confusing. No one thought it necessary to collect folklore at that time, although, as I said, both Gerald of Wales and Gervase of Tilbury did record a number of fascinating things including the tale of King Herla (which I have made into a song myself). I wish we did have some answers, although I suppose it might shorten my thesis somewhat. The big difficulty is that it's a fairly random issue as to what has survived and what hasn't. We know things have been lost. We suspect that other things have turned up re-worked in different ways, or maybe not. We can, as I said earlier, only work on and draw conclusions from what we have.

Clues in the material are also sparse - some authors did name themselves within their work, but not all. Those who did often simply give a name and a place, like Marie de France (Mary from France) or Chrétien de Troyes (Christian from Troyes), and that doesn't help a great deal. We know that Chrétien also names his patrons, which helps a bit more. "My" author has left very few clues indeed, and it's easier to find out about the scribes who copied his work than the person (I'm assuming a male, for various reasons of content, because there were women poets and writers at that time) who wrote the original. Or dictated it, because we don't know if he could write. I was excited a few months back to see the two manuscripts which have survived and now live in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and to be told the name of one of the scribes, but both manuscripts are copies (there are mistakes within them which show that) made probably 40 years after the original. I'm currently working on a theory that "my" author had some church-based training as there are huge numbers of references to the Bible and lines which sound similar to prayers used even now, but I could be wrong because not all of those with literacy skills were church-taught and this may be a reflection of how he thought people should talk in this kind of a story.

As to versification and ballads - the tale I'm working on is told in octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It also includes some passages which are very similar to troubadour poetry formats (whilst maintaining the metre and rhyme scheme). Prose narratives in the vernacular (as opposed to Latin) mostly came a bit later. They may of course have been based on rhymed or metred ways of telling the tale.

Finally - feudal history is also probably a lot more complicated than whatever we were taught in school. Those at the top of the pyramid had every reason to try and maintain a full and functioning workforce, because without that they wouldn't have lasted long themselves. But that's a story for another day, and now my left arm has gone to sleep and it's time for me to move away from the computer and disturb the cat. I've spent most of the past three days attempting to categorise the frankly bewildering number of oaths and interjections in "my" story, so I could do with a break!