For, the Middle Ages had inherited its great culture-forms in poetry, ritual learning, philosophy, politics, and warfare from classical antiquity, and they were fixed forms. Medieval culture was crude and poor in many aspects, but we cannot call it primitive. Its business was to work over traditional material, whether Christian or classical, and assimilate it afresh. Only where it was not rooted in antiquity, not fed by the ecclesiastical or Graeco-Roman spirit, was there room for the play-factor to ‘play’ and create something entirely new. That was the case wherever medieval civilization built directly on its Celto-Germanic past or on even earlier autochthonous layers.