The evidential fog that engulfs much of music in the early medieval period begins to lift a little as we get into the fourteenth century. For the first time we can see significant evidence of secular polyphonic song. We know from the iconography of the period that singing was a sociable activity; men and women are depicted singing and playing together, often outside and in mixed vocal and instrumental groups. What they sang is still a matter for speculation as there is nothing that links any illustration to specific pieces of music (or music to specific instruments). The relationship between composer and performer was still very little like our modern concept of clearly defined roles: a competent musician was expected to compose, sing, play and probably write poetry and dance too, and would have made very little distinction between any of these activities, which were subsumed within much looser concepts of poet, musician or courtier. We know the names of some who were singers, sometimes because they themselves appear in song texts or have some sort of singerly diminutive attached to their name, and increasingly because they figure in account books: singers are making money from their craft. Many more we know and value as composers, something that would have been incomprehensible to a fourteenth- century musician. It is an inevitable fact of survival that manuscripts remain, ghosts of music as act, but performers and performances of the act do not. It is significant that musicians are increasingly willing to be identified with their compositions, and this is the very beginning of a centuries-long process that will eventually lead to music history being written in terms of composers and ‘their’ works. In the late medieval period, however, this was not the case, and those whom scribes identify as composers are likely to have been better known to their contemporaries as doers or makers of music in a much wider sense.