Ages "Dietsc/Duutsc" was increasingly used as an umbrella term for the specific Germanic dialects spoken in the Low Countries, its meaning being largely implicitly provided by the regional orientation of medieval Dutch society: apart from the higher echelons of the clergy and nobility, mobility was largely static and hence while "Dutch" could by extension also be used in its earlier sense, referring to what to today would be called Germanic dialects as opposed to Romance dialects, in many cases it was understood or meant to refer to the language now known as Dutch. Apart from the sparsely populated eastern borderlands, there was little to no contact with contemporary speakers of German dialects, let alone a concept of the existence of German as language in its modern sense among the Dutch. Because medieval trade focussed on travel by water and with the most heavily populated areas adjacent to Northwestern France, the average 15th century Dutchman stood a far greater chance of hearing French or English than a dialect of the German interior, despite its relative geographical closeness. Medieval Dutch authors had a vague, generalised sense of common linguistic roots between their language and various German dialects, but no concept of speaking the same language existed. Instead they saw their linguistic surroundings mostly in terms of small scale regiolects. The 15th century saw the first attested use of "Nederlandsch" (Dutch: Netherlandish, Lowlandish) alongside "Duytsch" (the Early Modern spelling of the earlier "Dietsc/Duutsc") as a term for the Dutch language and it would eventually manifest itself as the main ethnonym. The use of "low(er)" or "nether" in describing the area now known as the Low Countries has a long historical record. In the 13th century epic the Nibelungenlied, written in Middle High German, the protagonist Sigurd is said to hail from the city of Xanten in the "Niderlant", meaning the Low Countries. In Old French, the inhabitants of the Low Countries were known as the "Avalois", meaning "those of the [Rhine/Scheldt/Meuse] estuary"; compare contemporary French "en aval" and "à vau-l'eau" meaning "downstream". The Dukes of Burgundy referred to their Dutch possessions as "pays d'embas" (French: "lower lands") as opposed to their higher/upper territorial possessions in Burgundy itself, which was echoed in the Middle and Modern French "Pays-Bas" meaning "Low Countries". In the second half of the 16th century the neologism "Nederduytsch" (literally: Nether-Dutch, Low-Dutch) appeared in print, in a way combining the earlier