Where do rhyming poems come from?

From French, it seems.

I have been listening to a series of lectures on poetry (I am horribly ignorant about it). At any rate, one of the things the instructor mentioned struck me as very interesting.

I'm sure I'm oversimplifying here, but...

Apparently Anglo Saxon poetry (i.e. pre-William the Conqueror British poetry) favored alliteration and rhythm and did not use rhyme extensively. One of the innovations brought to England by the Norman conquest was a French predilection for rhyming poetry. According to Prof. Drout, French and Latin are more amenable to or better facilitate the use of rhyme (i.e. same sound at the end of a word, after a stressed syllable) than English, because they tend to have a lot of common word suffixes that all sound the same. (I am reminded of my high school French class exercise of enumerating all the ways you can make the "A" sound: e, ee, ees, ai, ais, ait, aient, aie, er, est, es, et,...am I forgetting some?)

Again, according to Drout, cosmopolitan, continentally traveled Chaucer was instrumental in adopting rhyme into English and treating alliteration as a cheesy device.