The Mediaeval Stage, Volume 1 (of 2)

by E. K. Chambers

BOOK I

MINSTRELSY

C’est une étrange entreprise que celle de faire rire les honnêtes gens.—J.-B. Poquelin de Molière.

Molière est un infâme histrion.—J.-B. Bossuet.

CHAPTER I
THE FALL OF THE THEATRES

[Bibliographical Note.—A convenient sketch of the history of the Roman stage will be found in G. Körting, Geschichte des griechischen und römischen Theaters (1897). The details given in L. Friedländer, Sittengeschichte Roms in der Zeit von August bis zum Ausgang der Antonine (vol. ii, 7th ed. 1901), and the same writer’s article on Die Spiele in vol. vi of Marquardt and Mommsen’s Handbuch der römischen Alterthümer (2nd ed. 1885), may be supplemented from E. Nöldechen’s article Tertullian und das Theater in Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, xv (1894), 161, for the fabulae Atellanae from A. Dieterich, Pulcinella (1897), chs. 4-8, and for the pantomimi from C. Sittl, Die Gebärden der Griechen und Römer (1890), ch. 13. The account in C. Magnin, Les Origines du Théâtre moderne (vol. i, all published, 1838), is by no means obsolete. Teuffel and Schwabe, History of Latin Literature, vol. i, §§ 3-18 (trans. G. C. W. Warr, 1891), contains a mass of imperfectly arranged material. The later history of the Greek stage is dealt with by P. E. Müller, Commentatio historica de genio, moribus et luxu aevi Theodosiani (1798), vol. ii, and A. E. Haigh, Tragic Drama of the Greeks (1896), ch. 6. The ecclesiastical prohibitions are collected by W. Prynne, Histriomastix (1633), and J. de Douhet, Dictionnaire des Mystères (1854), and their general attitude summarized by H. Alt, Theater und Kirche in ihrem gegenseitigen Verhältniss (1846). S. Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Roman Empire (2nd ed. 1899), should be consulted for an admirable study of the conditions under which the pre-mediaeval stage came to an end.]

Christianity, emerging from Syria with a prejudice against disguisings[1], found the Roman world full of scenici. The mimetic instinct, which no race of mankind is wholly without, appears to have been unusually strong amongst the peoples of the Mediterranean stock. A literary drama came into being in Athens during the sixth century, and established itself in city after city. Theatres were built, and tragedies and comedies acted on the Attic model, wherever a Greek foot trod, from Hipola in Spain to Tigranocerta in Armenia. The great capitals of the later Greece, Alexandria, Antioch, Pergamum, rivalled Athens itself in their devotion to the stage. Another development of drama, independent of Athens, in Sicily and Magna Graecia, may be distinguished as farcical rather than comic. After receiving literary treatment at the hands of Epicharmus and Sophron in the fifth century, it continued its existence under the name of mime (μῖμος), upon a more popular level. Like many forms of popular drama, it seems to have combined the elements of farce and morality. Its exponents are described as buffoons (γελωτοποιοί, παιγνιογράφοι) and dealers in indecencies (ἀναισχυντογράφοι), and again as concerning themselves with questions of character and manners (ἠθολόγοι, ἀρεταλόγοι). They even produced what sound singularly like problem plays (ὑποθέσεις). Both qualities may have sprung from a common root in the observation and audacious portrayal of contemporary life. The mime was still flourishing in and about Tarentum in the third century[2].

Probably the Romans were not of the Mediterranean stock, and their native ludi were athletic rather than mimetic. But the drama gradually filtered in from the neighbouring peoples. Its earliest stirrings in the rude farce of the satura are attributed by Livy to Etruscan influence[3]. From Campania came another type of farce, the Oscum ludicrum or fabula Atellana, with its standing masks of Maccus and Bucco, Pappus and Dossennus, in whom it is hard not to find a kinship to the traditional personages of the Neapolitan commedia dell’ arte. About 240 B. C. the Greek Livius Andronicus introduced tragedy and comedy. The play now became a regular element in the spectacula of the Roman festivals, only subordinate in interest to the chariot-race and the gladiatorial show. Permanent theatres were built in the closing years of the Republic by Pompey and others, and the number of days annually devoted to ludi scenici was constantly on the increase. From 48 under Augustus they grew to 101 under Constantius. Throughout the period of the Empire, indeed, the theatre was of no small political importance. On the one hand it was the rallying point of all disturbers of the peace and the last stronghold of a public opinion debarred from the senate and the forum; on the other it was a potent means for winning the affection of the populace and diverting its attention from dynastic questions. The scenici might be thorns in the side of the government, but they were quite indispensable to it. If their perversities drove them from Italy, the clamour of the mob soon brought them back again. Trajan revealed one of the arcana imperii when he declared that the annona and the spectacula controlled Rome[4]. And what was true of Rome was true of Byzantium, and in a lesser degree of the smaller provincial cities. So long as the Empire itself held together, the provision firstly of corn and secondly of novel ludi remained one of the chief preoccupations of many a highly placed official.

The vast popular audiences of the period under consideration cared but little for the literary drama. In the theatre of Pompey, thronged with slaves and foreigners of every tongue, the finer histrionic effects must necessarily have been lost[5]. Something more spectacular and sensuous, something appealing to a cruder sense of humour, almost inevitably took their place. There is evidence indeed that, while the theatres stood, tragedy and comedy never wholly disappeared from their boards[6]. But it was probably only the ancient masterpieces that got a hearing. Even in Greece performances of new plays on classical models cannot be traced beyond about the time of Hadrian. And in Rome the tragic poets had long before then learnt to content themselves with recitations and to rely for victims on the good nature, frequently inadequate, of their friends[7]. The stilted dramas of Seneca were the delight of the Renaissance, but it is improbable that, until the Renaissance, they were ever dignified with representation. Roughly speaking, for comedy and tragedy the Empire substituted farce and pantomime.

Farce, as has been noticed, was the earliest traffic of the Roman stage. The Atellane, relegated during the brief vogue of comedy and tragedy to the position of an interlude or an afterpiece, now once more asserted its independence. But already during the Republic the Atellane, with its somewhat conventional and limited methods, was beginning to give way to a more flexible and vital type of farce. This was none other than the old mime of Magna Graecia, which now entered on a fresh phase of existence and overran both West and East. That it underwent considerable modifications, and probably absorbed much both of Atellane and of Attic comedy, may be taken for granted. Certainly it extended its scope to mythological themes. But its leading characteristics remained unchanged. The ethical element, one may fear, sank somewhat into the background, although it was by no means absent from the work of the better mime-writers, such as Laberius and Publilius Syrus[8]. But that the note of shamelessness was preserved there is no doubt whatever[9]. The favourite theme, which is common indeed to farce of all ages, was that of conjugal infidelity[10]. Unchaste scenes were represented with an astonishing realism[11]. Contrary to the earlier custom of the classical stage, women took part in the performances, and at the Floralia, loosest of Roman festivals, the spectators seem to have claimed it as their right that the mimae should play naked[12]. The mimus—for the same term designates both piece and actor—was just the kind of entertainer whom a democratic audience loves. Clad in a parti-coloured centunculus, with no mask to conceal the play of facial gesture, and planipes, with no borrowed dignity of sock or buskin, he rattled through his side-splitting scenes of low life, and eked out his text with an inexhaustible variety of rude dancing, buffoonery and horse-play[13]. Originally the mimes seem to have performed in monologues, and the action of their pieces continued to be generally dominated by a single personage, the archimimus, who was provided with certain stupidi and parasiti to act as foils and butts for his wit. A satirical intention was frequently present in both mimes and Atellanes, and their outspoken allusions are more than once recorded to have wrung the withers of persons of importance and to have brought serious retribution on the actors themselves. Caligula, for instance, with characteristic brutality, had a ribald playwright burnt alive in the amphitheatre[14].

The farce was the diversion of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie of Rome. Petronius, with all the insolence of the literary man, makes Trimalchio buy a troupe of comedians, and insist on their playing an Atellane[15]. The golden and cultured classes preferred the pantomimic dance. This arose out of the ruins of the literary drama. On the Roman stage grew up a custom, unknown in Greece, by which the lyric portions of the text (cantica) were entrusted to a singer who stood with the flute-player at the side of the stage, while the actor confined himself to dancing in silence with appropriate dumb show. The dialogue (diverbia) continued to be spoken by the actors. The next step was to drop the diverbia altogether; and thus came the pantomimus who undertook to indicate the whole development of a plot in a series of dramatic dances, during the course of which he often represented several distinct rôles. Instead of the single flute-player and singer a full choir now supplied the musical accompaniment, and great poets—Lucan and Statius among the number—did not disdain to provide texts for the fabulae salticae. Many of the pantomimi attained to an extreme refinement in their degenerate and sensuous art. They were, as Lucian said, χειρόσοφοι, erudite of gesture[16]. Their subjects were, for the most part, mythological and erotic, not to say lascivious, in character[17]. Pylades the Cilician, who, with his great rival Bathyllus the Alexandrian, brought the dance to its first perfection under Augustus, favoured satyric themes; but this mode does not appear to have endured. Practically the dancers were the tragedians, and the mimes were the comedians, of the Empire. The old Etruscan name for an actor, histrio, came to be almost synonymous with pantomimus[18]. Rome, which could lash itself into a fury over the contests between the Whites and Reds or the Blues and Greens in the circus, was not slow to take sides upon the respective merits of its scenic entertainers. The histrionalis favor led again and again to brawls which set the rulers of the city wondering whether after all the pantomimi were worth while. Augustus had found it to his advantage that the spirit of partisanship should attach itself to a Pylades or a Bathyllus rather than to more illustrious antagonists[19]. But the personal instincts of Tiberius were not so genial as those of Augustus. Early in his principate he attempted to restrain the undignified court paid by senators and knights to popular dancers, and when this measure failed, he expelled the histriones from Italy[20]. The example was followed by more than one of his successors, but Rome clamoured fiercely for its toys, and the period of exile was never a long one[21].

Both mimi and pantomimi had their vogue in private, at the banquets and weddings of the great, as well as in public. The class of scenici further included a heterogeneous variety of lesser performers. There were the rhapsodes who sung the tragic cantica, torn from their context, upon the stage. There were musicians and dancers of every order and from every land[22]. There were jugglers (praestigiatores, acetabuli), rope-walkers (funambuli), stilt-walkers (grallatores), tumblers (cernui, petauristae, petaminarii), buffoons (sanniones, scurrae), beast-tamers and strong men. The pick of them did their ‘turns’ in the theatre or the amphitheatre; the more humble were content with modest audiences at street corners or in the vestibule of the circus. From Rome the entertainers of the imperial race naturally found their way into the theatres of the provinces. Tragedy and comedy no doubt held their own longer in Greece, but the stage of Constantinople under Justinian does not seem to have differed notably from the stage of Rome under Nero. Marseilles alone distinguished itself by the honourable austerity which forbade the mimi its gates[23].

It must not be supposed that the profession of the scenici ever became an honourable one in the eyes of the Roman law. They were for the most part slaves or at best freedmen. They were deliberately branded with infamia or incapacity for civil rights. This infamia was of two kinds, depending respectively upon the action of the censors as guardians of public dignity and that of the praetors as presidents in the law courts. The censors habitually excluded actors from the ius suffragii and the ius honorum, the rights of voting and of holding senatorial or equestrian rank; the praetors refused to allow them, if men, to appear as attorneys, if women, to appoint attorneys, in civil suits[24]. The legislation of Julius Caesar and of Augustus added some statutory disabilities. The lex Iulia municipalis forbade actors to hold municipal honores[25]: the lex Iulia de adulteriis set the example of denying them the right to bring criminal actions[26]; the lex Iulia et Papia Poppaea limited their privileges when freed, and in particular forbade senators or the sons of senators to take to wife women who had been, or whose parents had been, on the stage[27]. On the other hand Augustus confined the ius virgarum, which the praetors had formerly had over scenici, to the actual place and time of performances[28]; and so far as the censorian infamia was concerned, the whole tendency of the late Republic and early Empire was to relax its application to actors. It came to be possible for senators and knights to appear on the stage without losing caste. It was a grievous insult when Julius Caesar compelled the mimograph Laberius to appear in one of his own pieces. But after all Caesar restored Laberius to his rank of eques, a dignity which at a still earlier date Sulla had bestowed on Roscius[29]. Later the restriction broke down altogether, although not without an occasional reforming effort to restore it[30]. Nero himself was not ashamed to take the boards as a singer of cantica[31]. And even an infamis, if he were the boon companion of a prince, might be appointed to a post directly depending on the imperial dignity. Thus Caracalla sent a pantomimus to hold a military command on the frontier, and Heliogabalus made another praefectus urbi in Rome itself[32]. Under Constantine a reaction set in, and a new decree formally excluded scenici from all dignitates[33]. The severe class legislation received only reluctant and piecemeal modification, and the praetorian infamia outlived the Empire itself, and left its mark upon Carolingian jurisprudence[34].

The relaxation of the old Roman austerity implied in the popularity of the mimi and histriones did not pass uncensured by even the pagan moralists of the Empire. The stage has a share in the denunciations of Tacitus and Juvenal, both of whom lament that princes and patricians should condescend to practise arts once relegated to the infames. Martial’s hypocrite rails at the times and the theatres. Three centuries later the soldierly Ammianus Marcellinus finds in the gyrations of the dancing-girls, three thousand of whom were allowed to remain in Rome when it was starving, a blot upon the fame of the state; and Macrobius contrasts the sober evenings of Praetextatus and his friends with revels dependent for their mirth on the song and wanton motions of the psaltria or the jests of sabulo and planipes[35]. Policy compelled the emperors to encourage spectacula, but even they were not always blind to the ethical questions involved. Tiberius based his expulsion of the histriones, at least in part, on moral grounds. Marcus Aurelius, with a philosophic regret that the high lessons of comedy had sunk to mere mimic dexterity, sat publicly in his box and averted his eyes to a state-paper or a book[36]. Julian, weaned by his tutor Mardonius from a boyish love of the stage, issued strict injunctions to the priests of the Sun to avoid a theatre which he despaired of reforming[37]. Christian teachers, unconcerned with the interests of a dynasty, and claiming to represent a higher morality than that either of Marcus Aurelius or of Julian, naturally took even stronger ground. Moreover, they had their special reasons for hostility to the stage. That the actors should mock at the pagan religion, with whose ludi their own performances were intimately connected, made a good dialectical point. But the connexion itself was unpardonable, and still more so the part taken by the mimes during the war of creeds, in parodying and holding up to ridicule the most sacred symbols and mysteries of the church. This feeling is reflected in the legends of St. Genesius, St. Pelagia and other holy folk, who are represented as turning from the scenic profession to embrace Christianity, the conversion in some cases taking place on the very boards of the theatre itself[38]. So far as the direct attack upon the stage is concerned, the key-note of patristic eloquence is struck in the characteristic and uncompromising treatise De Spectaculis of Tertullian. Here theatre, circus, and amphitheatre are joined in a threefold condemnation. Tertullian holds that the Christian has explicitly forsworn spectacula, when he renounced the devil and all his works and vanities at baptism. What are these but idolatry, and where is idolatry, if not in the spectacula, which not only minister to lust, but take place at the festivals and in the holy places of Venus and Bacchus? The story is told of the demon who entered a woman in the theatre and excused himself at exorcism, because he had found her in his own demesne. A fervid exhortation follows. To worldly pleasures Christians have no claim. If they need spectacula they can find them in the exercises of their Church. Here are nobler poetry, sweeter voices, maxims more sage, melodies more dulcet, than any comedy can boast, and withal, here is truth instead of fiction. Moreover, for Christians is reserved the last great spectaculum of all. ‘Then,’ says Tertullian, ‘will be the time to listen to the tragedians, whose lamentations will be more poignant for their proper pain. Then will the comedians turn and twist, rendered nimbler than ever by the sting of the fire that is not quenched[39].’ With Tertullian asceticism is always a passion, but the vivid African rhetoric is no unfair sample of a catena of outspoken comment which extends across the third century from Tatian to Lactantius[40]. The judgement of the Fathers finds more cautious expression in the disciplinary regulations of the Church. An early formal condemnation of actors is included in the so-called Canons of Hippolytus[41], and the relations of converts to the stage were discussed during the fourth century by the councils of Elvira (306) and of Arles (314) and by the third and fourth councils of Carthage (397-398)[42]. It was hardly possible for practical legislators to take the extreme step of forbidding Christian laymen to enter the theatre at all. No doubt that would be the counsel of perfection, but in dealing with a deep-seated popular instinct something of a compromise was necessary[43]. An absolute prohibition was only established for the clergy: so far as the laity were concerned, it was limited to Sundays and ecclesiastical festivals, and on those days it was enforced by a threat of excommunication[44]. No Christian, however, might be a scenicus or a scenica, or might marry one; and if a member of the unhallowed profession sought to be baptized, the preliminary of abandoning his calling was essential[45].

It is curious to notice that a certain sympathy with the stage seems to have been characteristic of one of the great heresiarchs. This was none other than Arius, who is said to have had designs of setting up a Christian theatre in rivalry to those of paganism, and his strange work, the Thaleia, may perhaps have been intended to further the scheme. At any rate an orthodox controversialist takes occasion to brand his Arian opponents and their works as ‘thymelic’ or ‘stagy’[46]. But it would probably be dangerous to lay undue stress upon what, after all, is as likely as not to be merely a dialectical metaphor.

After the edict of Milan (313), and still more after the end of the pagan reaction with the death of Julian (363), Christian influences began to make themselves felt in the civil legislation of the Empire. But if the councils themselves were chary of utterly forbidding the theatre, a stronger line was not likely to be taken in rescripts from Constantinople or Ravenna. The emperors were, indeed, in a difficult position. They stood between bishops pleading for decency and humanity and populaces now traditionally entitled to their panem et spectacula. The theatrical legislation preserved in the Code of Theodosius is not without traces of this embarrassment[47]. It is rather an interesting study. The views of the Church were met upon two points. One series of rescripts forbade performances on Sundays or during the more sacred periods of the Christian calendar[48]: another relaxed in favour of Christians the strict caste laws which sternly forbade actresses or their daughters to quit the unhappy profession in which they were born[49]. Moreover, certain sumptuary regulations were passed, which must have proved a severe restriction on the popularity as well as the liberty of actors. They were forbidden to wear gold or rich fabrics, or to ape the dress of nuns. They must avoid the company of Christian women and boys. They must not come into the public places or walk the streets attended by slaves with folding chairs[50]. Some of the rescripts contain phrases pointed with the bitterest contempt and detestation of their victims[51]. Theodosius will not have the portraits of scenici polluting the neighbourhood of his own imagines[52]. It is made very clear that the old court favourites are now to be merely tolerated. But they are to be tolerated. The idea of suppressing them is never entertained. On the contrary the provision of spectacula and of performers for them remains one of the preoccupations of the government[53]. The praetor is expected to be lavish on this item of his budget[54], and special municipal officers, the tribuni voluptatum, are appointed to superintend the arrangements[55]. Private individuals and rival cities must not deport actors, or withdraw them from the public service[56]. The bonds of caste, except for the few freed by their faith, are drawn as tight as ever[57], and when pagan worship ceases the shrines are preserved from demolition for the sake of the theatres built therein[58].

The love of even professing Christians for spectacula proved hard to combat. There are no documents which throw more light on the society of the Eastern Empire at the close of the fourth century than the works of St. Chrysostom; and to St. Chrysostom, both as a priest at Antioch before 397 and as patriarch of Constantinople after that year, the stage is as present a danger as it was to Tertullian two centuries earlier[59]. A sermon preached on Easter-day, 399, is good evidence of this. St. Chrysostom had been attacking the stage for a whole year, and his exhortations had just come to nought. Early in Holy Week there was a great storm, and the people joined the rogatory processions. But it was a week of ludi. On Good Friday the circus, and on Holy Saturday the theatre, were thronged and the churches were empty. The Easter sermon was an impassioned harangue, in which the preacher dwelt once more on the inevitable corruption bound up with things theatrical, and ended with a threat to enforce the sentence of excommunication, prescribed only a few months before by the council of Carthage, upon whoever should again venture to defy the Church’s law in like fashion on Sunday or holy day[60]. Perhaps one may trace the controversy which St. Chrysostom’s deliverance must have awakened, on the one hand in the rescript of the autumn of 399 pointedly laying down that the ludicrae artes must be maintained, on the other in the prohibition of the following year against performances in Holy week, and similar solemn tides.

More than a century after the exile and death of St. Chrysostom the theatre was still receiving state recognition at Constantinople. A regulation of Justinian as to the ludi to be given by newly elected consuls specified a performance on the stage ominously designated as the ‘Harlots’[61]. By this date the status of the theatrical profession had at last undergone further and noticeable modification. The ancient Roman prohibition against the marriage of men of noble birth with scenicae or other infames or the daughters of such, had been re-enacted under Constantine. A partial repeal in 454 had not extended to the scenicae[62]. During the first half of the sixth century, however, a series of decrees removed their disability on condition of their quitting the stage, and further made it an offence to compel slaves or freed women to perform against their will[63]. In these humane relaxations of the rigid laws of theatrical caste has often been traced the hand of the empress Theodora, who, according to the contemporary gossip of Procopius, was herself, before her conversion, one of the most shameless of mimes. But it must be noted that the most important of the decrees in question preceded the accession of Justinian, although it may possibly have been intended to facilitate his own marriage[64]. The history of the stage in the East cannot be traced much further with any certainty. The canons of the Quinisextine council, which met in the Trullan chamber to codify ecclesiastical discipline in 692, appear to contemplate the possibility of performances still being given[65]. A modern Greek scholar, M. Sathas, has made an ingenious attempt to establish the existence of a Byzantine theatrical tradition right through the Middle Ages; but Dr. Krumbacher, the most learned historian of Byzantine literature, is against him, and holds that, so far as our knowledge goes, the theatre must be considered to have perished during the stress of the Saracen invasions which, in the seventh and eighth centuries, devastated the East[66].

The ending of the theatre in the West was in very similar fashion. Chrysostom’s great Latin contemporaries, Augustine and Jerome, are at one with him and with each other in their condemnation of the evils of the public stage as they knew it[67]. Their divergent attitude on a minor point may perhaps be explained by a difference of temperament. The fifth century saw a marked revival of literary interests from which even dignitaries of the Church did not hold themselves wholly aloof. Ausonius urged his grandson to the study of Menander. Sidonius, a bishop and no undevout one, read both Menander and Terence with his son[68]. With this movement Augustine had some sympathy. In a well-known passage of the Confessions he records the powerful influence exercised by tragedy, and particularly erotic tragedy, over his tempestuous youth[69]. And in the City of God he draws a careful distinction between the higher and the lower forms of drama, and if he does not approve, at least does not condemn, the use of tragedies and comedies in a humane education[70]. Jerome, on the other hand, although himself like Augustine a good scholar, takes a more ascetic line, and a letter of his protesting against the reading of comedies by priests ultimately came to be quoted as an authority in Roman canon law[71].

The references to the stage in the works of two somewhat younger ecclesiastical writers are of exceptional interest. Orosius was a pupil of both Jerome and Augustine; and Orosius, endeavouring a few years after the sack of Rome by the Goths to prove that that startling disaster was not due to Christianity, lays great and indeed exaggerated importance on the share of the theatre in promoting the decay of the Empire[72]. About the middle of the fifth century the same note is struck by Salvian in his remarkable treatise De Gubernatione Dei[73]. The sixth book of his work is almost entirely devoted to the spectacula. Like Tertullian, Salvian insists on the definite renunciation of spectacula by Christians in their baptismal vow[74]. Like Orosius, he traces to the weakening of moral fibre by these accursed amusements the failure of the West to resist the barbarians. Moritur et ridet is his epigram on the Roman world. The citizens of Tréves, three times destroyed, still called upon their rulers for races and a theatre. With the Vandals at the very gates of Cirta and of Carthage, ecclesia Carthaginiensis insaniebat in circis, luxuriebat in theatris[75]. Incidentally Salvian gives some valuable information as to the survival of the stage in his day. Already in 400 Augustine had been able to say that the theatres were falling on every side[76]. Salvian, fifty years later, confirms the testimony, but he adds the reason. It was not because Christians had learnt to be faithful to their vows and to the teachings of the Church; but because the barbarians, who despised spectacula, and therein set a good example to degenerate Romans[77], had sacked half the cities, while in the rest the impoverished citizens could no longer pay the bills. He adds that at Rome a circus was still open and a theatre at Ravenna, and that these were thronged with delighted travellers from all parts of the Empire[78]. There must, however, have been a theatre at Rome as well, for Sidonius found it there when he visited the city, twelve years after it had been sacked for the second time, in 467. He was appointed prefect of the city, and in one of his letters expresses a fear lest, if the corn-supply fail, the thunders of the theatre may burst upon his head[79]. In a poem written a few years earlier he describes the spectacula theatri of mimes, pantomimes, and acrobats as still flourishing at Narbonne[80].

The next and the latest records of the stage in the West date from the earlier part of the sixth century, when the Ostrogoths held sway in Italy. They are to be found in the Variae of Cassiodorus, who held important official posts under the new lords of Rome, and they go to confirm the inference which the complaint of Salvian already suggests that a greater menace to the continuance of the theatre lay in the taste of the barbarians than even in the ethics of Christianity.

The Ostrogoths had long dwelt within the frontiers of the Empire, and Theodoric, ruling as ‘King of the Goths and Romans in Italy,’ over a mixed multitude of Italians and Italianate Germans, found it necessary to continue the spectacula, which in his heart he despised. There are many indications of this in the state-papers preserved in the Variae, which may doubtless be taken to express the policy and temper of the masters of Cassiodorus in the rhetorical trappings of the secretary himself. The scenici are rarely mentioned without a sneer, but their performances and those of the aurigae, or circus-drivers, who have now come to be included under the all-embracing designation of histriones, are carefully regulated[81]. The gladiators have, indeed, at last disappeared, two centuries after Constantine had had the grace to suppress them in the East[82]. There is a letter from Theodoric to an architect, requiring him to repair the theatre of Pompey, and digressing into an historical sketch, imperfectly erudite, of the history of the drama, its invention by the Greeks, and its degradation by the Romans[83]. A number of documents deal with the choice of a pantomimus to represent the prasini or ‘Greens,’ and show that the rivalry of the theatre-factions remained as fierce as it had been in the days of Bathyllus and Pylades. Helladius is given the preference over Thorodon, and a special proclamation exhorts the people to keep the peace[84]. Still more interesting is the formula, preserved by Cassiodorus, which was used in the appointment of the tribunus voluptatum, an official whom we have already come across in the rescripts of the emperors of the fourth century. This is so characteristic, in its contemptuous references to the nature of the functions which it confers, of the whole German attitude in the matter of spectacula, that it seems worth while to print it in an appendix[85]. The passages hitherto quoted from the Variae all seem to belong to the period between 507 and 511, when Cassiodorus was quaestor and secretary to Theodoric at Rome. A single letter written about 533 in the reign of Athalaric shows that the populace was still looking to its Gothic rulers for spectacula, and still being gratified[86]. Beyond this the Roman theatre has not been traced. The Goths passed in 553, and Italy was reabsorbed in the Empire. In 568 came the Lombards, raw Germans who had been but little under southern influence, and were far less ready than their predecessors to adopt Roman manners. Rome and Ravenna alone remained as outposts of the older civilization, the latter under an exarch appointed from Constantinople, the former under its bishop. At Ravenna the theatre may conceivably have endured; at Rome, the Rome of Gregory the Great, it assuredly did not. An alleged mention of a theatre at Barcelona in Spain during the seventh century resolves itself into either a survival of pagan ritual or a bull-fight[87]. Isidore of Seville has his learned chapters on the stage, but they are written in the imperfect tense, as of what is past and gone[88]. The bishops and the barbarians had triumphed.

CHAPTER II
MIMUS AND SCÔP

[Bibliographical Note (for chs. ii-iv).—By far the best account of minstrelsy is the section on Les Propagateurs des Chansons de Gestes in vol. ii of L. Gautier, Les Épopées françaises (2nd ed. 1892), bk. ii, chs. xvii-xxi. It may be supplemented by the chapter devoted to the subject in J. Bédier, Les Fabliaux (2nd ed. 1895), and by the dissertation of E. Freymond, Jongleurs und Menestrals (Halle, 1883). I have not seen A. Olrik, Middelalderens vandrende Spillemænd (Opuscula Philologica, Copenhagen, 1887). Some German facts are added by F. Vogt, Leben und Dichten der deutschen Spielleute im Mittelalter (1876), and A. Schultz, Das höfische Leben zur Zeit der Minnesinger (2nd ed. 1889), i. 565, who gives further references. The English books are not good, and probably the most reliable account of English minstrelsy is that in the following pages; but materials may be found in J. Strutt, Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801, ed. W. Hone, 1830); T. Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (ed. H. B. Wheatley, 1876, ed. Schroer, 1889); J. Ritson, Ancient English Metrical Romances (1802), Ancient Songs and Ballads (1829); W. Chappell, Old English Popular Music (ed. H. E. Wooldridge, 1893); F. J. Crowest, The Story of British Music, from the Earliest Times to the Tudor Period (1896); J. J. Jusserand, English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages (trans. L. T. Smith, 4th ed. 1892). The early English data are discussed by R. Merbot, Aesthetische Studien zur angelsächsischen Poesie (1883), and F. M. Padelford, Old English Musical Terms (1899). F. B. Gummere, The Beginnings of Poetry (1901), should be consulted on the relations of minstrelsy to communal poetry; and other special points are dealt with by O. Hubatsch, Die lateinischen Vagantenlieder des Mittelalters (1870); G. Maugras, Les Comédiens hors la Loi (1887), and H. Lavoix, La Musique au Siècle de Saint-Louis (in G. Raynaud, Recueil de Motets français, 1883, vol. ii). To the above list of authorities should of course be added the histories of literature and of the drama enumerated in the General Bibliographical Note.]

The fall of the theatres by no means implied the complete extinction of the scenici. They had outlived tragedy and comedy: they were destined to outlive the stage itself. Private performances, especially of pantomimi and other dancers, had enjoyed great popularity under the Empire, and had become an invariable adjunct of all banquets and other festivities. At such revels, as at the decadence of the theatre and of public morals generally, the graver pagans had looked askance[89]: the Church naturally included them in its universal condemnation of spectacula. Chrysostom in the East[90], Jerome in the West[91], are hostile to them, and a canon of the fourth-century council of Laodicea, requiring the clergy who might be present at weddings and similar rejoicings to rise and leave the room before the actors were introduced, was adopted by council after council and took its place as part of the ecclesiastical law[92]. The permanence of the regulation proves the strength of the habit, which indeed the Church might ban, but was not able to subdue, and which seems to have commended itself, far more than the theatre, to Teutonic manners. Such irregular performances proved a refuge for the dispossessed scenici. Driven from their theatres, they had still a vogue, not only at banquets, but at popular merry-makings or wherever in street or country they could gather together the remnant of their old audiences. Adversity and change of masters modified many of their characteristics. The pantomimi, in particular, fell upon evil times. Their subtle art had had its origin in an exquisite if corrupt taste, and adapted itself with difficulty to the ruder conditions of the new civilizations[93]. The mimi had always appealed to a common and gross humanity. But even they must now rub shoulders and contend for denarii with jugglers and with rope-dancers, with out-at-elbows gladiators and beast-tamers. More than ever they learnt to turn their hand to anything that might amuse; learnt to tumble, for instance; learnt to tell the long stories which the Teutons loved. Nevertheless, in essentials they remained the same; still jesters and buffoons, still irrepressible, still obscene. In little companies of two or three, they padded the hoof along the roads, travelling from gathering to gathering, making their own welcome in castle or tavern, or, if need were, sleeping in some grange or beneath a wayside hedge in the white moonlight. They were, in fact, absorbed into that vast body of nomad entertainers on whom so much of the gaiety of the Middle Ages depended. They became ioculatores, jongleurs, minstrels[94].

The features of the minstrels as we trace them obscurely from the sixth to the eleventh century, and then more clearly from the eleventh to the sixteenth, are very largely the features of the Roman mimi as they go under, whelmed in the flood which bore away Latin civilization. But to regard them as nothing else than mimi would be a serious mistake. On another side they have a very different and a far more reputable ancestry. Like other factors in mediaeval society, they represent a merging of Latin and the Teutonic elements. They inherit the tradition of the mimus: they inherit also the tradition of the German scôp[95]. The earliest Teutonic poetry, so far as can be gathered, knew no scôp. As will be shown in a later chapter, it was communal in character, closely bound up with the festal dance, or with the rhythmic movements of labour. It was genuine folk-song, the utterance of no select caste of singers, but of whoever in the ring of worshippers or workers had the impulse and the gift to link the common movements to articulate words. At the festivals such a spokesman would be he who, for whatever reason, took the lead in the ceremonial rites, the vates, germ at once of priest and bard. The subject-matter of communal song was naturally determined by the interests ruling on the occasions when it was made. That of daily life would turn largely on the activities of labour itself: that of the high days on the emotions of religion, feasting, and love which were evoked by the primitive revels of a pastoral or agricultural folk.

Presently the movements of the populations of Europe brought the Germanic tribes, after separating from their Scandinavian kinsmen, into contact with Kelts, with Huns, with the Roman Empire, and, in the inevitable recoil, with each other. Then for the first time war assumed a prerogative place in their life. To war, the old habits and the old poetry adapted themselves. Tiwaz, once primarily the god of beneficent heaven, became the god of battles. The chant of prayer before the onset, the chant of triumph and thanksgiving after the victory, made themselves heard[96]. From these were disengaged, as a distinct species of poetry, songs in praise of the deeds and deaths of great captains and popular heroes. Tacitus tells us that poetry served the Germans of his day for both chronology and history[97]. Jordanis, four centuries later, has a similar account to give of the Ostrogoths[98]. Arminius, the vanquisher of a Roman army, became the subject of heroic songs[99]: Athalaric has no higher word of praise for Gensimund than cantabilis[100]. The glories of Alboin the Lombard[101], of Charlemagne himself[102], found celebration in verse, and Charlemagne was at the pains to collect and record the still earlier cantilenae which were the chronicle of his race. Such historical cantilenae, mingled with more primitive ones of mythological import, form the basis of the great legendary epics[103]. But the process of epic-making is one of self-conscious and deliberate art, and implies a considerable advance from primitive modes of literary composition. No doubt the earliest heroic cantilenae were still communal in character. They were rondes footed and sung at festivals by bands of young men and maidens. Nor was such folk-song quick to disappear. Still in the eleventh century the deeds of St. William of Orange resounded amongst the chori iuvenum[104]; and spinning-room and village green were destined to hear similar strains for many centuries more[105]. But long before this the cantilenae had entered upon another and more productive course of development: they were in the mouths, not only of the folk, but also of a body of professional singers, the fashioners of the epic that was to be[106]. Like heroic song itself, the professional singers owed their origin to war, and to the prominence of the individual, the hero, which war entailed. Around the person of a great leader gathered his individual following or comitatus, bound to him by ties of mutual loyalty, by interchange of service and reward[107]. Amongst the comitatus room was found for one who was no spearman, but who, none the less honoured for that, became the poet of the group and took over from the less gifted chorus the duty of celebrating the praises of the chieftain. These he sung to the accompaniment, no longer of flying feet, but of the harp, struck when the meal was over in tent or hall. Such a harper is the characteristically Germanic type of professional entertainer. He has his affinities with the Demodokos of a Homeric king. Rich in dignities and guerdons, sitting at the foot of the leader, consorting on equal terms with the warriors, he differs wholly from the scenicus infamis, who was the plaything and the scorn of Rome. Precisely when the shifting of social conditions brought him into being it is hard to say. Tacitus does not mention him, which is no proof, but a presumption, that amongst the tribes on the frontier he had not yet made his appearance in the first century of the Empire. By the fifth century he was thoroughly established, and the earliest records point to his existence at least as early as the fourth. These are not to be found in Latin sources, but in those early English poems which, although probably written in their extant forms after the invasion of these islands, seem to date back in substance to the age when the Angles still dwelt in a continental home around the base of the Jutish peninsula. The English remained to a comparatively late stage of their history remote from Roman influence, and it is in their literature that both the original development of the Teutonic scôp and his subsequent contamination by the Roman mimus can most easily be studied.

The earliest of all English poems is almost certainly Widsith, the ‘far-traveller.’ This has been edited and interpolated in Christian England, but the kernel of it is heathen and continental[108]. It is an autobiographic sketch of the life of Widsith, who was himself an actual or ideal scôp, or rather gleómon, for the precise term scôp is not used in the poem. Widsith was of the Myrgings, a small folk who dwelt hard by the Angles. In his youth he went with Ealhhild, the ‘weaver of peace,’ on a mission to Eormanric the Ostrogoth. Eormanric is the Hermanric of legend, and his death in 375 A. D. gives an approximate date to the events narrated. Then Widsith became a wanderer upon the face of the earth, one who could ‘sing and say a story’ in the ‘mead-hall.’ He describes the nations and rulers he has known. Eormanric gave him a collar of beaten gold, and Guthhere the Burgundian a ring. He has been with Caesar, lord of jocund cities, and has seen Franks and Lombards, Finns and Huns, Picts and Scots, Hebrews, Indians, Egyptians, Medes and Persians. At the last he has returned to the land of the Myrgings, and with his fellow Scilling has sung loud to the harp the praises of his lord Eadgils and of Ealhhild the daughter of Eadwine. Eadgils has given him land, the inheritance of his fathers. The poem concludes with an eulogy of the life of gleemen. They wander through realm upon realm, voice their needs, and have but to give thanks. In every land they find a lord to whom songs are dear, and whose bounty is open to the exalters of his name. Of less undeniable antiquity than Widsith are the lines known as the Complaint of Deor. These touch the seamy side of the singer’s life. Deor has been the scôp of the Heodenings many winters through. But one more skilled, Heorrenda by name—the Horant of the Gudrun saga—has outdone him in song, and has been granted the land-right that once was Deor’s. He finds his consolation in the woes of the heroes of old. ‘They have endured: may not I endure[109]?’ The outline drawn in Widsith and in Deor is completed by various passages in the epic of Beowulf, which may be taken as representing the social conditions of the sixth or early seventh century. In Heorot, the hall of Hrothgar, there was sound of harp, the gleewood. Sweetly sang the scôp after the mead-bench. The lay was sung, the gleeman’s gyd told. Hrothgar’s thanes, even Hrothgar himself, took their turns to unfold the wondrous tale. On the other hand, when a folk is in sorrow, no harp is heard, the glee-beam is silent in the halls[110]. In these three poems, then, is fully limned the singer of Teutonic heathenism. He is a man of repute, the equal of thanes. He holds land, even the land of his fathers. He receives gifts of gold from princes for the praise he does them. As yet no distinction appears between scôp and gleómon. Widsith is at one time the resident singer of a court; at another, as the mood takes him, a wanderer to the ends of the earth. And though the scôp leads the song, the warriors and the king himself do not disdain to take part in it. This is noteworthy, because it gives the real measure of the difference between the Teutonic and the Roman entertainer. For a Nero to perform amongst the scenici was to descend: for a Hrothgar to touch the harp was a customary and an honourable act.

The singing did not cease when the English came to these islands. The long struggle with the Britons which succeeded the invasions assuredly gave rise to many new lays, both in Northumbria and Wessex. ‘England,’ says Mr. Stopford Brooke, ‘was conquered to the music of verse, and settled to the sound of the harp.’ But though Alfred and Dunstan knew such songs, they are nearly all lost, or only dimly discerned as the basis of chronicles. At the end of the sixth century, just as the conquest was completed, came Christianity. The natural development of English poetry was to some extent deflected. A religious literature grew up at the hands of priests. Eadhelm, who, anticipating a notion of St. Francis of Assisi, used to stand on a bridge as if he were a gleeman, and waylay the folk as they hurried back from mass, himself wrote pious songs. One of these, a carmen triviale, was still sung in the twelfth century[111]. This was in Wessex. In Northumbria, always the most literary district of early England, the lay brother Cædmon founded a school of divine poetry. But even amongst the disciples of Cædmon, some, such as the author of the very martial Judith, seem to have designed their work for the mead-hall as well as the monastery[112]. And the regular scôp by no means vanished. The Wanderer, a semi-heathen elegiac poem of the early eighth century, seems to be the lament of a scôp driven from his haunts, not by Christianity, but by the tumults of the day[113]. The great poet of the next generation, Cynewulf, himself took treasure of appled gold in the mead-hall. A riddle on ‘the wandering singer’ is ascribed to him[114], and various poems of his school on the fates or the crafts of man bear witness to the continued existence of the class[115]. With the eighth century, except for the songs of war quoted or paraphrased in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the extant Early English poetry reaches a somewhat inexplicable end. But history comes to the rescue, and enables us still to trace the scôp. It is in the guise of a harp-player that Alfred is reported to have fooled the Danes, and Anlaf in his turn to have fooled the Saxons[116]: and mythical as these stories may be, they would not have even been plausible, had not the presence of such folk by the camp-fire been a natural and common event.

Certainly the scôp survived heathenism, and many Christian bishops and pious laymen, such as Alfred[117], were not ashamed of their sympathy with secular song. Nevertheless, the entertainers of the English folk did not find favour in the eyes of the Church as a whole. The stricter ecclesiastics especially attacked the practice of harbouring them in religious houses. Decrees condemning this were made by the council on English affairs which sat at Rome in 679[118], and by the council of Clovesho in 747[119]. Bede, writing at about the latter date on the condition of church affairs in Northumbria complains of those who make mirth in the dwellings of bishops[120]; and the complaint is curiously illustrated by a letter of Gutbercht, abbot of Newcastle, to an episcopal friend on the continent, in which he asks him for a citharista competent to play upon the cithara or rotta which he already possesses[121]. At the end of the eighth century, Alcuin wrote a letter to Higbald, bishop of Lindisfarne, warning him against the snares of citharistae and histriones[122]: and some two hundred years later, when Edgar and Dunstan[123] were setting themselves to reform the religious communities of the land, the favour shown to such ribald folk was one of the abuses which called for correction[124]. This hostile attitude of the rulers of the Church is not quite explained by anything in the poetry of the scôpas, so far as it is left to us. This had very readily exchanged its pagan for a Christian colouring: it cannot be fairly accused of immorality or even coarseness, and the Christian sentiment of the time is not likely to have been much offended by the prevailing theme of battle and deeds of blood. The probable explanation is a double one. There is the ascetic tendency to regard even harmless forms of secular amusement as barely compatible with the religious life. And there is the fact, which the language of the prohibitions themselves makes plain, that a degeneration of the old Teutonic gleemen had set in. To singing and harping were now added novel and far less desirable arts. Certainly the prohibitions make no exception for poetae and musici; but the full strength of their condemnation seems to be directed against scurrae and their ioca, and against the mimi and histriones who danced as well as sang. These are new figures in English life, and they point to the fact that the merging of the Teutonic with the Latin entertainer had begun. To some extent, the Church itself was responsible for this. The conversion of England opened the remote islands to Latin civilization in general: and it is not to be wondered at, that the mimi, no less than the priests, flocked into the new fields of enterprise. If this was the case already in the eighth century, we can hardly doubt that it was still more so during the next two hundred years of which the literary records are so scanty. Such a view is supported by the numerous miniatures of dancers and tumblers, jugglers and bear-leaders, in both Latin and Early English manuscripts of this period[125], and by the glosses which translate such terms as mimus, iocista, scurra, pantomimus by gligmon, reserving scôp for the dignified poeta[126]. This distinction I regard as quite a late one, consequent upon the degeneracy introduced by mimi from south Europe into the lower ranks of the gleemen. Some writers, indeed, think that it existed from the beginning, and that the scôp was always the resident court poet, whereas the gleómon was the wandering singer, often a borrower rather than a maker of songs, who appealed to the smaller folk[127]. But the theory is inconsistent with the data of Widsith. The poet there described is sometimes a wanderer, sometimes stationary. He is evidently at the height of his profession, and has sung before every crowned head in Europe, but he calls himself a gleómon. Nor does the etymology of the words scôp and gleómon suggest any vital difference of signification[128].

The literary records of the continental Teutons are far scantier than those of the English. But amongst them also Latin and barbaric traditions seem to have merged in the ioculator. Ancestral deeds were sung to the harp, and therefore, it may be supposed, by a scôp, and not a chorus, before the Ostrogoths in Italy, at the beginning of the sixth century[129]. In the year 507 Clovis the Frank sent to Theodoric for a citharoedus trained in the musical science of the South, and Boethius was commissioned to make the selection[130]. On the other hand, little as the barbarians loved the theatre, the mimi and scurrae of the conquered lands seem to have tickled their fancy as they sat over their wine. At the banquet with which Attila entertained the imperial ambassadors in 448, the guests were first moved to martial ardour and to tears by the recital of ancient deeds of prowess, and then stirred to laughter by the antics of a Scythian and a Moorish buffoon[131]. Attila was a Hun and no German; but the Vandals who invaded Africa in 429 are recorded to have taken to the spectacula so extravagantly popular there[132], and Sidonius tells how mimici sales, chastened in view of barbaric conceptions of decency, found a place in the festivities of another Theodoric, king from 462 to 466 of the Visigoths in Gaul[133]. Three centuries later, under Charlemagne, the blending of both types of entertainer under the common designation of ioculator seems to be complete. And, as in contemporary England, the animosity of the Church to the scenici is transferred wholesale to the ioculatores, without much formal attempt to discriminate between the different grades of the profession. Alcuin may perhaps be taken as representing the position of the more rigid disciplinarians on this point. His letter to the English bishop, Higbald, does not stand alone. In several others he warns his pupils against the dangers lurking in ludi and spectacula[134], and he shows himself particularly exercised by the favour which they found with Angilbert, the literary and far from strict-lived abbot of St. Richer[135]. The influence of Alcuin with Charlemagne was considerable, and so far as ecclesiastical rule went, he had his way. A capitulary (†787) excluded the Italian clergy from uncanonical sports[136]. In 789 bishops, abbots, and abbesses were forbidden to keep ioculatores[137], and in 802 a decree applying to all in orders required abstinence from idle and secular amusements[138]. These prohibitions were confirmed in the last year of Charlemagne’s reign (813) by the council of Tours[139]. But as entertainers of the lay folk, the minstrels rather gained than lost status at the hands of Charlemagne. Personally he took a distinct interest in their performances. He treasured up the heroic cantilenae of his race[140], and attempted in vain to inspire the saevitia of his sons with his own enthusiasm for these[141]. The chroniclers more than once relate how his policy was shaped or modified by the chance words of a ioculator or scurra[142]. The later tradition of the jougleurs looked back to him as the great patron of their order, who had given them all the fair land of Provence in fee[143]: and it is clear that the songs written at his court form the basis not only of the chansons de gestes, but also, as we found to be the case with the English war-songs, of many passages in the chronicles themselves[144]. After Charlemagne’s death the minstrels fell for a time on evil days. Louis the Pious by no means shared his father’s love for them. He attempted to suppress the cantilenae on which he had been brought up, and when the mimi jested at court would turn away his head and refuse to smile[145]. To his reign may perhaps be ascribed a decree contained in the somewhat dubious collection of Benedictus Levita, forbidding idle dances, songs and tales in public places and at crossways on Sundays[146], and another which continued for the benefit of the minstrels the legal incapacity of the Roman scenici, and excluded histriones and scurrae from all privilege of pleading in courts of justice[147].

The ill-will of a Louis the Pious could hardly affect the hold which the minstrels had established on society. For good or for bad, they were part of the mediaeval order of things. But their popularity had to maintain itself against an undying ecclesiastical prejudice. They had succeeded irrevocably to the heritage of hate handed down from the scenici infames. To be present at their performances was a sin in a clerk, and merely tolerated in a layman. Largesse to them was declared tantamount to robbery of the poor[148]. It may be fairly said that until the eleventh century at least the history of minstrelsy is written in the attacks of ecclesiastical legislators, and in the exultant notices of monkish chroniclers when this or that monarch was austere enough to follow the example of Louis the Pious, and let the men of sin go empty away[149]. Throughout the Middle Ages proper the same standpoint was officially maintained[150]. The canon law, as codified by Gratian, treats as applicable to minstrels the pronouncements of fathers and councils against the scenici, and adds to them others more recent, in which clergy who attend spectacula, or in any way by word or deed play the ioculator, are uncompromisingly condemned[151]. This temper of the Church did not fail to find its expression in post-Conquest England. The council of Oxford in 1222 adopted for this country the restatement of the traditional rule by the Lateran council of 1215[152]; and the stricter disciplinary authorities at least attempted to enforce the decision. Bishop Grosseteste of Lincoln, for instance, pressed it upon his clergy in or about 1238[153]. The reforming provisions of Oxford in 1259 laid down that, although minstrels might receive charitable doles in monasteries, their spectacula must not be given[154]; and a similar prohibition, couched in very uncomplimentary terms, finds a place in the new statutes drawn up in 1319 for the cathedral church of Sarum by Roger de Mortival[155]. A few years later the statutes of St. Albans follow suit[156], while in 1312 a charge of breaking the canons in this respect brought against the minor clergy of Ripon minster had formed the subject of an inquiry by Archbishop Greenfield[157]. Such notices might be multiplied[158]; and the tenor of them is echoed in the treatises of the more strait-laced amongst monkish writers. John of Salisbury[159], William Fitz Stephen[160], Robert Mannyng of Brunne[161], are at one in their disapproval of ioculatores. As the fourteenth century draws to its close, and the Wyclifite spirit gets abroad, the freer critics of church and state, such as William Langland[162] or the imagined author of Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale[163], take up the same argument. And they in their turn hand it on to the interminable pamphleteering of the Calvinistic Puritans[164].

CHAPTER III
THE MINSTREL LIFE

The perpetual infamia of the minstrels is variously reflected in the literature of their production. Sometimes they take their condemnation lightly enough, dismissing it with a jest or a touch of bravado. In Aucassin et Nicolete, that marvellous romance of the viel caitif, when the hero is warned that if he takes a mistress he must go to hell, he replies that, to hell will he go, for thither go all the goodly things of the world. ‘Thither go the gold and the silver, and the vair and the grey, and thither too go harpers and minstrels and the kings of the world. With these will I go, so that I have Nicolete, my most sweet friend, with me’[165]. At other times they show a wistful sense of the pathos of their secular lot. They tell little stories in which heaven proves more merciful than the vice-gerents of heaven upon earth, and Virgin or saint bestows upon a minstrel the sign of grace which the priest denies[166]. But often, again, they turn upon their persecutors and rend them with the merciless satire of the fabliaux, wherein it is the clerk, the theologian, who is eternally called upon to play the indecent or ridiculous part[167].

Under spiritual disabilities the minstrels may have been, but so far as substantial popularity amongst all classes went, they had no cause from the eleventh to the fourteenth century to envy the monks. As a social and literary force they figure largely both on the continent and in England. The distinctively Anglo-Saxon types of scôp and gleómon of course disappear at the Conquest. They do not cease to exist; but they go under ground, singing their defiant lays of Hereward[168]; and they pursue a more or less subterranean career until the fourteenth century brings the English tongue to its own again. But minstrelsy was no less popular with the invaders than with the invaded. Whether the skald had yet developed amongst the Scandinavian pirates who landed with Rollo on the coasts of France may perhaps be left undetermined[169]: for a century and a half had sufficed to turn the Northmen into Norman French, and with the other elements of the borrowed civilization had certainly come the ioculator. In the very van of William’s army at Senlac strutted the minstrel Taillefer, and went to his death exercising the double arts of his hybrid profession, juggling with his sword, and chanting an heroic lay of Roncesvalles[170]. Twenty years later, Domesday Book records how Berdic the ioculator regis held three vills and five carucates of land in Gloucestershire, and how in Hampshire Adelinda, a ioculatrix, held a virgate, which Earl Roger had given her[171]. During the reigns of the Angevin and Plantagenet kings the minstrels were ubiquitous. They wandered at their will from castle to castle, and in time from borough to borough, sure of their ready welcome alike in the village tavern, the guildhall, and the baron’s keep[172]. They sang and jested in the market-places, stopping cunningly at a critical moment in the performance, to gather their harvest of small coin from the bystanders[173]. In the great castles, while lords and ladies supped or sat around the fire, it was theirs to while away many a long bookless evening with courtly geste or witty sally. At wedding or betrothal, baptism or knight-dubbing, treaty or tournament, their presence was indispensable. The greater festivities saw them literally in their hundreds[174], and rich was their reward in money and in jewels, in costly garments[175], and in broad acres. They were licensed vagabonds, with free right of entry into the presence-chambers of the land[176]. You might know them from afar by their coats of many colours, gaudier than any knight might respectably wear[177], by the instruments upon their backs and those of their servants, and by the shaven faces, close-clipped hair and flat shoes proper to their profession[178]. This kenspeckle appearance, together with the privilege of easy access, made the minstrel’s dress a favourite disguise in ages when disguise was often imperative. The device attributed by the chroniclers to Alfred and to Anlaf becomes in the romances one of the commonest of clichés[179]. The readiness with which the minstrels won the popular ear made them a power in the land. William de Longchamp, the little-loved chancellor of Richard I, found it worth his while to bring a number of them over from France, that they might sing his praises abroad in the public places[180]. Nor were they less in request for satire than for eulogy. The English speaking minstrels, in particular, were responsible for many songs in derision of unpopular causes and personalities[181]; and we need not doubt that ‘the lay that Sir Dinadan made by King Mark, which was the worst lay that ever harper sang with harp or with any other instruments,’ must have had its precise counterparts in actual life[182]. The Sarum statutes of 1319 lay especial stress on the flattery and the evil speaking with which the minstrels rewarded their entertainers[183]. Sometimes, indeed, they over-reached themselves, for Henry I is related to have put out the eyes of Lucas de Barre, a Norman jougleur, or perhaps rather trouvère, who made and sang songs against him[184]. But Lucas de Barre’s rank probably aggravated his offence, and as a rule the minstrels went scot-free. A wiser churchman here and there was not slow to perceive how the unexampled hold of minstrelsy on the popular ear might be turned to the service of religion. Eadhelm, standing in gleeman’s attire on an English bridge to mingle words of serious wisdom with his carmina trivialia, is one instance[185]. And in the same spirit St. Francis, himself half a troubadour in youth, would call his Minorites ioculatores Domini, and send them singing over the world to beg for their fee the repentance and spiritual joy of their hearers[186]. A popular hymn-writer of the present day is alleged to have thought it ‘hard that the devil should have all the good tunes’; but already in the Middle Ages religious words were being set to secular music, and graced with the secular imagery of youth and spring[187].

But if the minstrels were on the one hand a force among the people, on the other they had the ear of kings. The English court to judge by the payments recorded in the exchequer books, must have been full of them[188]. The fullest and most curious document on the subject dates from the reign of Edward I. It is a roll of payments made on the occasion of a Whitsuntide feast held in London in the year 1306, and a very large number of the minstrels recorded are mentioned by name[189]. At the head of the list come five minstrels with the high-sounding title of le roy[190], and these get five marks apiece. A number of others follow, who received sums varying from one mark upwards. Most of these have French names, and many are said to be in the company of this or that noble or reverend guest at the feast. Finally, two hundred marks were distributed in smaller sums amongst the inferior minstrels, les autres menestraus de la commune, and some of these seem to have been of English birth. Below the roys rank two minstrels, Adam le Boscu and another, who are dignified with the title of maistre, which probably signifies that they were clerks[191]. The other names are mainly descriptive, ‘Janin le Lutour,’ ‘Gillotin le Sautreour,’ ‘Baudec le Taboureur,’ and the like; a few are jesting stage names, such as the inferior performers of our music halls bear to-day[192]. Such are ‘Guillaume sanz Maniere,’ ‘Reginaldus le Menteur,’ ‘le Petit Gauteron,’ ‘Parvus Willielmus,’ and those of the attractive comedians Perle in the Eghe, and Matill’ Makejoye. The last, by the way, is the only woman performer named. The resources of Edward I could no doubt stand the strain of rewarding with royal magnificence the entertainers of his guests. There is plenty of evidence, however, that even on secular grounds the diatribes of the moralists against the minstrels were often enough justified. To the lavish and unthrifty of purse they became blood-suckers. Matilda, the wife of Henry I, is said to have squandered most of her revenues upon them[193]; while the unfortunate Robert of Normandy, if no less a chronicler than Ordericus Vitalis may be believed, was stripped by these rapacious gentry to the very skin[194]. Yet for all the days of honour and all the rich gifts the minstrel life must have had its darker side. Easily won, easily parted with; and the lands and laced mantles did not last long, when the elbow itched for the dice-box. This was the incurable ruin of the minstrel folk[195]. And even that life of the road, so alluring to the fever in the blood, must have been a hard one in the rigours of an English climate. To tramp long miles in wind and rain, to stand wet to the skin and hungry and footsore, making the slow bourgeois laugh while the heart was bitter within; such must have been the daily fate of many amongst the humbler minstrels at least[196]. And at the end to die like a dog in a ditch, under the ban of the Church and with the prospect of eternal damnation before the soul.

Kings and nobles were not accustomed to depend for their entertainment merely upon the stray visits of wandering minstrels. Others more or less domiciled formed a permanent part of the household. These indeed are the minstrels in the stricter sense of that term—ministri, ministeriales. In Domesday Book, as we have seen, one Berdic bears the title of the ioculator regis. Shortly afterwards Henry I had his mimus regis, by name Raherus, who made large sums by his suavitas iocularis, and founded the great priory of St. Bartholomew at Smithfield[197]. Laying aside his parti-coloured coat, he even became himself the first prior of the new community. The old spirit remained with him, however; and it is recorded that the fame of the house was largely magnified by means of some feigned miracles which Raherus put forth. Richard I was a noted lover of song, and the names of more than one minstrel of his are preserved. There was Ambroise, who was present at Richard’s coronation in 1189 and at the siege of Acre in 1191, and who wrote a history, still extant, of the third crusade[198]. And there was that Blondiaux or Blondel de Nesle, the story of whose discovery of his captive master, apocryphal though it may be, is in all the history books[199]. Henry III had his magister Henricus versificator in 1251[200], and his magister Ricardus citharista in 1252[201]. A harper was also amongst the ministri of Prince Edward in the Holy War[202], and when the prince became Edward I, he still retained one in his service. He is mentioned as Walter de Stourton, the king’s harper, in 1290[203], and as the citharista regis in 1300[204]. Edward II had several minstrels, to one of whom, William de Morlee, known as Roy de North, he made a grant of land[205]. By this time the royal minstrels seem to have become a regular establishment of no inconsiderable numbers. Under Edward III they received 7¹⁄₂d. a day[206]. A little later in the reign, between 1344 and 1347, there were nineteen who received 12d. a day in war, when they doubtless formed a military band, and 20s. a year in peace. These included five trumpeters, one citoler, five pipers, one tabouretter, two clarions, one nakerer, and one fiddler, together with three additional minstrels, known as waits[207]. The leader of the minstrels bore the title of rex, for in 1387 we find a licence given by Richard II to his rex ministrallorum, John Caumz, permitting him to pass the seas[208]. Henry V had fifteen minstrels when he invaded France in 1415, and at a later date eighteen, who received 12d. a day apiece[209]. At the end of his reign his minstrels received 100s. a year, and this annuity was continued under Henry VI, who in 1455 had twelve of them, besides a wait. In the next year this king issued a commission for the impressing of boys to fill vacancies in the body[210]. Edward IV had thirteen minstrels and a wait[211]. By 1469 these had been cut down to eight. At their head was a chief, who was now called, not as in Richard II’s time rex, but marescallus[212]. The eight king’s minstrels and their marescallus can be traced through the reign of Henry VII, and so on into the sixteenth century[213].

Nor was the royal household singular in the maintenance of a permanent body of minstrels. The citharista of Margaret, queen of Edward I, is mentioned in 1300, and her istrio in 1302[214]. Philippa, queen of Edward III, had her minstrels in 1337[215], and those of Queen Elizabeth were a regular establishment in the reign of Henry VII[216]. The Scottish court, too, had its recognized troupe, known by the early years of the sixteenth century as the ‘minstrels of the chekkar[217].’ As with kings and queens so with lesser men. The list of minstrels at court in 1306 includes the harpers and other musicians of several lords, both English and foreign[218]. In 1308 the earl of Lancaster had a body of menestralli and an armiger menestrallorum[219]. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries entries of payments to the minstrels of a vast number of domini, small and great, are common in the account books[220]. Henry, earl of Derby, took minstrels with him in his expeditions abroad of 1390 and 1392[221]; while the Household Book of the earl of Northumberland (†1512) shows that he was accustomed to entertain ‘a Taberett, a Luyte, and a Rebecc,’ as well as six ‘trompettes[222].’ Minstrels are also found, from the beginning of the fifteenth century, in the service of the municipal corporations. London, Coventry, Bristol, Shrewsbury, Norwich, Chester, York, Beverley, Leicester, Lynn, Canterbury had them, to name no others. They received fixed fees or dues, wore the town livery and badge of a silver scutcheon, played at all local celebrations and festivities, and were commonly known as waits[223]. This term we have already found in use at court, and the ‘Black Book,’ which contains the household regulations of Edward IV, informs us that the primary duty of a wait was to ‘pipe the watch,’ summer and winter, at certain fixed hours of the night[224].

It must not be supposed that established minstrels, whether royal, noble, or municipal, were always in constant attendance on their lords. Certain fixed services were required of them, which were not very serious, except in the case of waits[225]; for the rest of their time they were free. This same ‘Black Book’ of Edward IV is very explicit on the point. The minstrels are to receive a yearly fee and a livery[226]. They must attend at court for the five great feasts of the year. At other times, two or three out of their number, or more if the king desire it, are to be in waiting. The last regulation on the subject is curious. The king forbids his minstrels to be too presumptuous or familiar in asking rewards of any lord of the land; and in support of this he quotes a similar prohibition by the Emperor Henry II[227]. Doubtless, in the intervals of their services, the household minstrels travelled, like their unattached brethren of the road, but with the added advantage of a letter of recommendation from their lord, which ensured them the hospitality of his friends[228]. Such letters were indeed often given, both to the minstrels of a man’s own household and as testimonials to other minstrels who may have especially pleased the giver. Those interesting collections of mediaeval epistolary formulae, the summae dictaminis, contain many models for them, and judging by the lavish eulogy which they employ, the minstrels themselves must have had a hand in drawing them up[229]. Many minstrels probably confined themselves to short tours in the vicinity of their head quarters; others, like Widsith, the Anglo-Saxon scôp, were far travellers. John Caumz received a licence from Richard II to cross the seas, and in 1483 we find Richard III entertaining minstrels of the dukes of Austria and Bavaria[230]. Possibly the object of John Caumz was to visit one of the scolae ministrallorum in France, where experiences might be exchanged and new songs learnt. Beauvais, Lyon, Cambrai were famous for these schools, which were held year by year in Lent, when performances were stopped; and the wardrobe accounts of Edward III record grants of licences and expenses to Barbor and Morlan, two bagpipers, to visit the scolas ministrallis in partibus trans mare[231].

From the fourteenth century it is possible to trace the growth of the household minstrels as a privileged class at the expense of their less fortunate rivals. The freedom of access enjoyed by the entertainers of earlier days was obviously open to abuse. We have seen that in 1317 it led to the offering of an insult to Edward II by an emissary clad as a minstrel at his own table. It was only two years before that a royal proclamation had considerably restrained the liberty of the minstrels. In view of the number of idle persons who ‘under colour of mynstrelsie’ claimed food, drink, and gifts in private houses, it was ordered ‘that to the houses of prelates earls and barons none resort to meate and drynke, unless he be a mynstrel, and of these mynstrels that there come none except it be three or four minstrels of honour at the most in one day, unlesse he be desired of the lorde of the house.’ The houses of meaner men are to be altogether exempt, except at their desire[232]. I think it is probable that by ‘minstrels of honour’ we must here understand ‘household minstrels[233]’; and that the severity of the ordinance must have come upon those irresponsible vagrants who had not the shelter of a great man’s name. With the Statutes of Labourers in the middle of the fourteenth century begins a history of legislation against ‘vacabonds and valiant beggars,’ which put further and serious difficulties in the way of the free movement of the migratory classes through the country[234]. Minstrels, indeed, are not specifically declared to be ‘vacabonds’ until this legislation was codified by William Cecil in 1572[235]; but there is evidence that they were none the less liable to be treated as such, unless they had some protection in the shape of livery or licence. At Chester from the early thirteenth century, and at Tutbury in Staffordshire from 1380, there existed courts of minstrelsy which claimed to issue licences to all performers within their purview. It is not probable that this jurisdiction was very effective. But a step taken by Edward IV in 1469 had for its avowed object to strengthen the hands of what may be called official minstrelsy. Representation had been made to the king that certain rude husbandmen and artificers had usurped the title and livery of his minstrels, and had thus been enabled to gather an illegitimate harvest of fees. He therefore created or revived a regular guild or fraternity of minstrels, putting his own household performers with their marescallus at the head of it, and giving its officers a disciplinary authority over the profession throughout the country, with the exception of Chester. It is not improbable, although it is not distinctly stated, that admission into the guild was practically confined to ‘minstrels of honour.’ Certainly one of the later local guilds which grew up in the sixteenth century, that of Beverley, limited its membership to such as could claim to be ‘mynstrell to some man of honour or worship or waite of some towne corporate or other ancient town, or else of such honestye and conyng as shalbe thought laudable and pleasant to the hearers[236].’ In any case the whole drift of social development was to make things difficult for the independent minstrels and to restrict the area of their wanderings.

The widespread popularity of the minstrels amongst the mediaeval laity, whether courtiers, burghers, or peasants, needs no further labouring. It is more curious to find that in spite of the formal anathemas of the Church upon their art, they were not, as a matter of fact, rigorously held at arm’s length by the clergy. We find them taking a prominent part in the holyday festivities of religious guilds[237]; we find them solacing the slow progress of the pilgrimages with their ready wit and copious narrative or song[238]; we find them received with favour by bishops, even upon their visitations[239], and not excluded from a welcome in the hall of many a monastery. As early as 1180, one Galfridus, a citharoedus, held a ‘corrody,’ or right to a daily commons of food and drink in the abbey of Hyde at Winchester[240]. And payments for performances are frequent in the accounts of the Augustinian priories at Canterbury[241], Bicester, and Maxtoke, and the great Benedictine houses of Durham, Norwich, Thetford, and St. Swithin’s, Winchester[242], and doubtless in those of many another cloistered retreat. The Minorite chroniclers relate, how at the time of the coming of the friars in 1224 two of them were mistaken for minstrels by the porter of a Benedictine grange near Abingdon, received by the prior and brethren with unbecoming glee, and when the error was discovered, turned out with contumely[243]. At such semi-religious foundations also, as the college of St. Mary at Winchester, or Waynflete’s great house of St. Mary Magdalen in Oxford, minstrels of all degrees found, at least by the fifteenth century, ready and liberal entertainment[244].

How, then, is one to reconcile this discrepancy between the actual practice of the monasteries and the strict, the uncompromising prohibition of minstrelsy in rule and canon? An incomplete answer readily presents itself. The monks being merely human, fell short of the ideal prescribed for them. We do not now learn for the first time, that the ambitions of the pious founder, the ecclesiastical law-giver, the patristic preacher, were one thing; the effective daily life of churchmen in many respects quite another. Here, as in matters of even more moment, did mediaeval monasticism ‘dream from deed dissever’—

‘The reule of Seint Maure or of Seint Beneit,

By-cause that it was old and som-del streit

This ilke monk leet olde thinges pace,

And held after the newe world the space.’

True enough, but not the whole truth. It doubtless explains the behaviour of the Benedictines of Abingdon; but we can hardly suppose that when Robert de Grosseteste, the sworn enemy of ecclesiastical abuses, kept his harper’s chamber next his own, he was surreptitiously allowing himself an illegitimate gratification which he denied to his clergy. The fact is that the condemnations of the Church, transferred, as we have seen, wholesale from the mimi and histriones of the decaying Empire, were honestly not applicable without qualification, even from the ecclesiastical point of view, to their successors, the mimi and histriones of the Middle Ages. The traditions of the Roman stage, its manners, its topics, its ethical code, became indeed a large part of the direct inheritance of minstrelsy. But, as we have seen, they were far from being the whole of that inheritance. The Teutonic as well as the Latin element in the civilization of western Europe must be taken into account. The minstrel derives from the disreputable planipes; he derives also from the scôp, and has not altogether renounced the very different social and ethical position which the scôp enjoyed. After all, nine-tenths of the secular music and literature, something even of the religious literature, of the Middle Ages had its origin in minstrelsy. Practically, if not theoretically, the Church had to look facts in the face, and to draw a distinction between the different elements and tendencies that bore a single name. The formularies, of course, continued to confound all minstrels under the common condemnation of ioculatores. The Church has never been good at altering its formularies to suit altered conditions. But it has generally been good at practical compromises. And in the case of minstrelsy, a practical compromise, rough enough, was easily arrived at.

The effective conscience of the thirteenth-century Church had clearly come to recognize degrees in the ethical status of the minstrels. No more authoritative exponent of the official morals of his day can be desired than St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Thomas Aquinas is very far from pronouncing an unqualified condemnation of all secular entertainment. The profession of an histrio, he declares, is by no means in itself unlawful. It was ordained for the reasonable solace of humanity, and the histrio who exercises it at a fitting time and in a fitting manner is not on that account to be regarded as a sinner[245]. Another contemporary document is still more explicit. This is the Penitential written at the close of the thirteenth century by Thomas de Cabham, sub-dean of Salisbury and subsequently archbishop of Canterbury[246]. In the course of his analysis of human frailty, Thomas de Cabham makes a careful classification from the ethical point of view, of minstrels. There are those who wear horrible masks, or entertain by indecent dance and gesture. There are those again who follow the courts of the great, and amuse by satire and by raillery. Both these classes are altogether damnable. Those that remain are distinguished by their use of musical instruments. Some sing wanton songs at banquets. These too are damnable, no less than the satirists and posture-mongers. Others, however, sing of the deeds of princes, and the lives of the saints. To these it is that the name ioculatores more strictly belongs, and they, on no less an authority than that of Pope Alexander himself[247], may be tolerated.

Of the three main groups of minstrels distinguished by Thomas de Cabham, two correspond roughly to the two broad types which, from the point of view of racial tradition, we have already differentiated. His musicians correspond to the Teutonic gleemen and their successors; his posture-mongers and buffoons to the Roman mimi and their successors. Who then are Thomas de Cabham’s third and intermediate group, the satirists whose lampoons beset the courts of the great? Well, raillery and invective, as we have seen, were common features of minstrelsy; but Gautier may very likely be right when he surmises that Thomas de Cabham has particularly in mind the scolares vagantes, who brought so much scandal upon the Church during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries[248]. Some of these were actually out at elbows and disfrocked clerks; others were scholars drifting from university to university, and making their living meantime by their wits; most of them were probably at least in minor orders. But practically they lived the life of the minstrels, tramping the road with them, sharing the same temptations of wine, women, and dice, and bringing into the profession a trained facility of composition, and at least a flavour of classical learning[249]. They were indeed the main intermediaries between the learned and the vernacular letters of their day; the spilth of their wit and wisdom is to be found in the burlesque Latin verse of such collections as the Carmina Burana, riotous lines, by no means devoid of poetry, with their half-humorous half-pathetic burden,

‘In taberna quando sumus

Non curamus quid sit humus[250].’

And especially they were satirists, satirists mainly of the hypocrisy, cupidity and evil living of those in the high places of the Church, for whom they conceived a grotesque expression in Bishop Golias, a type of materialistic prelate, in whose name they wrote and whose pueri or discipuli they declared themselves to be[251]. Goliardi, goliardenses, their reputation in the eyes of the ecclesiastical authorities was of the worst, and their ill practices are coupled with those of the minstrels in many a condemnatory decree[252].

It is not with the goliardi then, that Thomas de Cabham’s relaxation of the strict ecclesiastical rigours is concerned. Neither is it, naturally enough, with the lower minstrels of the mimus tradition. Towards these Thomas de Cabham, like his predecessors, is inexorable. And even of the higher minstrels the musicians and singers, his toleration has its limits. He discriminates. In a sense, a social and professional sense, all these higher minstrels fall into the same class. But from the ethical point of view there is a very marked distinction amongst them. Some there are who haunt taverns and merry-makings with loose songs of love and dalliance. These it is not to be expected that the holy mother Church should in any way countenance. Her toleration must be reserved for those more reputable performers who find material for their verse either in the life and conversation of the saints and martyrs themselves, or at least in the noble and inspiring deeds of national heroes and champions. Legends of the saints and gests of princes: if the minstrels will confine themselves to the celebration of these, then, secure in the pronouncement of a pope, they may claim a hearing even from the devout. It would be rash to assert that even the comparatively liberal theory of Thomas de Cabham certainly justified in all cases the practice of the monasteries. But it is at least noteworthy that in several instances where the subjects of the minstrelsy presented for the delectation of a cowled audience remain upon record, they do fall precisely within the twofold definition which he lays down. At Winchester in 1338 the minstrel Herbert sang the song of Colbrond (or Guy of Warwick), and the gest of the miraculous deliverance of Queen Emma; while at Bicester in 1432 it was the legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus that made the Epiphany entertainment of the assembled canons.

If now we set aside the very special class of ribald galiardi, and if we set aside also the distinction drawn by Thomas de Cabham on purely ethical grounds between the minstrels of the love-songs and the minstrels of saintly or heroic gest, the net result is the twofold classification of higher and lower minstrels already familiar to us. Roughly—it must always be borne in mind how roughly—it corresponds on the one hand to the difference between the Teutonic and the Roman tradition, on the other to the distinction between the established ‘minstrel of honour’ and his unattached rival of the road. And there is abundant evidence that such a distinction was generally present, and occasionally became acute, in the consciousness of the minstrels themselves. The aristocrats of minstrelsy, a Baudouin or a Jean de Condé, or a Watriquet de Couvin, have very exalted ideas as to the dignity of their profession. They will not let you, if they can help it, put the grans menestreus on the same level with every-day jangleur of poor attainments and still poorer repute[253]. In the Dit des Taboureurs again it is a whole class, the joueurs de vielle, who arise to vindicate their dignity and to pour scorn upon the humble and uninstructed drummers[254]. But the most instructive and curious evidence comes from Provence. It was in 1273, when the amazing growth of Provençal poetry was approaching its sudden decay, that the last of the great troubadours, Guiraut de Riquier, addressed a verse Supplicatio to Alphonso X of Castile on the state of minstrelsy. He points out the confusion caused by the indiscriminate grouping of poets, singers, and entertainers of all degrees under the title of joglars, and begs the king, as high patron of letters, to take order for it. A reply from Alphonso, also in verse, and also, one may suspect, due to the fertile pen of Guiraut Riquier, is extant. Herein he establishes or confirms a fourfold hierarchy. At the head come two classes, the doctors de trobar and the trobaires, who are composers, the former of didactic, the latter of ordinary songs and melodies. Beneath these are the joglars proper, instrumentalists and reciters of delightful stories, and beneath these again the bufos, the entertainers of common folk, who have really no claim to be considered as joglars at all[255]. One of the distinctions here made is new to us. The difference between doctor de trobar and trobaire is perhaps negligible. But that between the trobaire or composer and the joglar or executant of poetry, is an important one. It is not, however, so far as the Teutonic element in minstrelsy goes, primitive. The scôpas and the French or Anglo-Norman ioculatores up to the twelfth century composed their verses as a class, and sang them as well[256]. In Provence, however, the Teutonic element in minstrelsy must have been of the slightest, and perhaps the Roman tradition, illustrated by the story of Laberius, of a marked barrier between composing and executing, had vaguely lingered. At any rate it is in Provence, in the eleventh century, that the distinction between trobaire and joglar makes its appearance. It never became a very complete one. The trobaire was generally, not always, of gentle or burgess birth; sometimes actually a king or noble. In the latter case he contented himself with writing his songs, and let the joglars spread them abroad. But the bulk of the trobaires lived by their art. They wandered from castle to castle, alone with a vielle, or with joglars in their train, and although they mingled with their hosts on fairly equal terms, they did not disdain to take their rewards of horse or mantle or jewel, just like any common performer. Moreover, they confined themselves to lyric poetry, leaving the writing of epic, so far as epic was abroad in Provence, to the joglars[257]. From Provence, the trobaire spread to other countries, reappearing in the north of France and England as the trouvère. We seem to trace an early trouvère in Lucas de Barre in the time of Henry I. But it is Eleanor of Poitiers, daughter of the trobaire count William of Poitiers, and mother of the trouvère Richard Cœur de Lion, who appears as the chief intermediary between north and south. The intrusion of the trouvère was the first step in the degradation of minstrelsy. Amongst the Anglo-Saxons, even apart from the cantilenae of the folk, the professional singer had no monopoly of song. Hrothgar and Alfred harped with their scôpas. But if there had been a similar tendency amongst the continental Teutons who merged in the French and Norman-French, it had been checked by the complete absorption of all literary energies, outside the minstrel class, in neo-Latin. It was not until the twelfth century, and as has been said, under Provençal influence, that secular-minded clerks, and exceptionally educated nobles, merchants, or officials, began to devote themselves to the vernacular, and by so doing to develop the trouvère type. The trouvère had the advantage of the minstrel in learning and independence, if not in leisure; and though the latter long held his own by the side of his rival, he was fated in the end to give way, and to content himself with the humbler task of spreading abroad what the trouvère wrote[258]. By the second quarter of the fourteenth century, the conquest of literature by the bourgeoisie was complete. The interest had shifted from the minstrel on the hall floor to the burgher or clerk in the puy; the prize of a successful poem was no longer a royal mantle, but a laureate crown or the golden violet of the jeux floraux; and its destiny less to be recited at the banquet, than read in the bower. In England the completion of the process perhaps came a little later, and was coincident with the triumph of English, the tongue of the bourgeois, over French, the tongue of the noble. The full flower of minstrelsy had been the out-at-elbows vagabond, Rutebeuf. The full flower of the trouvère is the comptroller of the customs and subsidies of the port of London, Geoffrey Chaucer.

The first distinction, then, made by Guiraut Riquier, that between trobaire and joglar, implies a development from within minstrelsy itself that was destined one day to overwhelm it. But the second, that between the joglar and the bufo, is precisely the one already familiar to us, between the minstrels of the scôp and the minstrels of the mimus tradition. And, as has been said, it is partly, if not entirely, identical with that which grew up in course of time between the protected minstrels of the court and of great men’s houses, and their vagrant brethren of the road. This general antithesis between the higher and lower mintrelsy may now, perhaps, be regarded as established. It was the neglect of it, surely, that led to that curious and barren logomachy between Percy and Ritson, in which neither of the disputants can be said to have had hold of more than a bare half of the truth[259]. And it runs through the whole history of minstrelsy. It became acute, no doubt, with the growth in importance of the minstrels of honour in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But it had probably been just as acute, if not more so, at the very beginning of things, when the clash of Teutonic and Roman civilization first brought the bard face to face with the serious rivalry of the mime. Bard and mime merged without ever becoming quite identical; and even at the moment when this process was most nearly complete, say in the eleventh century, the jouglerie seigneuriale, to use Magnin’s happy terms, was never quite the same thing as the jouglerie foraine et populaire[260], least of all in a country like England where differences of tongue went to perpetuate and emphasize the breach.

Nevertheless, the antithesis may easily be pushed too far. After all, the minstrels were entertainers, and therefore their business was to entertain. Did the lord yawn over a gest or a saintly legend? the discreet minstrel would be well advised to drop high art, and to substitute some less exacting, even if less refined fashion of passing the time. The instincts of boor and baron were not then, of course, so far apart as they are nowadays. And as a matter of fact we find many of the most eminent minstrels boasting of the width and variety of their accomplishments. Thus of Baudouin II, count of Guisnes (1169-1206), it is recorded that he might have matched the most celebrated professionals, not only in chansons de gestes and romans d’aventure but also in the fabliaux which formed the delight of the vulgar bourgeoisie[261]. Less aristocratic performers descended even lower than Baudouin de Guisnes. If we study the répertoires of such jougleurs as the diabolic one in Gautier de Coincy’s miracle[262], or Daurel in the romance of Daurel et Beton[263], or the disputants who vaunt their respective proficiencies in Des Deus Bordeors Ribauz[264], we shall find that they cover not only every conceivable form of minstrel literature proper, but also tricks with knives and strings, sleight of hand, dancing and tumbling. Even in Provence, the Enseignamens for joglars warn their readers to learn the arts of imitating birds, throwing knives, leaping through hoops, showing off performing asses and dogs, and dangling marionettes[265]. So that one discerns the difference between the lower and the higher minstrels to have been not so much that the one did not sink so low, as that the other, for lack of capacity and education, did not rise so high.

The palmy days of minstrelsy were the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The germ of decay, however, which appeared when the separation grew up between trouvère and jougleur, and when men began to read books instead of listening to recitations, was further developed by the invention of printing. For then, while the trouvère could adapt himself readily enough to the new order of things, the jougleur’s occupation was gone. Like Benedick he might still be talking, but nobody marked him. Eyes cast down over a page of Chaucer or of Caxton had no further glitter or tear for him to win[266]. The fifteenth, and still more the sixteenth century, witness the complete break-up of minstrelsy in its mediaeval form. The mimes of course endured. They survived the overthrow of mediaevalism, as they had survived the overthrow of the Empire[267]. The Tudor kings and nobles had still their jugglers, their bearwards, their domestic buffoons, jesters or fools[268]. Bearbaiting in Elizabethan London rivalled the drama in its vogue. Acrobats and miscellaneous entertainers never ceased to crowd to every fair, and there is applause even to-day in circus and music-hall for the old jests and the old somersaults that have already done duty for upwards of twenty centuries. But the jougleur as the thirteenth century knew him was by the sixteenth century no more. Professional musicians there were in plenty; ‘Sneak’s noise’ haunted the taverns of Eastcheap[269], and instrumentalists and vocalists in royal palaces and noble mansions still kept the name and style of minstrels. But they were not minstrels in the old sense, for with the production of literature, except perhaps for a song here and there, they had no longer anything to do. That had passed into other hands, and even the lineaments of the trouvère are barely recognizable in the new types of poets and men of letters whom the Renaissance produced. The old fashioned minstrel in his style and habit as he lived, was to be presented before Elizabeth at Kenilworth as an interesting anachronism[270]. Some of the discarded entertainers, as we shall see, were absorbed into the growing profession of stage-players; others sunk to be ballad singers. For to the illiterate the story-teller still continued to appeal. The ballad indeed, at least on one side of it, was the detritus, as the lai had been the germ, of romance[271], and at the very moment when Spenser was reviving romance as a conscious archaism, it was still possible for a blind fiddler with a ballad to offend the irritable susceptibilities of a Puritan, or to touch the sensitive heart-strings of a Sidney[272]. But as a social and literary force, the glory of minstrelsy had departed[273].

CHAPTER IV
THE MINSTREL REPERTORY

The floor of a mediaeval court, thronged with minstrels of every degree, provided at least as various an entertainment as the Roman stage itself[274]. The performances of the mimes, to the accompaniment of their despised tabor or wry-necked fife, undoubtedly made up in versatility for what they lacked in decorum. There were the tombeors, tombesteres or tumbleres, acrobats and contortionists, who twisted themselves into incredible attitudes, leapt through hoops, turned somersaults, walked on their heads, balanced themselves in perilous positions. Female tumblers, tornatrices, took part in these feats, and several districts had their own characteristic modes of tumbling, such as le tour français, le tour romain, le tour de Champenois[275]. Amongst the tombeors must be reckoned the rarer funambuli or rope-walkers, such as he whom the Corvei annals record to have met with a sorry accident in the twelfth century[276], or he who created such a furore in the thirteenth by his aerial descent from the cathedral at Basle[277]. Nor are they very distinct from the crowd of dancers, male and female, who are variously designated as saltatores and saltatrices, ‘sautours,’ ‘sailyours,’ ‘hoppesteres.’ Indeed, in many mediaeval miniatures, the daughter of Herodias, dancing before Herod, is represented rather as tumbling or standing on her head than in any more subtle pose[278]. A second group includes the jugglers in the narrower sense, the jouers des costeax who tossed and caught knives and balls[279], and the practitioners of sleight of hand, who generally claimed to proceed by nigremance or sorcery[280]. The two seem to have shared the names of prestigiatores or tregetours[281]. Other mimes, the bastaxi, or jouers des basteax, brought round, like the Punch and Judy men of our own day, little wooden performing puppets or marionettes[282]. Others, to whom Thomas de Cabham more particularly refers, came in masked as animals, and played the dog, the ass or the bird with appropriate noises and behaviour[283]. Others, again, led round real animals; generally bears or apes, occasionally also horses, cocks, hares, dogs, camels and even lions[284]. Sometimes these beasts did tricks; too often they were baited[285], and from time to time a man, lineal descendant of the imperial gladiators, would step forward to fight with them[286]. To the gladiatorial shows may perhaps also be traced the fight with wooden swords which often formed a part of the fun[287]. And, finally, whatever the staple of the performance, there was the parade or preliminary patter to call the audience together, and throughout the ‘carping,’ a continuous flow of rough witticism and repartee, such as one is accustomed to hear Joey, the clown, in the pauses of a circus, pass off on Mr. Harris, the ring-master[288]. Here came in the especial talents of the scurra, bordeor or japere, to whom the moralists took such marked exception. ‘L’uns fet l’ivre, l’autre le sot’ says the fabliau; and indeed we do not need the testimony of Thomas de Cabham or of John of Salisbury to conclude that such buffoonery was likely to be of a ribald type[289].

Even in the high places of minstrelsy there was some measure of variety. A glance at the pay-sheet of Edward I’s Whitsuntide feast will show that the minstrels who aspired to be musicians were habitually distinguished by the name of the musical instrument on which they played. They are vidulatores, citharistae, trumpatores, vilours, gigours, crouderes, harpours, citolers, lutours, trumpours, taboreurs and the like. The harp (cithara), played by twitching the strings, had been the old instrument of the Teutons, but in the Middle Ages it came second in popularity to the vielle (vidula), which was also a string instrument, but, like the modern fiddle, was played with a bow. The drum (tympanum, tabour) was, as we have seen, somewhat despised, and relegated to the mimes. The trumpeters appear less often singly than in twos and threes, and it is possible that their performances may have been mainly ceremonial and of a purely instrumental order. But the use of music otherwise than to accompany the voice does not seem to have gone, before the end of the thirteenth century, much beyond the signals, flourishes and fanfares required for wars, triumphs and processions. Concerted instrumental music was a later development[290]. The ordinary function of the harp or vielle in minstrelsy was to assist the voice of the minstrel in one of the many forms of poetry which the middle ages knew. These were both lyric and narrative. The distinction is roughly parallel to that made by Thomas de Cabham when he subdivides his highest grades of minstrels into those who sing wanton songs at taverns, and those more properly called ioculatores who solace the hearts of men with reciting the deeds of the heroes and the lives of the saints. The themes of mediaeval lyric, as of all lyric, are largely wantonness and wine; but it must be borne in mind that Thomas de Cabham’s classification is primarily an ethical one, and does not necessarily imply any marked difference of professional status between the two classes. The haunters of taverns and the solacers of the virtuous were after all the same minstrels, or at least minstrels of the same order. That the chansons, in their innumerable varieties, caught up from folk-song, or devised by Provençal ingenuity, were largely in the mouths of the minstrels, may be taken for granted. It was here, however, that the competition of trobaire and trouvère began earliest, and proved most triumphant, and the supreme minstrel genre was undoubtedly the narrative. This was, in a sense, their creation, and in it they held their own, until the laity learned to read and the trouvères became able to eke out the shortness of their memories by writing down or printing their stories. With narrative, no doubt, the minstrels of highest repute mainly occupied themselves. Harp or vielle in hand they beguiled many a long hour for knight and châtelaine with the interminable chansons de gestes in honour of Charlemagne and his heroic band[291], or, when the vogue of these waned, as in time it did, with the less primitive romans d’aventure, of which those that clustered round the Keltic Arthur were the widest famed. Even so their repertory was not exhausted. They had lais, dits and contes of every kind; the devout contes that Thomas de Cabham loved, historical contes, romantic contes of less alarming proportions than the genuine romans. And for the bourgeoisie they had those improper, witty fabliaux, so racy of the French soil, in which the esprit gaulois, as we know it, found its first and not its least characteristic expression. In most of these types the music of the instrument bore its part. The shorter lais were often accompanied musically throughout[292]. The longer poems were delivered in a chant or recitative, the monotony of which was broken at intervals by a phrase or two of intercalated melody, while during the rest of the performance a few perfunctory notes served to sustain the voice[293]. And at times, especially in the later days of minstrelsy, the harp or vielle was laid aside altogether, and the singer became a mere story-teller. The antithesis, no infrequent one, between minstrel, and fabulator, narrator, fableor, conteor, estour, disour, segger, though all these are themselves elsewhere classed as minstrels, sufficiently suggests this[294]. It was principally, one may surmise, the dits and fabliaux that lent themselves to unmusical narration; and when prose crept in, as in time it did, even before reading became universal, it can hardly have been sung. An interesting example is afforded by Aucassin et Nicolete, which is what is known as a cantefable. That is to say, it is written in alternate sections of verse and prose. The former have, in the Paris manuscript, a musical accompaniment, and are introduced with the words ‘Or se cante’; the latter have no music, and the introduction ‘Or content et dient et fablent.’

A further differentiation amongst minstrels was of linguistic origin. This was especially apparent in England. The mime is essentially cosmopolitan. In whatever land he finds himself the few sentences of patter needful to introduce his tour or his nigremance are readily picked up. It is not so with any entertainer whose performances claim to rank, however humbly, as literature. And the Conquest in England brought into existence a class of minstrels who, though they were by no means mimes, were yet obliged to compete with mimes, making their appeal solely to the bourgeoisie and the peasants, because their speech was not that of the Anglo-Norman lords and ladies who formed the more profitable audiences of the castles. The native English gleemen were eclipsed at courts by the Taillefers and Raheres of the invading host. But they still held the road side by side with their rivals, shorn of their dignities, and winning a precarious livelihood from the shrunken purses of those of their own blood and tongue[295]. It was they who sang the unavailing heroisms of Hereward, and, if we may judge by the scanty fragments and records that have come down to us, they remained for long the natural focus and mouthpiece of popular discontent and anti-court sentiment. In the reign of Edward III a gleeman of this type, Laurence Minot, comes to the front, voicing the spirit of an England united in its nationalism by the war against France; the rest are, for the most part, nameless[296]. Naturally the English gleemen did not remain for ever a proscribed and isolated folk. One may suspect that at the outset many of them became bilingual. At any rate they learnt to mingle with their Anglo-Norman confrères: they borrowed the themes of continental minstrelsy; translating roman, fabliau and chanson into the metres and dialects of the vernacular; and had their share in that gradual fusion of the racial elements of the land, whose completion was the preparation for Chaucer.

Besides the Saxons, there were the Kelts. In the provinces of France that bordered on Armorica, in the English counties that marched with Wales, the Keltic harper is no unusual or negligible figure. Whether such minstrels ranked very high in the bardic hierarchy of their own peoples may be doubted; but amid alien folk they achieved popularity[297]. Both Giraldus Cambrensis and Thomas the author of Tristan speak of a certain famosus fabulator of this class, Bledhericus or Breri by name[298]. Through Breri and his like the Keltic traditions filtered into Romance literature, and an important body of scholars are prepared to find in lais sung to a Welsh or Breton harp the origines of Arthurian romance[299]. In England the Welsh, like the English-speaking minstrels, had a political, as well as a literary significance. They were the means by which the spirit of Welsh disaffection under English rule was kept alive, and at times fanned into a blaze. The fable of the massacre of the bards by Edward I is now discredited, but an ordinance of his against Keltic ‘bards and rhymers’ is upon record, and was subsequently repeated under Henry IV[300].

An important question now presents itself. How far, in this heterogeneous welter of mediaeval minstrelsy, is it possible to distinguish any elements which can properly be called dramatic? The minstrels were entertainers in many genres. Were they also actors? An answer may be sought first of all in their literary remains. The first condition of drama is dialogue, and dialogue is found both in lyric and in narrative minstrelsy. Naturally, it is scantiest in lyric. But there is a group of chansons common to northern France and to southern France or Provence, which at least tended to develop in this direction. There are the chansons à danser, which are frequently a semi-dialogue between a soloist and a chorus, the one singing the verses, the other breaking into a burden or refrain. There are the chansons à personnages or chansons de mal mariée, complaints of unhappy wives, which often take the form of a dialogue between the woman and her husband, her friend or, it may be, the poet, occasionally that of a discussion on courtly love in general. There are the aubes, of which the type is the morning dialogue between woman and lover adapted by Shakespeare with such splendid effect in the third act of Romeo and Juliet. And finally there are the pastourelles, which are generally dialogues between a knight and a shepherdess, in which the knight makes love and, successful or repulsed, rides away. All these chansons, like the chansons d’histoire or de toile, which did not develop into dialogues, are, in the form in which we have them, of minstrel origin. But behind them are probably folk-songs of similar character, and M. Gaston Paris is perhaps right in tracing them to the fêtes du mai, those agricultural festivals of immemorial antiquity in which women traditionally took so large a part. A further word will have to be said of their ultimate contribution to drama in a future chapter[301].

Other lyrical dialogues of very different type found their way into the literature of northern France from that of Provence. These were the elaborate disputes about abstract questions, generally of love, so dear to the artistic and scholastic mind of the trobaire. There was the tenson (Fr. tençon) in which two speakers freely discussed a given subject, each taking the point of view which seems good to him. And there was the joc-partitz or partimen (Fr. jeu-parti or parture), in which the challenger proposed a theme, indicated two opposed attitudes towards it, and gave his opponent his choice to maintain one or other[302]. Originally, no doubt the tensons and the jocs-partitz were, as they professed to be, improvised verbal tournaments: afterwards they became little more than academic exercises[303]. To the drama they have nothing to say.

The dialogue elements in lyric minstrelsy thus exhausted, we turn to the wider field of narrative. But over the greater space of this field we look in vain. If there is anything of dialogue in the chansons de gestes and the romans it is merely reported dialogue such as every form of narrative poetry contains, and is not to the purpose. It is not until we come to the humbler branches of narrative, the unimportant contes and dits, that we find ourselves in the presence of dialogue proper. Dits and fabliaux dialogués are not rare[304]. There is the already quoted Deus Bordeors Ribauz in which two jougleurs meet and vaunt in turn their rival proficiencies in the various branches of their common art[305]. There is Rutebeuf’s Charlot et le Barbier, a similar ‘flyting’ between two gentlemen of the road[306]. There is Courtois d’Arras, a version of the Prodigal Son story[307]. There is Le Roi d’Angleterre et le Jongleur d’Ely, a specimen of witty minstrel repartee, of which more will be said immediately. These dialogues naturally tend to become of the nature of disputes, and they merge into that special kind of dit, the débat or disputoison proper. The débat is a kind of poetical controversy put into the mouths of two types or two personified abstractions, each of which pleads the cause of its own superiority, while in the end the decision is not infrequently referred to an umpire in the fashion familiar in the eclogues of Theocritus[308]. The débats thus bear a strong resemblance to the lyric tençons and jeux-partis already mentioned. Like the chansons, they probably owe something to the folk festivals with their ‘flytings’ and seasonal songs. In any case they are common ground to minstrelsy and to the clerkly literature of the Middle Ages. Many of the most famous of them, such as the Débat de l’Hiver et de l’Été, the Débat du Vin et de l’Eau, the Débat du Corps et de l’Âme, exist in neo-Latin forms, the intermediaries being naturally enough those vagantes or wandering scholars, to whom so much of the interaction of learned and of popular literature must be due[309]. And in their turn many of the débats were translated sooner or later into English. English literature, indeed, had had from Anglo-Saxon days a natural affinity for the dialogue form[310], and presents side by side with the translated débats others—strifs or estrifs is the English term—of native origin[311]. The thirteenth-century Harrowing of Hell is an estrif on a subject familiar in the miracle plays: and for an early miracle play it has sometimes been mistaken[312]. Two or three other estrifs of English origin are remarkable, because the interlocutors are not exactly abstractions, but species of birds and animals[313].

Dialogue then, in one shape or another, was part of the minstrel’s regular stock-in-trade. But dialogue by itself is not drama. The notion of drama does not, perhaps, necessarily imply scenery on a regular stage, but it does imply impersonation and a distribution of rôles between at least two performers. Is there anything to be traced in minstrelsy that satisfies these conditions? So far as impersonation is concerned, there are several scattered notices which seem to show that it was not altogether unknown. In the twelfth century for instance, Ælred, abbot of Rievaulx, commenting on certain unpleasing innovations in the church services of the day, complains that the singers use gestures just like those of histriones, fit rather for a theatrum than for a house of prayer[314]. The word theatrum is, however, a little suspicious, for an actual theatre in the twelfth century is hardly thinkable, and with a learned ecclesiastic one can never be sure that he is not drawing his illustrations rather from his knowledge of classical literature than from the real life around him. It is more conclusive, perhaps, when fabliaux or contes speak of minstrels as ‘doing’ l’ivre, or le cat, or le sot[315]; or when it appears from contemporary accounts that at a performance in Savoy the manners of England and Brittany were mimicked[316]. In Provence contrafazedor seems to have been a regular name for a minstrel[317]; and the facts that the minstrels wore masks ‘with intent to deceive’[318], and were forbidden to wear ecclesiastical dresses[319], also point to something in the way of rudimentary impersonation.

As for the distribution of rôles, all that can be said, so far as the débats and dits dialogués go, is, that while some of them may conceivably have been represented by more than one performer, none of them need necessarily have been so, and some of them certainly were not. There is generally a narrative introduction and often a sprinkling of narrative interspersed amongst the dialogue. These parts may have been pronounced by an auctor or by one of the interlocutors acting as auctor, and some such device must have been occasionally necessitated in the religious drama. But there is really no difficulty in supposing the whole of these pieces to have been recited by a single minstrel with appropriate changes of gesture and intonation, and in The Harrowing of Hell, which begins ‘A strif will I tellen of,’ this was clearly the case. The evidences of impersonation given above are of course quite consistent with such an arrangement; or, for the matter of that, with sheer monologue. The minstrel who recited Rutebeuf’s Dit de l’Erberie may readily be supposed to have got himself up in the character of a quack[320].

But the possibilities of secular mediaeval drama are not quite exhausted by the débats and dits dialogués. For after all, the written literature which the minstrels have left us belongs almost entirely to those higher strata of their complex fraternity which derived from the thoroughly undramatic Teutonic scôp. But if mediaeval farce there were, it would not be here that we should look for it. It would belong to the inheritance, not of the scôp, but of the mimus. The Roman mimus was essentially a player of farces; that and little else. It is of course open to any one to suppose that the mimus went down in the seventh century playing farces, and that his like appeared in the fifteenth century playing farces, and that not a farce was played between. But is it not more probable on the whole that, while occupying himself largely with other matters, he preserved at least the rudiments of the art of acting, and that when the appointed time came, the despised and forgotten farce, under the stimulus of new conditions, blossomed forth once more as a vital and effective form of literature? In the absence of data we are reduced to conjecture. But the mere absence of data itself does not render the conjecture untenable. For if such rudimentary, or, if you please, degenerate farces as I have in mind, ever existed in the Middle Ages, the chances were all against their literary survival. They were assuredly very brief, very crude, often improvised, and rarely, if ever, written down. They belonged to an order of minstrels far below that which made literature[321]. And one little bit of evidence which has not yet been brought forward seems to point to the existence of something in the way of a secular as well as a religious mediaeval drama. In the well-known Wyclifite sermon against miracle plays, an imaginary opponent of the preacher’s argument is made to say that after all it is ‘lesse yvels that thei have thyre recreaceon by pleyinge of myraclis than bi pleyinge of other japis’; and again that ‘to pley in rebaudye’ is worse than ‘to pley in myriclis[322].’ Now, there is of course no necessary dramatic connotation either in the word ‘pley’ or in the word ‘japis,’ which, like ‘bourde’ or ‘gab’ is frequently used of any kind of rowdy merriment, or of the lower types of minstrelsy in general[323]. But on the other hand the whole tone of the passage seems to draw a very close parallel between the ‘japis’ and the undeniably dramatic ‘myriclis,’ and to imply something in the former a little beyond the mere recitation, even with the help of impersonation, of a solitary mime.

Such rude farces or ‘japis’ as we are considering, if they formed part of the travelling equipment of the humbler mimes, could only get into literature by an accident; in the event, that is to say, of some minstrel of a higher class taking it into his head to experiment in the form or to adapt it to the purposes of his own art. And this is precisely what appears to have happened. A very natural use of the farce would be in the parade or preliminary patter, merely about himself and his proficiency, which at all times has served the itinerant entertainer as a means whereby to attract his audiences. And just as the very similar boniment or patter of the mountebank charlatan at a fair became the model for Rutebeuf’s Dit de l’Erberie, so the parade may be traced as the underlying motive of other dits or fabliaux. The Deus Bordeors Ribauz is itself little other than a glorified parade, and another, very slightly disguised, may be found in the discomfiture of the king by the characteristic repartees of the wandering minstrel in Le Roi d’Angleterre et le Jougleur d’Ely[324]. The parade, also, seems to be the origin of a certain familiar type of dramatic prologue in which the author or the presenters of a play appear in their own persons. The earliest example of this is perhaps that enigmatic Terentius et Delusor piece which some have thought to point to a representation of Terence somewhere in the dark ages between the seventh and the eleventh century[325]. And there is a later one in the Jeu du Pèlerin which was written about 1288 to precede Adan de la Hale’s Jeu de Robin et Marion.

The renascence of farce in the fifteenth century will call for consideration in a later chapter. It is possible that, as is here suggested, that renascence was but the coming to light again of an earth-bourne of dramatic tradition that had worked its way beneath the ground ever since the theatres of the Empire fell. In any case, rare documents of earlier date survive to show that it was at least no absolutely sudden and unprecedented thing. The jeux of Adan de la Hale, indeed, are somewhat irrelevant here. They were not farces, and will fall to be dealt with in the discussion of the popular fêtes from which they derive their origin[326]. But the French farce of Le Garçon et l’Aveugle, ascribed to the second half of the thirteenth century, is over a hundred years older than any of its extant successors[327]. And even more interesting to us, because it is of English provenance and in the English tongue, is a fragment found in an early fourteenth-century manuscript of a dramatic version of the popular mediaeval tale of Dame Siriz[328]. This bears the heading Hic incipit interludium de Clerico et Puella. But the significance of this fateful word interludium must be left for study at a later period, when the history of the secular drama is resumed from the point at which it must now be dropped.