III
We have had occasion to mention the vagrant musicians, that singular adjunct to Middle-Age society, which appeared in every country of Central Europe, in Germany as Fahrender, in France as fableor or contraire and later as jongleur or ménétrier, in England as minstrel. Gustav Freytag has speculatively traced their origin back to the Roman gladiators, actors, and performers mentioned above, a despised race, who were, like their supposed posterity, beyond the pale of the law. When the Germanic hordes swept away the degenerate opulence of Rome, this class may well be supposed to have scattered among the barbarian conquerors. As once in the arena, they now stood before the huts of Frankish chieftains, performing their tricks and piping strange tunes. To the populace of the Middle Ages they were welcome guests, for they provided the one means of artistic entertainment outside the church.
In Germany the fahrende Sänger or Spielmann, whether a native who had travelled in many lands or a singer of foreign birth, was sure to find his way into the remotest huts of the countryside. He brought with him new tunes and took with him those that he heard at the fireside that had given him hospitality. In this way the stock of tunes handed down from father to son and from mother to daughter was in every generation enlarged by acquisitions from without. The minstrel was the medium of musical exchange between the town and the country, between the several provinces and between different nations. He was the middleman and the teacher, through whom echoes of the songs of Norse skalds, Welsh and Irish bards, and French and Provençal singers reached the German people and vice versa. He was especially popular in England, where numerous instances are quoted of minstrels appearing at royal weddings and other great functions, not only individually but in large numbers, and being so richly rewarded for their services that the church complained because they were better paid than priests. Individual German sovereigns also seem to have appreciated their skill and distinguished them by marks of favor. In 1355 Emperor Charles IV appointed one Johann der Fiedler ‘rex omnium histriorum’ for the archbishopric of Mayence, and thirty years later another minstrel, the piper Brachte, bore the official title Künig der farenden Lüte (King of the wayfarers).
In France, too, the vagrant appears as the original type of popular singer. He ran from one end of the land to the other. Received and even invited by the great lords he went from castle to castle, his head filled with songs, or his pockets with parchments—if, indeed, he could read. Perchance he would stop in the common of some village, play a few stray arpeggios on his viol, and, having collected an enthusiastic audience, sing a complainte, the adventures of a favorite hero, or perhaps recount the story of a celebrated crime, embellished with horrifying details. Again he might sing a love romance, or even a scriptural légende—the ‘Prodigal Son’ or some other parable, the life of a saint, or the Passion of our Lord.
With the growth of the cities and the development of the middle class the wandering minstrel lost popularity in Germany, even among the people. His itinerant life bred a disregard of social customs and conventions which caused no little concern among the respectable burghers of larger communities, and both the Sachsenspiegel and the Schwabenspiegel, chronicles of the thirteenth century, record the fact that minstrels were outside the social pale and even excluded from membership in the church. Yet these same outcasts of the church, excluded from its sacraments, would gather the faithful in the cathedral square and, exciting the people’s fancy with sacred legends and miracles, would, as it were, become the self-appointed allies of the clergy. But at last, in uncompromising opposition to them, the resident musicians of the towns associated themselves in the manner of guilds and monopolized the privilege of furnishing music for public functions, being employed and paid by the city councils. The earliest musicians’ guild of this kind was the Nikolaibrüderschaft (Brotherhood of St. Nicholas), organized in Vienna in 1288. Its management was entrusted to a high official, the Musikantenvogt, later Oberspielgraf, who represented the highest tribunal in matters of music. The policy of these musicians’ guilds was similar to that of musicians’ unions of the present day. In a district covered by the guilds only persons enrolled as paying members were allowed to play or sing for money.
It was different in France. Here the jongleur, by virtue of special circumstances, became a privileged character and enjoyed the continued patronage of the aristocracy, for he was an all-important factor in the musicianship of chivalry, which we shall presently discuss.
We have left out of our consideration of folk music so far that all-important element of modern song, the mainspring of lyricism—romantic love. In an age when man’s entire spiritual life was dictated by religious dogma, his natural instincts, branded as profane and unworthy, were naturally excluded from the objects of his poetic expression. ‘But the church could not completely triumph over Nature. The fundamental human sentiments—above all, profane love—after having for more than ten centuries been excluded from the expression which musical science might have vouchsafed to them, now seemed to take their revenge, to free themselves from long subjection, to let voices hitherto condemned to silence be heard at last. By the side of the altars where psalms were sung, where the things of the world were condemned, the free and subtle stories of exalted love arose, like irresistible protests of the human heart. The cult of the ideal woman, the mother of the Saviour, the Virgin immaculate, continued; but beside it was heard the praise of the woman of France [of Germany, of Italy]; the subject of another sort of devotion, as exalted and often as pure. The chivalrous qualities of the race, disciplined and refined by Christian dogma, but rebelling against asceticism, reappeared and reclaimed their rights with a new vivacity.’[75] This new spirit pervaded all classes of society. The nobility, especially, now affected a finer, more spiritual manner of life. Christian metaphysics, superior education, and the advanced social position of women were the things which prepared the way for chivalry, that new moral code propagated by formal orders of knighthood. The Crusades and contact with Eastern culture confirmed its establishment.
Mediæval French Sculpture showing Trouvères
and Jongleurs with Instruments.
With this first renaissance of the modern spirit came also the awakening of a new appreciation of the beauties of Nature. Man began to notice the first flowers, the song of birds, the signs of spring’s awakening. This gave rise to a species of popular song known as the pastoral—pastourelle—which was afterward adopted and cultivated by the Troubadours, who subjected it to certain rules, respecting the sequence of different lengths of verses, etc. Besides the pastourelle, numerous other forms of love songs (we need only mention the serenades peculiar to the south—the Basque country and Corsica especially) are of truly popular origin.
It may not be out of place here to quote the charming love romance in narrative form entitled Aucassin et Nicolette, dating from the beginning of the thirteenth century, which had an undoubted influence upon the music of chivalry both in France and in Germany. It comprises twenty-one vocal pieces interspersed with twenty prose sections, which are to be read, not sung, as the superscription Or se dient et content et flabloient indicates, in distinction from the Or se cante of the verse sections. The verse also forms part of the narrative, with the exception of Aucassin’s song to the evening star, which is purely lyric but of the same musical treatment as the epic songs of the piece:
![[PNG]](#5641759967176005169_.png.id-1538244686884271732.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
1. E-stoi-le-te je te voi
![[PNG]](#2189264214098753271_.png.id-3099030938640881625.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
2. Que la lu-ne trait a soi
(and twelve more verses)
![[PNG]](#5888272354090838135_.png.id-7781864184824513602.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
15. Suer douce a-mi-e.
The second musical line here serves for thirteen successive text lines with continuous rhyme—another example of this most ancient method of cantilation.
We must now pass on to the development of the love song, which seems to have been the special task of a gifted and celebrated race of knighthood, the glorious post-musicians called Troubadours and Trouvères in France, and Minnesinger in Germany.