Estre nés, vivre purement.’
These three writers belong to the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century.
[254] A. Jubinal, Jongleurs et Trouvères, 165. Cf. Gautier, ii. 78; Bédier, 418.
[255] F. Diaz, Poesie der Troubadours (ed. Bartsch), 63; K. Bartsch, Grundriss der provenzalischen Literatur, 25; F. Hueffer, The Troubadours, 63. Diaz, op. cit. 297, prints the documents.
[256] There is nothing to show that Scilling, the companion of Widsith (Widsith, 104), was of an inferior grade.
[257] Hueffer, 52; G. Paris, 182: A. Stimming in Grober’s Grundriss, ii. 2. 15; Gautier, ii. 45, 58. The commonest of phrases in troubadour biography is ‘cantet et trobet.’ The term trobador is properly the accusative case of trobaire.
[258] Petrarch, Epist. Rerum Senil. n. 3 ‘sunt homines non magni ingenii, magnae vero memoriae, magnaeque diligentiae, sed maioris audaciae, qui regum ac potentum aulas frequentant, de proprio nudi, vestiti autem carminibus alienis, dumque quid ab hoc, aut ab illo exquisitius materno praesertim charactere dictum sit, ingenti expressione pronunciant, gratiam sibi nobilium, et pecunias quaerunt, et vestes et munera.’ Fulke of Marseilles, afterwards bishop of Toulouse, wrote songs in his youth. He became an austere Cistercian; but the songs had got abroad, and whenever he heard one of them sung by a joglar, he would eat only bread and water (Sermo of Robert de Sorbonne in Hauréau, Man. Fr. xxiv. 2. 286).
[259] In the first edition of his Reliques (1765), Percy gave the mediaeval minstrel as high a status as the Norse scald or Anglo-Saxon scôp. This led to an acrid criticism by Ritson who, in his essay On the ancient English Minstrels in Ancient Songs and Ballads (1829), easily showed the low repute in which many minstrels were held. See also his elaborate Dissertation on Romance and Minstrelsy in his Ancient English Metrical Romances (1802). The truth really lay between the two, for neither appreciated the wide variety covered by a common name. On the controversy, cf. Minto in Enc. Brit. s. v. Minstrels, Courthope, i. 426-31, and H. B. Wheatley’s Introduction to his edition of Percy’s Reliques, xiii-xv. Percy in his later editions profited largely by Ritson’s criticism; a careful collation of these is given in Schroer’s edition (1889).
[260] Magnin, Journal des Savants (1846), 545.
[261] Lambertus Ardensis, Chronicon, c. 81 (ed. Godefroy Menilglaise, 175) ‘quid plura? tot et tantorum ditatus est copia librorum ut Augustinum in theologia, Areopagitam Dionysium in philosophia, Milesium fabularium in naeniis gentium, in cantilenis gestoriis, sive in eventuris nobilium, sive etiam in fabellis ignobilium, ioculatores quosque nominatissimos aequiparare putaretur.’