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].