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.