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