Non curamus quid sit humus[250].’
And especially they were satirists, satirists mainly of the hypocrisy, cupidity and evil living of those in the high places of the Church, for whom they conceived a grotesque expression in Bishop Golias, a type of materialistic prelate, in whose name they wrote and whose pueri or discipuli they declared themselves to be[251]. Goliardi, goliardenses, their reputation in the eyes of the ecclesiastical authorities was of the worst, and their ill practices are coupled with those of the minstrels in many a condemnatory decree[252].
It is not with the goliardi then, that Thomas de Cabham’s relaxation of the strict ecclesiastical rigours is concerned. Neither is it, naturally enough, with the lower minstrels of the mimus tradition. Towards these Thomas de Cabham, like his predecessors, is inexorable. And even of the higher minstrels the musicians and singers, his toleration has its limits. He discriminates. In a sense, a social and professional sense, all these higher minstrels fall into the same class. But from the ethical point of view there is a very marked distinction amongst them. Some there are who haunt taverns and merry-makings with loose songs of love and dalliance. These it is not to be expected that the holy mother Church should in any way countenance. Her toleration must be reserved for those more reputable performers who find material for their verse either in the life and conversation of the saints and martyrs themselves, or at least in the noble and inspiring deeds of national heroes and champions. Legends of the saints and gests of princes: if the minstrels will confine themselves to the celebration of these, then, secure in the pronouncement of a pope, they may claim a hearing even from the devout. It would be rash to assert that even the comparatively liberal theory of Thomas de Cabham certainly justified in all cases the practice of the monasteries. But it is at least noteworthy that in several instances where the subjects of the minstrelsy presented for the delectation of a cowled audience remain upon record, they do fall precisely within the twofold definition which he lays down. At Winchester in 1338 the minstrel Herbert sang the song of Colbrond (or Guy of Warwick), and the gest of the miraculous deliverance of Queen Emma; while at Bicester in 1432 it was the legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus that made the Epiphany entertainment of the assembled canons.
If now we set aside the very special class of ribald galiardi, and if we set aside also the distinction drawn by Thomas de Cabham on purely ethical grounds between the minstrels of the love-songs and the minstrels of saintly or heroic gest, the net result is the twofold classification of higher and lower minstrels already familiar to us. Roughly—it must always be borne in mind how roughly—it corresponds on the one hand to the difference between the Teutonic and the Roman tradition, on the other to the distinction between the established ‘minstrel of honour’ and his unattached rival of the road. And there is abundant evidence that such a distinction was generally present, and occasionally became acute, in the consciousness of the minstrels themselves. The aristocrats of minstrelsy, a Baudouin or a Jean de Condé, or a Watriquet de Couvin, have very exalted ideas as to the dignity of their profession. They will not let you, if they can help it, put the grans menestreus on the same level with every-day jangleur of poor attainments and still poorer repute[253]. In the Dit des Taboureurs again it is a whole class, the joueurs de vielle, who arise to vindicate their dignity and to pour scorn upon the humble and uninstructed drummers[254]. But the most instructive and curious evidence comes from Provence. It was in 1273, when the amazing growth of Provençal poetry was approaching its sudden decay, that the last of the great troubadours, Guiraut de Riquier, addressed a verse Supplicatio to Alphonso X of Castile on the state of minstrelsy. He points out the confusion caused by the indiscriminate grouping of poets, singers, and entertainers of all degrees under the title of joglars, and begs the king, as high patron of letters, to take order for it. A reply from Alphonso, also in verse, and also, one may suspect, due to the fertile pen of Guiraut Riquier, is extant. Herein he establishes or confirms a fourfold hierarchy. At the head come two classes, the doctors de trobar and the trobaires, who are composers, the former of didactic, the latter of ordinary songs and melodies. Beneath these are the joglars proper, instrumentalists and reciters of delightful stories, and beneath these again the bufos, the entertainers of common folk, who have really no claim to be considered as joglars at all[255]. One of the distinctions here made is new to us. The difference between doctor de trobar and trobaire is perhaps negligible. But that between the trobaire or composer and the joglar or executant of poetry, is an important one. It is not, however, so far as the Teutonic element in minstrelsy goes, primitive. The scôpas and the French or Anglo-Norman ioculatores up to the twelfth century composed their verses as a class, and sang them as well[256]. In Provence, however, the Teutonic element in minstrelsy must have been of the slightest, and perhaps the Roman tradition, illustrated by the story of Laberius, of a marked barrier between composing and executing, had vaguely lingered. At any rate it is in Provence, in the eleventh century, that the distinction between trobaire and joglar makes its appearance. It never became a very complete one. The trobaire was generally, not always, of gentle or burgess birth; sometimes actually a king or noble. In the latter case he contented himself with writing his songs, and let the joglars spread them abroad. But the bulk of the trobaires lived by their art. They wandered from castle to castle, alone with a vielle, or with joglars in their train, and although they mingled with their hosts on fairly equal terms, they did not disdain to take their rewards of horse or mantle or jewel, just like any common performer. Moreover, they confined themselves to lyric poetry, leaving the writing of epic, so far as epic was abroad in Provence, to the joglars[257]. From Provence, the trobaire spread to other countries, reappearing in the north of France and England as the trouvère. We seem to trace an early trouvère in Lucas de Barre in the time of Henry I. But it is Eleanor of Poitiers, daughter of the trobaire count William of Poitiers, and mother of the trouvère Richard Cœur de Lion, who appears as the chief intermediary between north and south. The intrusion of the trouvère was the first step in the degradation of minstrelsy. Amongst the Anglo-Saxons, even apart from the cantilenae of the folk, the professional singer had no monopoly of song. Hrothgar and Alfred harped with their scôpas. But if there had been a similar tendency amongst the continental Teutons who merged in the French and Norman-French, it had been checked by the complete absorption of all literary energies, outside the minstrel class, in neo-Latin. It was not until the twelfth century, and as has been said, under Provençal influence, that secular-minded clerks, and exceptionally educated nobles, merchants, or officials, began to devote themselves to the vernacular, and by so doing to develop the trouvère type. The trouvère had the advantage of the minstrel in learning and independence, if not in leisure; and though the latter long held his own by the side of his rival, he was fated in the end to give way, and to content himself with the humbler task of spreading abroad what the trouvère wrote[258]. By the second quarter of the fourteenth century, the conquest of literature by the bourgeoisie was complete. The interest had shifted from the minstrel on the hall floor to the burgher or clerk in the puy; the prize of a successful poem was no longer a royal mantle, but a laureate crown or the golden violet of the jeux floraux; and its destiny less to be recited at the banquet, than read in the bower. In England the completion of the process perhaps came a little later, and was coincident with the triumph of English, the tongue of the bourgeois, over French, the tongue of the noble. The full flower of minstrelsy had been the out-at-elbows vagabond, Rutebeuf. The full flower of the trouvère is the comptroller of the customs and subsidies of the port of London, Geoffrey Chaucer.
The first distinction, then, made by Guiraut Riquier, that between trobaire and joglar, implies a development from within minstrelsy itself that was destined one day to overwhelm it. But the second, that between the joglar and the bufo, is precisely the one already familiar to us, between the minstrels of the scôp and the minstrels of the mimus tradition. And, as has been said, it is partly, if not entirely, identical with that which grew up in course of time between the protected minstrels of the court and of great men’s houses, and their vagrant brethren of the road. This general antithesis between the higher and lower mintrelsy may now, perhaps, be regarded as established. It was the neglect of it, surely, that led to that curious and barren logomachy between Percy and Ritson, in which neither of the disputants can be said to have had hold of more than a bare half of the truth[259]. And it runs through the whole history of minstrelsy. It became acute, no doubt, with the growth in importance of the minstrels of honour in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But it had probably been just as acute, if not more so, at the very beginning of things, when the clash of Teutonic and Roman civilization first brought the bard face to face with the serious rivalry of the mime. Bard and mime merged without ever becoming quite identical; and even at the moment when this process was most nearly complete, say in the eleventh century, the jouglerie seigneuriale, to use Magnin’s happy terms, was never quite the same thing as the jouglerie foraine et populaire[260], least of all in a country like England where differences of tongue went to perpetuate and emphasize the breach.
Nevertheless, the antithesis may easily be pushed too far. After all, the minstrels were entertainers, and therefore their business was to entertain. Did the lord yawn over a gest or a saintly legend? the discreet minstrel would be well advised to drop high art, and to substitute some less exacting, even if less refined fashion of passing the time. The instincts of boor and baron were not then, of course, so far apart as they are nowadays. And as a matter of fact we find many of the most eminent minstrels boasting of the width and variety of their accomplishments. Thus of Baudouin II, count of Guisnes (1169-1206), it is recorded that he might have matched the most celebrated professionals, not only in chansons de gestes and romans d’aventure but also in the fabliaux which formed the delight of the vulgar bourgeoisie[261]. Less aristocratic performers descended even lower than Baudouin de Guisnes. If we study the répertoires of such jougleurs as the diabolic one in Gautier de Coincy’s miracle[262], or Daurel in the romance of Daurel et Beton[263], or the disputants who vaunt their respective proficiencies in Des Deus Bordeors Ribauz[264], we shall find that they cover not only every conceivable form of minstrel literature proper, but also tricks with knives and strings, sleight of hand, dancing and tumbling. Even in Provence, the Enseignamens for joglars warn their readers to learn the arts of imitating birds, throwing knives, leaping through hoops, showing off performing asses and dogs, and dangling marionettes[265]. So that one discerns the difference between the lower and the higher minstrels to have been not so much that the one did not sink so low, as that the other, for lack of capacity and education, did not rise so high.
The palmy days of minstrelsy were the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The germ of decay, however, which appeared when the separation grew up between trouvère and jougleur, and when men began to read books instead of listening to recitations, was further developed by the invention of printing. For then, while the trouvère could adapt himself readily enough to the new order of things, the jougleur’s occupation was gone. Like Benedick he might still be talking, but nobody marked him. Eyes cast down over a page of Chaucer or of Caxton had no further glitter or tear for him to win[266]. The fifteenth, and still more the sixteenth century, witness the complete break-up of minstrelsy in its mediaeval form. The mimes of course endured. They survived the overthrow of mediaevalism, as they had survived the overthrow of the Empire[267]. The Tudor kings and nobles had still their jugglers, their bearwards, their domestic buffoons, jesters or fools[268]. Bearbaiting in Elizabethan London rivalled the drama in its vogue. Acrobats and miscellaneous entertainers never ceased to crowd to every fair, and there is applause even to-day in circus and music-hall for the old jests and the old somersaults that have already done duty for upwards of twenty centuries. But the jougleur as the thirteenth century knew him was by the sixteenth century no more. Professional musicians there were in plenty; ‘Sneak’s noise’ haunted the taverns of Eastcheap[269], and instrumentalists and vocalists in royal palaces and noble mansions still kept the name and style of minstrels. But they were not minstrels in the old sense, for with the production of literature, except perhaps for a song here and there, they had no longer anything to do. That had passed into other hands, and even the lineaments of the trouvère are barely recognizable in the new types of poets and men of letters whom the Renaissance produced. The old fashioned minstrel in his style and habit as he lived, was to be presented before Elizabeth at Kenilworth as an interesting anachronism[270]. Some of the discarded entertainers, as we shall see, were absorbed into the growing profession of stage-players; others sunk to be ballad singers. For to the illiterate the story-teller still continued to appeal. The ballad indeed, at least on one side of it, was the detritus, as the lai had been the germ, of romance[271], and at the very moment when Spenser was reviving romance as a conscious archaism, it was still possible for a blind fiddler with a ballad to offend the irritable susceptibilities of a Puritan, or to touch the sensitive heart-strings of a Sidney[272]. But as a social and literary force, the glory of minstrelsy had departed[273].
CHAPTER IV
THE MINSTREL REPERTORY
The floor of a mediaeval court, thronged with minstrels of every degree, provided at least as various an entertainment as the Roman stage itself[274]. The performances of the mimes, to the accompaniment of their despised tabor or wry-necked fife, undoubtedly made up in versatility for what they lacked in decorum. There were the tombeors, tombesteres or tumbleres, acrobats and contortionists, who twisted themselves into incredible attitudes, leapt through hoops, turned somersaults, walked on their heads, balanced themselves in perilous positions. Female tumblers, tornatrices, took part in these feats, and several districts had their own characteristic modes of tumbling, such as le tour français, le tour romain, le tour de Champenois[275]. Amongst the tombeors must be reckoned the rarer funambuli or rope-walkers, such as he whom the Corvei annals record to have met with a sorry accident in the twelfth century[276], or he who created such a furore in the thirteenth by his aerial descent from the cathedral at Basle[277]. Nor are they very distinct from the crowd of dancers, male and female, who are variously designated as saltatores and saltatrices, ‘sautours,’ ‘sailyours,’ ‘hoppesteres.’ Indeed, in many mediaeval miniatures, the daughter of Herodias, dancing before Herod, is represented rather as tumbling or standing on her head than in any more subtle pose[278]. A second group includes the jugglers in the narrower sense, the jouers des costeax who tossed and caught knives and balls[279], and the practitioners of sleight of hand, who generally claimed to proceed by nigremance or sorcery[280]. The two seem to have shared the names of prestigiatores or tregetours[281]. Other mimes, the bastaxi, or jouers des basteax, brought round, like the Punch and Judy men of our own day, little wooden performing puppets or marionettes[282]. Others, to whom Thomas de Cabham more particularly refers, came in masked as animals, and played the dog, the ass or the bird with appropriate noises and behaviour[283]. Others, again, led round real animals; generally bears or apes, occasionally also horses, cocks, hares, dogs, camels and even lions[284]. Sometimes these beasts did tricks; too often they were baited[285], and from time to time a man, lineal descendant of the imperial gladiators, would step forward to fight with them[286]. To the gladiatorial shows may perhaps also be traced the fight with wooden swords which often formed a part of the fun[287]. And, finally, whatever the staple of the performance, there was the parade or preliminary patter to call the audience together, and throughout the ‘carping,’ a continuous flow of rough witticism and repartee, such as one is accustomed to hear Joey, the clown, in the pauses of a circus, pass off on Mr. Harris, the ring-master[288]. Here came in the especial talents of the scurra, bordeor or japere, to whom the moralists took such marked exception. ‘L’uns fet l’ivre, l’autre le sot’ says the fabliau; and indeed we do not need the testimony of Thomas de Cabham or of John of Salisbury to conclude that such buffoonery was likely to be of a ribald type[289].
Even in the high places of minstrelsy there was some measure of variety. A glance at the pay-sheet of Edward I’s Whitsuntide feast will show that the minstrels who aspired to be musicians were habitually distinguished by the name of the musical instrument on which they played. They are vidulatores, citharistae, trumpatores, vilours, gigours, crouderes, harpours, citolers, lutours, trumpours, taboreurs and the like. The harp (cithara), played by twitching the strings, had been the old instrument of the Teutons, but in the Middle Ages it came second in popularity to the vielle (vidula), which was also a string instrument, but, like the modern fiddle, was played with a bow. The drum (tympanum, tabour) was, as we have seen, somewhat despised, and relegated to the mimes. The trumpeters appear less often singly than in twos and threes, and it is possible that their performances may have been mainly ceremonial and of a purely instrumental order. But the use of music otherwise than to accompany the voice does not seem to have gone, before the end of the thirteenth century, much beyond the signals, flourishes and fanfares required for wars, triumphs and processions. Concerted instrumental music was a later development[290]. The ordinary function of the harp or vielle in minstrelsy was to assist the voice of the minstrel in one of the many forms of poetry which the middle ages knew. These were both lyric and narrative. The distinction is roughly parallel to that made by Thomas de Cabham when he subdivides his highest grades of minstrels into those who sing wanton songs at taverns, and those more properly called ioculatores who solace the hearts of men with reciting the deeds of the heroes and the lives of the saints. The themes of mediaeval lyric, as of all lyric, are largely wantonness and wine; but it must be borne in mind that Thomas de Cabham’s classification is primarily an ethical one, and does not necessarily imply any marked difference of professional status between the two classes. The haunters of taverns and the solacers of the virtuous were after all the same minstrels, or at least minstrels of the same order. That the chansons, in their innumerable varieties, caught up from folk-song, or devised by Provençal ingenuity, were largely in the mouths of the minstrels, may be taken for granted. It was here, however, that the competition of trobaire and trouvère began earliest, and proved most triumphant, and the supreme minstrel genre was undoubtedly the narrative. This was, in a sense, their creation, and in it they held their own, until the laity learned to read and the trouvères became able to eke out the shortness of their memories by writing down or printing their stories. With narrative, no doubt, the minstrels of highest repute mainly occupied themselves. Harp or vielle in hand they beguiled many a long hour for knight and châtelaine with the interminable chansons de gestes in honour of Charlemagne and his heroic band[291], or, when the vogue of these waned, as in time it did, with the less primitive romans d’aventure, of which those that clustered round the Keltic Arthur were the widest famed. Even so their repertory was not exhausted. They had lais, dits and contes of every kind; the devout contes that Thomas de Cabham loved, historical contes, romantic contes of less alarming proportions than the genuine romans. And for the bourgeoisie they had those improper, witty fabliaux, so racy of the French soil, in which the esprit gaulois, as we know it, found its first and not its least characteristic expression. In most of these types the music of the instrument bore its part. The shorter lais were often accompanied musically throughout[292]. The longer poems were delivered in a chant or recitative, the monotony of which was broken at intervals by a phrase or two of intercalated melody, while during the rest of the performance a few perfunctory notes served to sustain the voice[293]. And at times, especially in the later days of minstrelsy, the harp or vielle was laid aside altogether, and the singer became a mere story-teller. The antithesis, no infrequent one, between minstrel, and fabulator, narrator, fableor, conteor, estour, disour, segger, though all these are themselves elsewhere classed as minstrels, sufficiently suggests this[294]. It was principally, one may surmise, the dits and fabliaux that lent themselves to unmusical narration; and when prose crept in, as in time it did, even before reading became universal, it can hardly have been sung. An interesting example is afforded by Aucassin et Nicolete, which is what is known as a cantefable. That is to say, it is written in alternate sections of verse and prose. The former have, in the Paris manuscript, a musical accompaniment, and are introduced with the words ‘Or se cante’; the latter have no music, and the introduction ‘Or content et dient et fablent.’