[353] In the MS. illuminations of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the messenger is denoted by peculiarities of equipment. He generally bears a spear, and has a very small, round target (or, perhaps, a badge of his lord’s arms) at his girdle—e.g., in the MS. Add. 11,639 of the close of the thirteenth century, folio 203 v. In the fifteenth century we see messengers carrying letters openly, fastened in the cleft of a split wand, in the MS. of about the same date, Harl. 1,527, folio 1,080, and in the fourteenth century MS. Add. 10,293, folio 25; and in Hans Burgmaier’s Der Weise Könige.
[354] It is right to state that one MS. of this statute gives Mareschans instead of Menestrals; but the reading in the text is that preferred by the Record Commission, who have published the whole of the interesting document.
[355] In the romance of Richard Cœur de Lion we read that, after the capture of Acre, he distributed among the “heralds, disours, tabourers, and trompours,” who accompanied him, the greater part of the money, jewels, horses, and fine robes which had fallen to his share. We have many accounts of the lavish generosity with which chivalrous lords propitiated the favourable report of the heralds and minstrels, whose good report was fame.
[356] May we infer from the exemption of the jurisdiction of the Duttons, and not of that of the court of Tutbury and the guild of Beverley, that the jurisdiction of the King of the Minstrels over the whole realm was established after the former, and before the latter? The French minstrels were incorporated by charter, and had a king in the year 1330, forty-seven years before Tutbury. In the ordonnance of Edward II., 1315, there is no allusion to such a general jurisdiction.
[357] One of the minstrels of King Edward the Fourth’s household (there were thirteen others) was called the wayte; it was his duty to “pipe watch.” In the romance of “Richard Cœur de Lion,” when Richard, with his fleet, has come silently in the night under the walls of Jaffa, which was besieged on the land side by the Saracen army:—
“They looked up to the castel,
They heard no pipe, ne flagel,[A]
They drew em nigh to land,
If they mighten understand,
And they could ne nought espie,
Ne by no voice of minstralcie,
That quick man in the castle were.”
And so they continued in uncertainty until the spring of the day, then
“A wait there came, in a kernel,[B]
And piped a nott in a flagel.”
And when he recognised King Richard’s galleys,
“Then a merrier note he blew,
And piped, ‘Seigneurs or sus! or sus!
King Richard is comen to us!’”