A Royal Dinner.
Having introduced the feast, the minstrels continued to play during its progress. We find numerous representations of dinners in the illuminations, in which one or two minstrels are standing beside the table, playing their instruments during the progress of the meal. In a MS. volume of romances of the early part of the fourteenth century in the British Museum (Royal 14 E iii.), the title-page of the romance of the “Quête du St. Graal” (at folio 89 of the MS.) is adorned with an illumination of a royal banquet; a squire on his knee (as in the illustration given on opposite page) is carving, and a minstrel stands beside the table playing the violin; he is dressed in a parti-coloured tunic of red and blue, and wears his hat. In the Royal MS. 2 B vii., at folio 168, is a similar representation of a dinner, in which a minstrel stands playing the violin; he is habited in a red tunic, and is bareheaded. At folio 203 of the same MS. (Royal 2 B vii.), is another representation of a dinner, in which two minstrels are introduced; one (wearing his hood) is playing a cittern, the other (bareheaded) is playing a violin: and these references might be multiplied.
Royal Dinner of the time of Edward IV.
We reproduce here, in further illustration of the subject, engravings of a royal dinner of about the time of our Edward IV., “taken from an illumination of the romance of the Compte d’Artois, in the possession of M. Barrois, a distinguished and well-known collector in Paris.”[331] The other is an exceedingly interesting representation of a grand imperial banquet, from one of the plates of Hans Burgmair, in the volume dedicated to the exploits of the Emperor Maximilian, contemporary with our Henry VIII. It represents the entrance of a masque, one of those strange entertainments, of which our ancestors, in the time of Henry and Elizabeth, were so fond, and of which Mr. C. Kean some years ago gave the play-going world of London so accurate a representation in his mise en scene of Henry VIII. at the Princess’s Theatre. The band of minstrels who have been performing during the banquet, are seen in the left corner of the picture.
Imperial Banquet.
So in “The Squier’s Tale” of Chaucer, where Cambuscan is “holding his feste so solempne and so riche.”
“It so befel, that after the thridde cours,
While that this king sat thus in his nobley,[332]
Harking his ministralles her[333] thinges play,
Beforne him at his bord deliciously,” &c.