In great houses the service was performed by the chaplain in the chapel of the hall or castle, and it seems probable that the lord’s minstrels assisted in the musical part of the service.
The organ doubtless continued to be, as we have seen it in Saxon times, the most usual church instrument. Thus the King of Hungary in “The Squire of Low Degree,” tells his daughter:—
“Then shal ye go to your even song,
With tenours and trebles among;
****
Your quere nor organ song shal want
With countre note and dyscant;
The other half on organs playing,
With young children ful fayn synging.”
And in inventories of church furniture in the Middle Ages we find organs enumerated:[339] Not only the organ, but all instruments in common use, were probably also used in the celebration of divine worship. We meet with repeated instances in which David singing the psalms is accompanied by a band of musicians, as in the Saxon illumination on p. 272, and again in the initial letter of this chapter, which is taken from a psalter of early thirteenth-century date in the British Museum (Harl. 5,102). The men of those days were in some respects much more real and practical, less sentimental and transcendental, than we in religious matters. We must have everything relating to divine worship of different form and fashion from ordinary domestic appliances, and think it irreverent to use things of ordinary domestic fashion for religious uses, or to have domestic things in the shapes of what we call religious art. They had only one art, the best they knew, for all purposes; and they were content to apply the best of that to the service of God. Thus to their minds it would not appear at all unseemly that the minstrels who had accompanied the divine service in chapel should walk straight out of chapel into the hall, and tune their instruments anew to play symphonies, or accompany chansons during dinner, or enliven the dance in the great chamber in the evening—no more unseemly than that their master and his family should dine and dance as well as pray. The chapel royal establishment of Edward IV. consisted of trumpets, shalms, and pipes, as well as voices; and we may be quite sure that the custom of the royal chapel was imitated by noblemen and gentlemen of estate. A good fifteenth-century picture of the interior of a church, showing the organ in a gallery, is engraved in the “Annales Archæologiques,” vol. xii., p. 349. A very good representation of an organ of the latter part of the sixteenth century (1582) is in the fine MS. Plut. 3,469, folio 27.[340] An organ of about this date is still preserved in that most interesting old Manor House, Igtham Mote, in Kent. They were sometimes placed at the side of the chancel, sometimes in the rood-loft, which occupied the same relative position in the choir which the music gallery did in the hall.
In the MSS. we not unfrequently find the ordinary musical instruments placed in the hands of the angels; e.g., in the early fourteenth-century MS. Royal 2 B. vii., in a representation of the creation, with the morning stars singing together, and all the sons of God shouting for joy, an angelic choir are making melody on the trumpet, violin, cittern, shalm (or psaltery), and harp. There is another choir of angels at p. 168 of the same MS., two citterns and two shalms, a violin and trumpet. Similar representations occur very significantly in churches. On the arch of the Porta Della Gloria of Saragossa Cathedral, of the eleventh century, from which there is a cast at the entrance to the South Kensington Museum, are a set of angel minstrels with musical instruments. In the bosses of the ceiling of Tewkesbury Abbey Church we find angels playing the cittern (with a plectrum), the harp (with its cover seen enveloping the lower half of the instrument)[341] and the cymbals. A set of angel musicians is sculptured on the rood loft of York Minster. In the triforum of the nave of Exeter Cathedral is a projecting gallery for the minstrels, with sculptures of them on the front playing instruments.[342] In the choir of Lincoln Cathedral, some of the noble series of angels which fill the spandrels of its arcades, and which have given to it the name of the Angel Choir, are playing instruments, viz., the trumpet, double pipe, pipe and tabret, dulcimer, viol and harp. They represent the heavenly choir attuning their praises in harmony with the human choir below: “Therefore with angels and archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious name.” There is a band of musicians sculptured on the grand portal of the Cathedral at Rheims; a sculptured capital from the church of St. Georges de Bocherville, now in the Museum at Rouen, represents eleven crowned figures playing different instruments.[343] On the chasse of St. Ursula at Bruges are angels playing instruments beautifully painted by Hemling.[344] We cannot resist the temptation to introduce here another charming little drawing of an angelic minstrel, playing a psaltery, from the Royal MS. 14 E iii.; others occur at folio 1 of the same MS. The band of village musicians with flute, violin, clarinet, and bass-viol, whom most of us have seen occupying the singing-gallery of some country church, are the representatives of the band of minstrels who occupied the rood-lofts in mediæval times.
The Morning Stars singing together.
An Angel Minstrel.
Clerical censors of manners during the Middle Ages frequently denounce the dissoluteness of minstrels, and the minstrels take their revenge by lampooning the vices of the clergy. Like all sweeping censures of whole classes of men, the accusations on both sides must be received cautiously. However, it is certain that the minstrels were patronised by the clergy. We shall presently find a record of the minstrels of the Bishop of Winchester in the fourteenth century; and the Ordinance of Edward II., quoted at p. 296, tells us that minstrels flocked to the houses of prelates as well as of nobles and gentlemen. In the thirteenth century, that fine sample of an English bishop, Grostête of Lincoln, was a great patron of minstrel science: he himself composed an allegorical romance, the Chasteau d’Amour. Robert de Brunne, in his English paraphrase of Grostête’s Manuel de Peches (begun in 1303), gives us a charming anecdote of the Bishop’s love of minstrelsy.