And again:—
“Then were the gates shut, and cried was loude
Now do your devoir youngé knightés proud.
The heralds left their pricking up and down,
Now ringen trumpets loud and clarioun.
There is no more to say, but East and West
In go the spearés sadly in the rest;
In goeth the sharpé spur into the side;
There see men who can just and who can ride.
Men shiveren shaftés upon shieldés thick,
He feeleth thro the hearte-spoon the prick.”
In actual war only the trumpet and horn and tabor seem to have been used. In “The Romance of Merlin” we read of
“Trumpés beting, tambours classing”
in the midst of a battle; and again, in Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale”—
“Pipes, trumpets, nakeres,[345] and clariouns
That in the battle blowen bloody sounds;”
and again, on another occasion—
“The trumping and the tabouring,
Did together the knights fling.”
There are several instances in the Royal MS., 2 B vii., in which trumpeters are sounding their instruments in the rear of a company of charging chevaliers.
Again, when a country knight and his neighbour wished to keep their spears in practice against the next tournament, or when a couple of errant knights happened to meet at a manor-house, the lists were rudely staked out in the base-court of the castle, or in the meadow under the castle-walls; and, while the ladies looked on and waved their scarfs from the windows or the battlements, and the vassals flocked round the ropes, the minstrels gave animation to the scene. In the illustration on p. 414 from the title-page of the Royal MS., 14 E iii., a fine volume of romances of early fourteenth-century date, we are made spectators of a scene of the kind; the herald is arranging the preliminaries between the two knights who are about to joust, while a band of minstrels inspire them with their strains.