[971] “Payments for performances are frequent in the accounts of the Augustinian priories at Canterbury, Bicester and Maxstoke and the great Benedictine houses of Durham, Norwich, Thetford and St Swithin’s, Winchester, and doubtless in those of many another cloistered retreat. The Minorite chroniclers relate how, at the coming of the friars in 1224, two of them were mistaken for minstrels by the porter of a Benedictine grange near Abingdon, received by the brethren with unbecoming glee, and when the error was discovered, turned out with contumely,” Chambers, op. cit. I, pp. 56-7. In the Register of St Swithun’s it is recorded under the year 1374 that “on the feast of Bishop Alwyn ... six minstrels with four harpers performed their minstrelsies. And after dinner in the great arched chamber of the lord Prior, they sang the same geste.... And the said jongleurs came from the household of the bishop,” ib. I, p. 56 (note). See extracts from the account books of Durham, Finchale, Maxstoke and Thetford Priories relating to the visits of minstrels, ib. II, pp. 240-6. At Finchale there was even a room called “le Playerchambre,” ib. II, p. 244. In 1258 Eudes Rigaud had to order the Abbot of Jumièges “that he should send strolling players away from his premises.” Reg. Visit. Arch. Roth. p. 607. At a later date, in 1549, a council at Cologne directed a canon against comedians who were in the habit of visiting the German nunneries and by their profane plays and amatory acting excited to unholy desires the virgins dedicated to God. Lea, Hist. of Sacerdotal Celibacy, II, p. 189.
[972] “Histrionibus potest dari cibus, quia pauperes sunt, non quia histriones; et eorum ludi non videantur, vel audiantur vel permittantur fieri coram abbate vel monachis.” Annales de Burton (Ann. Monast. R. S. I, p. 485), quoted Chambers, op. cit. I, p. 39 (note).
[973] Alnwick’s Visit. f. 83.
[974] Aucassin and Nicolete, ed. Bourdillon (1897), p. 22.
[975] See the well-known story of “Le Tombeor de Notre Dame” (Romania, II, p. 315), and “Du Cierge qui descendi sus la viele au vieleeux devant l’ymage Nostre Dame,” Gautier de Coincy, Miracles de Nostre Dame, ed. Poquet (1859), p. 310. Both are translated in Of The Tumbler of Our Lady and Other Miracles by A. Kemp-Welch (King’s Classics 1909).
[976] For the following account, see A. F. Leach’s article on “The Schoolboy’s Feast,” Fortnightly Review, N.S. LIX (1896), p. 128, and Chambers, op. cit. I, ch. XV.
[978] Reg. Epis. J. Peckham, I, pp. 82-3. For a similar injunction to Godstow, see ib. III, p. 846. At Romsey the Archbishop forbade the festivities altogether: “Superstitionem vero quae in Natali Domini et Ascensione Ejusdem fieri consuevit, perpetuo condemnamus,” ib. II, p. 664. The superstition was probably the election of the youngest nun as abbess.
[979] Norwich Visit. pp. 209-10.
[980] Archaeol. XLVII, p. 56. On the Lord of Misrule, see Chambers op. cit. I, ch. XVII. There is a vivid account (from the Puritan point of view) in Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (1583) quoted in Life in Shakespeare’s England, ed. J. D. Wilson (1915), pp. 25-7.