CHAPTER VII.
ROGUES AND ADVENTURERS.
The war had fearfully loosened the joints of burgher society. The old orderly and disciplined character of Germans appeared almost lost. Countless was the number of unfortunates who having lost house and farm, maintenance and family, wandered homeless through inhospitable foreign countries; and not less numerous were the troops of reprobates who had habituated themselves to live by fraud, extortion, and robbery. Excitement had become a necessity to the whole living race, for thirty years the vagrant rabble of all Europe had chosen Germany as their head-quarters.
Thus it happened that after the peace the doings of the fortune hunters, adventurers, and rogues increased to an extraordinary extent. A contrast of weakness and roughness is, in the following century, a special characteristic of the needy, careworn family life, into which the spirit of the German people had contracted itself. Some particulars of this wild life will be here related, which will denote the gradual changes it underwent. For like the German devils, the children of the devil have also their history, and their race is more ancient than the Christian faith.
People are hardly aware of the intimate connection between German life and Roman antiquity. Not only did the traditions of the Roman empire, Christianity, Roman law, and the Latin language become parts of the German civilization, but still more extensively were the numerous little peculiarities of the Roman world preserved in the middle ages. German agriculture acquired from the Romans the greater part of its implements, also wheat, barley, and much of the remaining produce. The most ancient of our finer kinds of fruit are of Roman origin, equally so our wine, many garden flowers, and almost all our vegetables; also the oldest woollen fabrics, cotton and silk stuffs, and all the oldest machines, as for example, watermills, and the first mining and foundry works; likewise innumerable other things, even to the oldest forms of our dress, house utensils, chairs, tables, cupboards, and even the panels of our folding doors. And if it were possible to measure how much in our life is gathered from antiquity, or from primitive German invention, we should still, after the lapse of fifteen centuries, find so much that is Roman in our fields, gardens, and houses, on our bodies, nay, even in our souls, that one may well have a right to inquire whether our primeval ancestors were more under the protection of Father Jove or of the wild Woden.
Thus amongst numberless others, the despised race of Gladiators, Histrions, and Thymelei--or jesters, were preserved throughout the storm of migration, and spread from Rome among the barbarian races. They introduced amongst the bloody hordes of Vandals the dissolute Roman pantomime; they stood before the huts of the Frank chiefs, and piped and played foreign melodies, which had perhaps once come with the orgies of the Asiatic gods to Rome; they intermingled with the Gothic congregation, which poured out of the newly built church into the churchyard, and there opened their chests in order to show a monkey in a red jacket as a foreign prodigy, or produced the grotesque figures of old Latin puppets, the maccus, bucco, papus, and whatever else the ancient fathers called our jack-puddings, for the amusement of the young parishioners, who opened wide their large blue eyes at these foreign wonders. Meanwhile other members of the band of jugglers offered on payment, to execute gymnastic games before the warriors of the community, which they performed with sharp weapons and all the artifices and cunning of the Roman circus; then these foolhardy men formed a ring and carried on with passionate eagerness, for the sake of pay, the dangerous hazards of the combat, which the spectators admired the more, the bloodier it became, whilst they held the unfortunates, who thus struggled for money, in no greater consideration than a couple of wolves or hungry dogs. But for the distinguished spectators there were other more enticing artists. Women also roved with the men amongst the German tribes, dexterous and bold, dancers, singers, and actresses, in brilliant cavalcades. When they shook the Greek tambourine or the Asiatic castanets, in the licentious mazes of the bacchanalian dance, they were generally irresistible to the German barons, but were extremely offensive to serious people. In the year 554 a Frank king interposed with his authority against the nuisance of these foreign rovers, and the worthy Hinkmar, paternally warned his priests also against these women, whose foreign sounding designation was expressed by the true-hearted monk with a very well known but bitter word.
To these foreign jugglers were speedily added numerous German recruits. The German races had had wandering singers from the primitive times, bearers of news, spreaders of epic songs and poems. These also moved from farm to farm, highly welcome in the large houses of persons of distinction, honoured guests, trusted messengers, who often received from their hosts a more affectionate reward than golden bracelets or new dresses. They had once upon a time sung to the harp by the fireside, of the adventurous expedition of the thunder god to the world of giants, and of the tragic fall of the Nibelungen, then of Attila's battle, and the wonders of southern lands. But to the new Christian faith, this treasure of old native songs was obnoxious. The high-minded Charlemagne made a collection of the heroic songs of the German race, but his Popish son Louis hated and despised them. These songs undoubtedly were so thoroughly heathen, that the Church had reason to remonstrate against them in synodical resolutions and episcopal decrees. Together with them, the race of singers who carried and spread them, fell into disfavour with the church. The songs did not however cease, but the singers sank to a lower scale, and finally a portion of them at least fell into the class of vagrants, and the people were accustomed to hear the fairest heritage of their past from the lips of despised players.
Another heritage also from German heathendom fell to these strollers. Even before the time of Tacitus there were simple dramatic processions in Germany; on the great feast days of the German gods, there already appeared the humorous ideas of the pious German regarding his world of deities, associating with them comic processions of mummers, the figures of goblins and giants, gray winter and green spring, the bear of Donar, and probably the magic white horse of Woden, which in the oldest form of dramatic play opposed each other either in mimic combat, or for their rights. The wandering jugglers, with great facility, added these German masks to the grotesque Roman figures which they had brought into the country; and in the churchyard of the new Christian congregation, the bear of the bacchanalian Asen bellowed beside the followers of the Roman god of wine, and the satyr with his goats' feet and horns.
Thus this race of wanderers soon Germanized themselves, and during the whole of the middle ages roved about amongst the people--in the eye of the law homeless and lawless. The Church continued to rouse suspicion against these strollers by repeated decrees; the clergy would on no account see or listen to such rabble, nay, they were denied the right of taking a part in the Christian sacraments. The old law books allowed hired pugilists to kill each other without penance, like stray dogs; or what was almost worse, they granted to the injured vagrant only the mockery of a sham penance. If a stroller was struck by a sword or knife, he could only return the thrust or blow upon the shadow of his injurers on the wall.
This ignominious treatment contrasted strongly with the favour which these strollers generally enjoyed. Singly, or in bands, they went through the country, and streamed together by hundreds at the great court and Church fêtes. Then, it was the general custom to distribute among them food, drink, clothes, and money. It was thought advisable to treat them well, as they were well known to be tale-bearers, and would publish in satirical songs throughout the whole country the scandalous conduct of the niggardly man, with a vindictiveness which was sharpened by the feeling that such revenge was the best means of making themselves feared. It was rarely that a prince like Henry II., or a pious bishop, ventured to send away these bands from their fêtes without a reward. Almost everywhere, till quite into the fifteenth century, they were to be found wherever a large assemblage of men sought for amusement. They sang ballads, satirical songs and love songs, and related heroic tales and legends from foreign lands, on the stove-bench of the peasant, in tins ante-room of the burgher, or the hall of the castle. From the latter its lord is absent perhaps on a crusade, and his wife and servants listen anxiously to the fables and lies of the wandering player. To-day he is the narrator of foreign tales of marvel, and to-morrow the clandestine messenger betwixt two lovers; then he again enters for a time the service of knightly minne-singers, whose minne-songs he accompanies with his music, and undertakes to spread them through the country, as a journal does now; or he dresses himself up more strikingly than usual, takes his bauble in his hand, places a fool's cap on his head, and goes as travelling fool to some nobleman, or follower of some distinguished ecclesiastic.