Entour son col porta soun tabour,
Depeynt de or e riche azour.”
“Le roi d’Angleterre et le jongleur d’Ely,” edited with “La riote du monde,” by Francisque Michel, Paris, 1834, p. 28.—“Viola. Save thee, friend, and thy music: Dost thou live by thy tabor?” And the tabor player, in “Twelfth Night” (iii. 1) is the Clown.
[279] At Exeter Cathedral may be seen many of the musical instruments used in the fourteenth century, sculptured in the “Minstrels’ Gallery,” where angels are performing (see the plate). The instruments they use have been identified by M. Carl Engel as being: the cittern, the bag-pipe, the clarion, the rebec, the psaltery, the syrinx, the sackbut, the regals, the gittern, the shalm, the timbrel, the cymbals. “Musical Instruments,” South Kensington Museum Art Handbook, p. 113. [The duties of the court minstrels of Edward IV are declared in the Black Book of the Orders of that king’s household (Harl. MS. 610, fol. 23), and their instruments are enumerated; “some vse trumpetts, some shalmes, some small pipes, some are stringe-men.” L. T. S.]
[280] Rymer’s “Fœdera,” April 24, 1469. See Appendix XI. On minstrels’ gilds in various English cities, the Beverley one being perhaps the most famous (none, however, possessing documentary proofs of its existence so old as the French ones, the Paris gild, for example, which was reformed in 1321 and lasted till 1776), see Chambers, “Mediæval Stage,” ii. 258. Having known various vicissitudes, the royal or London gild “still exists as the Corporation of the Master, Wardens and Commonalty of the Art and Science of the Musicians of London.” Ibid. ii. 261.
[281] “Rolls of Parliament,” iii. p. 508, A.D. 1402.
[282] See Appendix XII, p. [437].
[283] The songs about him were collected by J. Ritson; “Robin Hood Ballads,” London, second edition, 1832. Most of them are only of the sixteenth century, but a few are of an earlier date. Robin Hood’s popularity was, however, well established in the fourteenth century, as shown by a line in “Piers Plowman,” Skeat’s edition, Text B, passus v., l. 79. On Robin Hood as the hero of popular songs, of many games and of plays, see Chambers, “Mediæval Stage,” i. 174.
[284] “The Wyf of Bathes Tale” (sixty-eight lines on the equality of men and on nobility); again, in the “Parson’s Tale”: “Eek for to pryde him of his gentrye is ful greet folye . . . we ben alle of o fader and of o moder; and alle we been of o nature roten and corrupt, both riche and poure” (Skeat’s edition of the “Canterbury Tales,” vol. iv. p. 596). Not less striking, these lines of a French poem of the same century, quoted in the Discourse upon the state of letters in the fourteenth century, “Histoire Littéraire de la France,” vol. xxiv. p. 236:
“Nus qui bien face n’est vilains,