The minstrels played yet other instruments, the harp, the lute, the guitar, the bag-pipe, the rota (a kind of small harp, the ancient instrument of the Celts), and others.[279]
39. THE MINSTRELS’ GALLERY AT EXETER.
(Fourteenth Century.)
The presents, the favour of the great, rendered enviable the lot of the minstrels; they multiplied accordingly, and the competition was great, which made the trade less profitable. In the fifteenth century, the king’s minstrels, clever and able men, protested to their master against the increasing audacity of the false minstrels, who deprived them of the greater part of their revenues. “Uncultured peasants,” said the king, who sided with his own men, “and workmen of different trades in our kingdom of England have passed themselves off as minstrels; some have worn our livery, which we did not {211} grant to them, and have even given themselves out to be our own minstrels.” By means of these guilty practices, they extorted much money from the king’s subjects, and although they had no understanding nor experience of the art, they went from place to place on festival days and gathered all the profits which should have enriched the true artists, those who had devoted themselves entirely to their profession, and did not exercise any low trade.
The king, to protect his men against such unlawful competition, authorized them to reconstitute and consolidate the pre-existing gild of minstrels; no one could henceforth exercise this profession, whatever his talent, if he had not been admitted into the gild. A power of inquiry was granted to the members of the society, who had the right to have false minstrels fined, the money to be applied to candles lit in the chapel of the Holy Virgin at St. Paul’s and in the “royal free chapel of St. Anthony.” For a pious motive was associated then with most actions, and minstrels, so badly treated by the generality of religious writers, were in this case bound, says the king, to pray in those two chapels for him while alive and for his soul when dead, for his “dearest consort Elizabeth queen of England,” and for the soul of his “dearest lord and father”; this till the end of time. Women were, as well as men, admitted into the fraternity.[280]
Such was the will of the king; in the same manner, and without any better success, the price of bread and the wage for a day’s labour were lowered by statute, all of which had but a limited and temporary effect. {212}
The authorities had other reasons for watching over singers and itinerant musicians; while they showed indulgence to the armed retainers of the great, they feared the rounds made by those glee men with no other arms than their vielle or tabor, but sowing sometimes strange disquieting doctrines under colour of songs. These were more than liberal, and went at times so far as to recommend social or political revolt. The Commons in parliament denounced by name, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Welsh minstrels as fomentors of trouble and causes of rebellion. Their political songs encouraged the insurgents to resistance; and parliament, who bracketed them with ordinary vagabonds, knew well that in having them arrested on the roads, it was not simple cut-purses whom it sent to prison. “Item: That no westours and rimers, minstrels or vagabonds, be maintained in Wales to make kymorthas or quyllages on the common people, who by their divinations, lies, and exhortations are partly cause of the insurrection and rebellion now in Wales. Reply: Le roy le veut.”[281]
Popular movements were the occasion for satirical songs against the great, songs composed by minstrels and soon known by heart among the crowd. It was a popular song which furnished to John Ball the text for his famous speech at Blackheath in the revolt of 1381:
“When Adam delved and Eve span,