The extensive privileges enjoyed by the minstrels, and the long continuance of the public favour, inflated their pride and made them insolent; they even went so far as to claim their reward by a prescriptive right, and settled its amount according to the estimation they had formed of their own abilities, and the opulence of the noblemen into whose houses they thought proper to intrude. The large gratuities collected by these artists not only occasioned great numbers to join their fraternity, but also induced many idle and dissipated persons to assume the characters of minstrels, to the disgrace of the profession. These evils became at last so notorious, that in the reign of king Edward II. it was thought necessary to restrain them by a public edict, which sufficiently explains the nature of the grievance. It states, that many indolent persons, under the colour of minstrelsy, intruded themselves into the residences of the wealthy, where they had both meat and drink, but were not contented without the addition of large gifts from the householder. To restrain this abuse, the mandate ordains, that no person should resort to the houses of prelates, earls, or barons, to eat, or to drink, who was not a professed minstrel; nor more than three or four minstrels of honour at most in one day, meaning, I presume, the king's minstrels and those retained by the nobility, except they came by invitation from the lord of the house.
Thus we read in the old romance of Launfel,
They had menstrelles of moche honours,
Fydelers, sytolyrs, and trompoters.
The edict also prohibits a professed minstrel from going to the house of any person below the dignity of a baron, unless invited by the master; and, in that case, it commands him to be contented with meat and drink, and such reward as the housekeeper willingly offered, without presuming to ask for any thing. For the first offence the minstrel lost his minstrelsy, and for the second he was obliged to forswear his profession, and was never to appear again as a minstrel. [598] This edict is dated from Langley, 6, an. 9 Edward II. A.D. 1315.
XV.—A GUILD OF MINSTRELS.
In little more than a century afterwards, the same grievances became again the subject of complaint; and in the ninth year of Edward IV. it was stated, that certain rude husbandmen and artificers of various trades had assumed the title and livery of the king's minstrels, and, under that colour and pretence, had collected money in divers parts of the kingdom, and committed other disorders; the king therefore granted to Walter Haliday, marshal, and to seven others, his own minstrels, named by him, a charter, by which he created, or rather restored, a fraternity, or perpetual guild, such as the king understood the brothers and sisters of the fraternity of minstrels to have possessed in former time; and we shall see, a little further on, that the minstrel's art, or part of it at least, was practised by females in the time of the Saxons. This fraternity was to be governed by a marshal appointed for life, the same office as that anciently possessed by the king of the minstrels, [599] and two wardens, who were empowered to admit members into the guild, and to regulate and govern, and to punish, when necessary, all such as exercised the profession of minstrels throughout the kingdom. The minstrels of Chester, who had by charter several peculiar privileges, are excepted in this act.
XVI.—ABUSES AND DECLINE OF MINSTRELSY.
It does not appear that much good was effected by the foregoing institution; it neither corrected the abuses practised by the fraternity, nor retrieved their reputation, which declined apace from this period. Under queen Elizabeth, the minstrels had lost the protection of the opulent; and their credit was sunk so low in the public estimation, that, by a statute in the thirty-ninth year of her reign against vagrants, they were included among the rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars, and subjected to the like punishments. This edict also affected all fencers, bearwards, common players of interludes (with the exception of such players as belonged to great personages, and were authorised to play under the hand and seal of their patrons), as well as minstrels wandering abroad, jugglers, tinkers, and pedlars; and seems to have given the death's wound to the profession of the minstrels, who had so long enjoyed the public favour, and basked in the sunshine of prosperity. The name, however, remained, and was applied to itinerant fiddlers and other musicians, whose miserable state is thus described by Putenham, in his Arte of English Poësie, printed in 1589: [600] "Ballads and small popular musickes sung by these cantabanqui upon benches and barrels heads, where they have none other audience than boyes or countrye fellowes that passe by them in the streete, or else by blind harpers, or such like taverne minstrels that give a fit of mirth for a groat; and their matters being for the most part stories of old time, as the tale of sir Topas, Bevis of Southampton, Guy of Warwick, Adam Bell and Clymme of the Clough, and such other old romances or historical rhimes, made purposely for the recreation of the common people at Christmas dinners and bride ales, and in tavernes and alehouses, and such other places of base resort." Bishop Hall, the satirist, adverts to the low estate of the minstrels at this time, in the two last lines of the following couplet:
Much better than a Paris-garden beare,