The rewards given to the minstrels did not always consist in money, but frequently in rich mantles and embroidered vestments: they received, says Fauchet, great presents from the nobility, who would sometimes give them even the robes with which they were clothed. It was a common custom in the middle ages to give vestments of different kinds to the minstrels. In an ancient poem, cited by Fauchet, called La Robe Vermeille, or, The Red Robe, the wife of a vavaser, that is, one who, holding of a superior lord, has tenants under him, reproaches her husband for accepting a robe; "Such gifts," says she, "belong to jugglers, and other singing men, who receive garments from the nobility, because it is their trade:
S'appartient à ces jorgleours,
Et à ces autres chanteours,
Quils ayent de ces chevaliers,
Les robes car c'est lor mestier." [627]
These garments the jugglers failed not to take with them to other courts, in order to excite a similar liberality. Another artifice they often used, which was, to make the heroes of their poems exceedingly bountiful to the minstrels, who appear to have been introduced for that purpose: thus, in the metrical romance of Ipomedon, where the poet speaks of the knight's marriage, he says—
Ipomydon gaff, in that stound,
To mynstrelles five hundred pound. [628]
The author of Pierce the Ploughman, who lived in the reign of Edward III., gives the following general description of the different performances of the minstrels, and of their rewards, at that period:
I am mynstrell, quoth that man; my name is Activa Vita;