Our great King Alfred, who is expressly said to have excelled in music,[1042] being desirous to learn the true situation of the Danish army, which had invaded his realm, assumed the dress and character of a minstrel,[M] when, taking his harp, and one of the most trusty of his friends disguised as a servant[1043] (for in the early times it was not unusual for a minstrel to have a servant to carry his harp), he went with the utmost security into the Danish camp; and, though he could not but be known to be a Saxon by his dialect, the character he had assumed procured him a hospitable reception. He was admitted to entertain the king at table, and staid among them long enough to contrive that assault which afterwards destroyed them. This was in the year 878.
About fifty years after,[1044] a Danish king made use of the same disguise to explore the camp of our king Athelstan. With his harp in his hand, and dressed like a minstrel,[N] Aulaff,[1045] king of the Danes, went among the Saxon tents; and, taking his stand near the king's pavilion, began to play, and was immediately admitted. There he entertained Athelstan and his lords with his singing and his music, and was at length dismissed with an honourable reward, though his songs must have discovered him to have been a Dane.[O] Athelstan was saved from the consequences of this stratagem by a soldier, who had observed Aulaff bury the money which had been given him, either from some scruple of honour or motive of superstition. This occasioned a discovery.
Now, if the Saxons had not been accustomed to have minstrels of their own, Alfred's assuming so new and unusual a character would have excited suspicions among the Danes. On the other hand, if it had not been customary with the Saxons to shew favour and respect to the Danish Scalds, Aulaff would not have ventured himself among them, especially on the eve of a battle.[P] From the uniform procedure, then, of both these kings, we may fairly conclude that the same mode of entertainment prevailed among both people, and that the minstrel was a privileged character with each.
But if these facts had never existed, it can be proved from undoubted records that the minstrel was a regular and stated officer in the court of our Anglo-Saxon kings: for in Doomesday book, "Joculator Regis," the king's minstrel, is expressly mentioned in Gloucestershire, in which county it should seem that he had lands assigned him for his maintenance.[Q]
III. We have now brought the inquiry down to the Norman Conquest; and as the Normans had been a late colony from Norway and Denmark, where the Scalds had arrived to the highest pitch of credit before Rollo's expedition into France, we cannot doubt but this adventurer, like the other northern princes, had many of these men in his train, who settled with him in his new duchy of Normandy, and left behind them successors in their art; so that when his descendant, William the Bastard, invaded this kingdom in the following century,[1046] that mode of entertainment could not but be still familiar with the Normans. And that this is not mere conjecture will appear from a remarkable fact, which shews that the arts of poetry and song were still as reputable among the Normans in France as they had been among their ancestors in the north; and that the profession of Minstrel, like that of Scald, was still aspired to by the most gallant soldiers. In William's army was a valiant warrior, named Taillefer, who was distinguished no less for the minstrel-arts,[R] than for his courage and intrepidity. This man asked leave of his commander to begin the onset, and obtained it. He accordingly advanced before the army, and with a loud voice animated his countrymen with songs in praise of Charlemagne and Roland, and other heroes of France; then rushing among the thickest of the English, and valiantly fighting, lost his life.
Indeed, the Normans were so early distinguished for their minstrel-talents, that an eminent French writer[S] makes no scruple to refer to them the origin of all modern poetry, and shews that they were celebrated for their songs near a century before the troubadours of Provence, who are supposed to have led the way to the poets of Italy, France, and Spain.[1047]
We see then that the Norman Conquest was rather likely to favour the establishment of the minstrel profession in this kingdom, than to suppress it: and although the favour of the Norman conquerors would be probably confined to such of their own countrymen as excelled in the minstrel arts—and in the first ages after the Conquest, no other songs would be listened to by the great nobility but such as were composed in their own Norman French—yet as the great mass of the original inhabitants were not extirpated, these could only understand their own native gleemen or minstrels; who must still be allowed to exist, unless it can be proved that they were all proscribed and massacred, as, it is said, the Welsh Bards were afterwards by the severe policy of King Edward I. But this we know was not the case; and even the cruel attempts of that monarch, as we shall see below, proved ineffectual.[S2]
The honours shewn to the Norman or French minstrels by our princes and great barons, would naturally have been imitated by their English vassals and tenants, even if no favour or distinction had ever been shewn here to the same order of men, in the Anglo-Saxon and Danish reigns. So that we cannot doubt but the English harper and songster would, at least in a subordinate degree, enjoy the same kind of honours, and be received with similar respect among the inferior English gentry and populace. I must be allowed, therefore, to consider them as belonging to the same community, as subordinate members at least of the same college; and therefore, in gleaning the scanty materials for this slight history, I shall collect whatever incidents I can find relating to minstrels and their art, and arrange them, as they occur in our own annals, without distinction, as it will not always be easy to ascertain, from the slight mention of them by our regular historians, whether the artists were Norman or English; for it need not be remarked that subjects of this trivial nature are but incidentally mentioned by our ancient annalists, and were fastidiously rejected by other grave and serious writers; so that, unless they were accidentally connected with such events as became recorded in history, they would pass unnoticed through the lapse of ages, and be as unknown to posterity as other topics relating to the private life and amusements of the greatest nations.
On this account it can hardly be expected that we should be able to produce regular and unbroken annals of the minstrel art and its professors, or have sufficient information whether every minstrel or harper composed himself, or only repeated, the songs he chanted. Some probably did the one, and some the other: and it would have been wonderful indeed if men whose peculiar profession it was, and who devoted their time and talents to entertain their hearers with poetical compositions, were peculiarly deprived of all poetical genius themselves, and had been under a physical incapacity of composing those common popular rhymes which were the usual subjects of their recitation. Whoever examines any considerable quantity of these, finds them in style and colouring as different from the elaborate production of the sedentary composer at his desk or in his cell, as the rambling harper or minstrel was remote in his modes of life and habits of thinking from the retired scholar, or the solitary monk.[T]