CHAPTER VI
THE EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF SONG
Song in early Christian times—The age of chivalry—The troubadours and trouvères—The minnesingers—The mastersingers; the Lutheran revival—Polyphonic eclipse of song.
I
We think of the first eight or ten centuries of the Christian era as a chasm between the ancient and the modern. But this is of course not strictly true, least of all in folk-music. In the church, indeed, music struggled slowly and painfully, surrounded by doctrine and law. But in the music, as in the customs, of the people, there was no break. The apostolic succession of song continued unbroken from the time of the Greeks to the time of Schubert. Through all the mediæval period folk-music was flourishing, growing in richness and in influence steadily up to the time when it entered art music by the back door, so to speak, stealing into the Catholic ritual. For many centuries the songs of the old world continued in the new. For the Christian era did not come all at once. It attained formal dominance when Constantine adopted it as the official religion of Rome. But it needed many centuries more before it could attain complete sway over people’s hearts. Pagan customs and pagan songs were still living and beautiful. The Christian missionaries gained their hold over the people by compromising with the past. The old festivals were not rejected in favor of the new; they were merged with the new. Thus Christmas, among the Germanic nations, was made to absorb an older festival of the turning of the sun, and the mistletoe, which had had a profound religious significance for the Pagans became one of the minor symbols of the Christian feast and continues to-day an essential part of the Yuletide festivities, as we know.
And thus it was with the people’s songs. Men’s beliefs were Christianized, but men’s feelings remained Pagan. And the two existed side by side for centuries without trouble. Charlemagne ordered a collection to be made of German songs (all of Pagan origin) and did not feel that there was anything impious in his action. The Pagan was honored along with the Christian just as, some five centuries later, the Classical was honored in the Renaissance. But the millennial year was approaching, when men expected the world to end, or Christ to come and take personal charge of his Kingdom. And throughout all Christendom there arose a desire in men to make themselves perfect for the second coming. And so arose a mania for exterminating all that remained of the old world. Charlemagne’s son, Ludwig the Pious, despised the German songs his father had collected. And it was so all over Europe. In these years the last vestiges of Paganism were stamped out, except for the sweet souvenirs of it which the institution of the mistletoe and similar symbols have retained.
Pagan songs of the early Christian period were mostly in the hands of wandering minstrels and storytellers who roamed the world in great numbers. These men, like the songs they sang, were direct descendants of the Pagan world. One well accredited theory says that the Italian minstrels were the gladiators of Roman times, and their descendants. The last of the Roman gladiatorial shows was held about the beginning of the fifth century. After that Christian sentiment forbade these bloody entertainments, and the gladiators, the entertainers par excellence of Roman times, found themselves without a means of livelihood. They wandered from town to town, giving exhibitions of strength and agility in the market places, just as the acrobats do to this day in European cities. They became a separate caste, almost a separate race. Inevitably they invented or appropriated songs with which to entertain their admirers between the acts. Some of them became itinerant merchants, selling molasses or some other delicacy and attracting the crowds by their music. Sometimes they had dancing bears, or camels, or trick monkeys.
In the more serious northern countries—Germany and England—they were probably the remnants of the old priesthood. Religion has always needed music as a support, and the old priests were themselves bards, or had bards in their service to sing their doctrines. As they fell into disrepute with the advance of Christianity, they had to seek their living as best they might, and they became minstrels, singing the old sagas and stories which people still loved. Often they became attached to the service of the courts. The chronicler Robert Ware says that the battle of Hastings, in which William the Conqueror subjected the Saxons, was opened by the minstrel or jongleur Taillefer, attached to the Norman army, who advanced singing of the fabulous exploits of some hero of the time and performing feats of agility with his lance and sword, which struck terror into the Saxons, who thought his dexterity must be the effect of witchcraft. But more often the minstrels were popular entertainers, with a collection of tricks—hence the name of jongleur, which means player or trickster, and gives us our English word ‘juggler.’
Their music had no very exalted status, since it was only a ‘side-line’ to their merchandise or performance. But to the people of the time it was as important as our orchestral concerts and operas are to us. For it effected the interchange of art and ideas between province and province and between nation and nation. The minstrels were rarely the inventors of the songs they sang. The music of the time was genuine folk-music and the minstrels only learned and disseminated the popular songs. But they represented the whole institution of secular music in the early Christian age.
In their roving life, the minstrels tended to become wretchedly immoral. They sometimes formed themselves into bands for the acting of plays, taking women along with them, and these bands became the synonym for dissolute living. Sometimes they were beggars pure and simple, willing to get money by any means except working, and purchasable equally to spread a scandal or commit a murder. They had no home and no citizenship. In 554 A. D. Childebert promulgated very stringent laws for the suppression of their licentiousness. Philip Augustus, King of France, caused them to be expelled from his domains. They were outside the law and its protection. For centuries they were regarded as the evil children of another race. A citizen might attack or insult a minstrel and the latter had no recourse in law, except the privilege of striking his opponent’s shadow. This outlawing of musicians continued (in the statute books, at least) for many years. There are traces of it still in certain lands. Even New York state, it is said, has an unrepealed statute somewhere in its dusty books authorizing the arrest of ‘common showmen.’
This prejudice, in the early years, seems to have been generally justified. The lives of the minstrels were certainly dissolute. Their personal characters had all the unattractive qualities of an inferior race—to dying for money or favor, fickleness and vindictiveness. They had to truckle to the great, and flatter the prejudices of the masses. They had, moreover, the means of making themselves feared by the knights and barons of whom they demanded money in return for their music. For if they were allowed to leave the castle disgruntled, nothing was easier for them than to spread abroad among the people scandals concerning the great men and ladies, the tale that Sir Knight was a wife-beater and that his lady was having an affair with her page. A certain jongleur, Colin Muset, who plied his trade in Lorraine and Champagne in the thirteenth century, once had occasion to sing the following ditty to the noble of whom he had asked largess: