‘Lord Count, I have the viol played
Before yourself, within your hall,
And you my service never paid
Nor gave me any wage at all;
’Twas villainy.’
It is not difficult to catch the implied threat in these lines.
But the fickleness and flunkeyism of the minstrels served them well. When they had been expelled from France because of their libellous tongues, many of them were invited over to England by William de Longchamps, bishop of Ely, who governed the kingdom during the absence of Richard the Lionhearted, and who, anxious to blind the people to the vices of his régime, hired these singers to proclaim his virtues to the public. Thus art is continually being called to the glorification of vice and tyranny. But for such services the minstrels had their reward. So useful did they make themselves, wherever they went, that they received increasing marks of respect. When the Christian revival of the tenth and eleventh centuries came, they made themselves its apostles, singing the new songs in place of the old. The acting troupes presented miracle plays on Biblical or traditional religious subjects and were presently invited by the clergy to perform on the church steps or even within the church itself. Centuries later they had attained such dignity that they could organize themselves into guilds under the protection of the reigning prince. They had their aristocratic and exclusive labor unions, were employed to organize town bands, and in many places formed the nuclei for court orchestras.
Of the music of these minstrels in the early centuries we know next to nothing. There existed nothing at the time that could be called musical notation, and tradition, if it has brought any of their songs down to us, has changed them in the course of the centuries. We have, it is true, a spirited song, supposed to have been written on the death of Charlemagne, calling on Franks and Romans to lament and honor the lost sovereign. But this was probably not purely popular in its origin, else it would not have attained to writing. The words of a few ditties have been preserved. The celebrated ‘Song of Roland,’ dating from Charlemagne’s time, was supposed to have been sung as late as the battle of Poitiers in 1356. But what chiefly assures us of the vigor of the popular music of the time was the wide variety of types it contained—patriotic songs, love songs, songs satirical and historical, and many others. We know also that the music was original and alive, quite in contrast to that of the church. For when the popular tradition was taken up by the aristocratic Troubadours and Trouvères in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the melodies had an independent character that proves a vigorous antecedent development. The old modes continued to dominate church music up to the fifteenth and even sixteenth centuries. But the songs of the Troubadours and Trouvères are often written in the modern major scale. The popular music of the ninth and tenth centuries had undergone the development that the church did not attain until five hundred years later.
We know rather more concerning the instruments used by the wandering minstrels. They were of all the types which have since furnished out the modern orchestra. The harp, a remnant of the very earliest times, was favored by the more aristocratic musicians and steadily became enlarged as the technique of music widened. The lute (much like the modern guitar), most popular of amateur instruments in the time of the Renaissance, was widely used. All kinds of pipes, ancestors of the wood-wind instruments of our orchestras, flourished in a great variety of styles. And the incipient violin was represented by the rota, rebek, and vielle, figuring under a multitude of different names. Like the Saxon language during the Norman domination in England, popular music developed in the dark, without official sanction, finally coming forth, strong and mature, from its hiding and carrying everything before it.
II
With the approach of the millennial year we find the beginnings of that institution which was to enframe all the life of the later middle ages—Chivalry. The first military games and tourneys appear in the reign of Charles the Bald, in the ninth century. From that time on, life became more pretentious, more individual, more refined. The chivalric ideal was professedly Christian. It preached what the Pagan could never have understood—reverence for womanhood and respect for the weak. Knights gained the church’s special sanction when they devoted themselves to righting wrongs and rescuing women in distress. The tender poetry which in early mediæval times became attached to the figure of the Madonna, was now extended to all women—at least to all women of social standing. Because a woman had been chosen as the Mother of God all women were regarded as holy in her likeness. With this changed attitude toward the weaker sex there came a multitude of delicate shades of sentiment and an exaggerated devotion that would have seemed childish to the ancient Greeks. It was common for the Troubadours to profess the most ecstatic love for some woman of high rank, who was hardly expected to do more than smile in return. Love, in its more fanciful aspects, became the mania of the age.
It is not surprising, then, that the nobles of the time took up love, one might almost say, as an avocation. They had nothing to do, much of the time, but cultivate the fine arts. They caught the trick of making verses and melodies. It was natural that love should be the chief theme of their songs. And in Provence, the southeastern part of modern France, there arose toward the end of the eleventh century, the cult or institutions of the Troubadours. The Troubadours were primarily nobles, cultivating the arts as a pastime. But many men of lower rank also took up the fashion, winning their way through the beauty of their song. All that we regard as most typical of French art was in their music and verses—delicacy of wit and fancy, beauty of form, purity of diction. They represented the utmost refinement to which their age attained.
They did not, like the jongleurs, accept money for their singing, though they were proud to receive gifts from lords and ladies whom they praised. But they often retained the jongleurs in their service. They seem to have had ambitions of spreading their reputations as composers and, as it was unbecoming their rank to sing in the market-places, they hired jongleurs, as personal servants, to do it for them. Thus the wandering minstrel of the ninth century, while losing something of his artistic preëminence, gained no little in social dignity. Some gained high reputation. We recall the story of Blondel, minstrel to Richard the Lionhearted, who, when his liege lord was a prisoner in Germany on his return from the Holy Land, sought him far and wide and made himself known by his singing outside the castle, later bringing help and liberty to his king.
In the north of France flourished the Trouvères, similar to the Troubadours of the south. They were less delicate in touch, less polished, but far more serious, frequently composing, in their own fashion, works of science and history, theology and philosophy. Among the Troubadours and Trouvères were Count Guillaume of Poitiers, Count Thibaut of Champagne, King of Navarre, and Adam de la Halle. The last named was not of noble blood, but gained high standing as singer to the Count of Artois. In Spain, as well as in France, the institution of courtly song took root and the noble singers were known as Trobadores. In Italy the singer was known as Trovatore, though the Provençal song did not gain much vogue in the land which was being stirred by the awakening of the Renaissance. The Trouvères, through the Norman court of London, influenced the native minstrelsy of England, thus spreading over half of Europe the fame of the Provençal song.