gathered, knew no _scôp_. As will be shown in a later chapter, it was
communal in character, closely bound up with the festal dance, or
with the rhythmic movements of labour. It was genuine folk-song, the
utterance of no select caste of singers, but of whoever in the ring of
worshippers or workers had the impulse and the gift to link the common
movements to articulate words. At the festivals such a spokesman would
be he who, for whatever reason, took the lead in the ceremonial rites,
the _vates_, germ at once of priest and bard. The subject-matter of
communal song was naturally determined by the interests ruling on the
occasions when it was made. That of daily life would turn largely on
the activities of labour itself: that of the high days on the emotions
of religion, feasting, and love which were evoked by the primitive
revels of a pastoral or agricultural folk.

Presently the movements of the populations of Europe brought the
Germanic tribes, after separating from their Scandinavian kinsmen, into
contact with Kelts, with Huns, with the Roman Empire, and, in the
inevitable recoil, with each other. Then for the first time war assumed
a prerogative place in their life. To war, the old habits and the old
poetry adapted themselves. Tiwaz, once primarily the god of beneficent
heaven, became the god of battles. The chant of prayer before the
onset, the chant of triumph and thanksgiving after the victory, made
themselves heard[96]. From these were disengaged, as a distinct
species of poetry, songs in praise of the deeds and deaths of great
captains and popular heroes. Tacitus tells us that poetry served the
Germans of his day for both chronology and history[97]. Jordanis, four
centuries later, has a similar account to give of the Ostrogoths[98].
Arminius, the vanquisher of a Roman army, became the subject of heroic
songs[99]: Athalaric has no higher word of praise for Gensimund
than _cantabilis_[100]. The glories of Alboin the Lombard[101], of
Charlemagne himself[102], found celebration in verse, and Charlemagne
was at the pains to collect and record the still earlier _cantilenae_
which were the chronicle of his race. Such historical _cantilenae_,
mingled with more primitive ones of mythological import, form the basis
of the great legendary epics[103]. But the process of epic-making is
one of self-conscious and deliberate art, and implies a considerable
advance from primitive modes of literary composition. No doubt the
earliest heroic _cantilenae_ were still communal in character. They
were _rondes_ footed and sung at festivals by bands of young men and
maidens. Nor was such folk-song quick to disappear. Still in the
eleventh century the deeds of St. William of Orange resounded amongst
the _chori iuvenum_[104]; and spinning-room and village green were
destined to hear similar strains for many centuries more[105]. But
long before this the _cantilenae_ had entered upon another and more
productive course of development: they were in the mouths, not only of
the folk, but also of a body of professional singers, the fashioners of
the epic that was to be[106]. Like heroic song itself, the professional
singers owed their origin to war, and to the prominence of the
individual, the hero, which war entailed. Around the person of a great
leader gathered his individual following or _comitatus_, bound to him
by ties of mutual loyalty, by interchange of service and reward[107].
Amongst the _comitatus_ room was found for one who was no spearman,
but who, none the less honoured for that, became the poet of the group
and took over from the less gifted _chorus_ the duty of celebrating
the praises of the chieftain. These he sung to the accompaniment, no
longer of flying feet, but of the harp, struck when the meal was over
in tent or hall. Such a harper is the characteristically Germanic type
of professional entertainer. He has his affinities with the Demodokos
of a Homeric king. Rich in dignities and guerdons, sitting at the foot
of the leader, consorting on equal terms with the warriors, he differs
wholly from the _scenicus infamis_, who was the plaything and the scorn
of Rome. Precisely when the shifting of social conditions brought him
into being it is hard to say. Tacitus does not mention him, which is
no proof, but a presumption, that amongst the tribes on the frontier
he had not yet made his appearance in the first century of the Empire.
By the fifth century he was thoroughly established, and the earliest
records point to his existence at least as early as the fourth. These
are not to be found in Latin sources, but in those early English
poems which, although probably written in their extant forms after
the invasion of these islands, seem to date back in substance to the
age when the Angles still dwelt in a continental home around the base
of the Jutish peninsula. The English remained to a comparatively late
stage of their history remote from Roman influence, and it is in their
literature that both the original development of the Teutonic _scôp_
and his subsequent contamination by the Roman _mimus_ can most easily
be studied.

The earliest of all English poems is almost certainly _Widsith_, the
‘far-traveller.’ This has been edited and interpolated in Christian
England, but the kernel of it is heathen and continental[108]. It is
an autobiographic sketch of the life of Widsith, who was himself an
actual or ideal _scôp_, or rather _gleómon_, for the precise term
_scôp_ is not used in the poem. Widsith was of the Myrgings, a small
folk who dwelt hard by the Angles. In his youth he went with Ealhhild,
the ‘weaver of peace,’ on a mission to Eormanric the Ostrogoth.
Eormanric is the Hermanric of legend, and his death in 375 A. D. gives
an approximate date to the events narrated. Then Widsith became a
wanderer upon the face of the earth, one who could ‘sing and say a
story’ in the ‘mead-hall.’ He describes the nations and rulers he has
known. Eormanric gave him a collar of beaten gold, and Guthhere the
Burgundian a ring. He has been with Caesar, lord of jocund cities, and
has seen Franks and Lombards, Finns and Huns, Picts and Scots, Hebrews,
Indians, Egyptians, Medes and Persians. At the last he has returned
to the land of the Myrgings, and with his fellow Scilling has sung
loud to the harp the praises of his lord Eadgils and of Ealhhild the
daughter of Eadwine. Eadgils has given him land, the inheritance of his
fathers. The poem concludes with an eulogy of the life of gleemen. They
wander through realm upon realm, voice their needs, and have but to
give thanks. In every land they find a lord to whom songs are dear, and
whose bounty is open to the exalters of his name. Of less undeniable
antiquity than _Widsith_ are the lines known as the _Complaint of
Deor_. These touch the seamy side of the singer’s life. Deor has
been the _scôp_ of the Heodenings many winters through. But one more
skilled, Heorrenda by name--the Horant of the Gudrun saga--has outdone
him in song, and has been granted the land-right that once was Deor’s.
He finds his consolation in the woes of the heroes of old. ‘They have
endured: may not I endure[109]?’ The outline drawn in _Widsith_ and in
_Deor_ is completed by various passages in the epic of _Beowulf_, which
may be taken as representing the social conditions of the sixth or
early seventh century. In Heorot, the hall of Hrothgar, there was sound
of harp, the gleewood. Sweetly sang the _scôp_ after the mead-bench.
The lay was sung, the gleeman’s _gyd_ told. Hrothgar’s thanes, even
Hrothgar himself, took their turns to unfold the wondrous tale. On the
other hand, when a folk is in sorrow, no harp is heard, the glee-beam
is silent in the halls[110]. In these three poems, then, is fully
limned the singer of Teutonic heathenism. He is a man of repute, the
equal of thanes. He holds land, even the land of his fathers. He
receives gifts of gold from princes for the praise he does them. As
yet no distinction appears between _scôp_ and _gleómon_. Widsith is at
one time the resident singer of a court; at another, as the mood takes
him, a wanderer to the ends of the earth. And though the _scôp_ leads
the song, the warriors and the king himself do not disdain to take
part in it. This is noteworthy, because it gives the real measure of
the difference between the Teutonic and the Roman entertainer. For a
Nero to perform amongst the _scenici_ was to descend: for a Hrothgar to
touch the harp was a customary and an honourable act.

The singing did not cease when the English came to these islands. The
long struggle with the Britons which succeeded the invasions assuredly
gave rise to many new lays, both in Northumbria and Wessex. ‘England,’
says Mr. Stopford Brooke, ‘was conquered to the music of verse, and
settled to the sound of the harp.’ But though Alfred and Dunstan knew
such songs, they are nearly all lost, or only dimly discerned as the
basis of chronicles. At the end of the sixth century, just as the
conquest was completed, came Christianity. The natural development of
English poetry was to some extent deflected. A religious literature
grew up at the hands of priests. Eadhelm, who, anticipating a notion
of St. Francis of Assisi, used to stand on a bridge as if he were a
gleeman, and waylay the folk as they hurried back from mass, himself
wrote pious songs. One of these, a _carmen triviale_, was still sung in
the twelfth century[111]. This was in Wessex. In Northumbria, always
the most literary district of early England, the lay brother Cædmon
founded a school of divine poetry. But even amongst the disciples
of Cædmon, some, such as the author of the very martial _Judith_,
seem to have designed their work for the mead-hall as well as the
monastery[112]. And the regular _scôp_ by no means vanished. The
_Wanderer_, a semi-heathen elegiac poem of the early eighth century,
seems to be the lament of a _scôp_ driven from his haunts, not by
Christianity, but by the tumults of the day[113]. The great poet of
the next generation, Cynewulf, himself took treasure of appled gold
in the mead-hall. A riddle on ‘the wandering singer’ is ascribed to
him[114], and various poems of his school on the fates or the crafts of
man bear witness to the continued existence of the class[115]. With the
eighth century, except for the songs of war quoted or paraphrased in
the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_, the extant Early English poetry reaches a
somewhat inexplicable end. But history comes to the rescue, and enables
us still to trace the _scôp_. It is in the guise of a harp-player that
Alfred is reported to have fooled the Danes, and Anlaf in his turn to
have fooled the Saxons[116]: and mythical as these stories may be, they
would not have even been plausible, had not the presence of such folk
by the camp-fire been a natural and common event.

Certainly the _scôp_ survived heathenism, and many Christian bishops
and pious laymen, such as Alfred[117], were not ashamed of their
sympathy with secular song. Nevertheless, the entertainers of the
English folk did not find favour in the eyes of the Church as a
whole. The stricter ecclesiastics especially attacked the practice
of harbouring them in religious houses. Decrees condemning this were
made by the council on English affairs which sat at Rome in 679[118],
and by the council of Clovesho in 747[119]. Bede, writing at about
the latter date on the condition of church affairs in Northumbria
complains of those who make mirth in the dwellings of bishops[120];
and the complaint is curiously illustrated by a letter of Gutbercht,
abbot of Newcastle, to an episcopal friend on the continent, in which
he asks him for a _citharista_ competent to play upon the _cithara_
or _rotta_ which he already possesses[121]. At the end of the eighth
century, Alcuin wrote a letter to Higbald, bishop of Lindisfarne,
warning him against the snares of _citharistae_ and _histriones_[122]:
and some two hundred years later, when Edgar and Dunstan[123] were
setting themselves to reform the religious communities of the land, the
favour shown to such ribald folk was one of the abuses which called
for correction[124]. This hostile attitude of the rulers of the Church
is not quite explained by anything in the poetry of the _scôpas_, so
far as it is left to us. This had very readily exchanged its pagan
for a Christian colouring: it cannot be fairly accused of immorality
or even coarseness, and the Christian sentiment of the time is not
likely to have been much offended by the prevailing theme of battle and
deeds of blood. The probable explanation is a double one. There is the
ascetic tendency to regard even harmless forms of secular amusement
as barely compatible with the religious life. And there is the fact,
which the language of the prohibitions themselves makes plain, that a
degeneration of the old Teutonic gleemen had set in. To singing and
harping were now added novel and far less desirable arts. Certainly the
prohibitions make no exception for _poetae_ and _musici_; but the full
strength of their condemnation seems to be directed against _scurrae_
and their _ioca_, and against the _mimi_ and _histriones_ who danced as
well as sang. These are new figures in English life, and they point to
the fact that the merging of the Teutonic with the Latin entertainer
had begun. To some extent, the Church itself was responsible for
this. The conversion of England opened the remote islands to Latin
civilization in general: and it is not to be wondered at, that the
_mimi_, no less than the priests, flocked into the new fields of
enterprise. If this was the case already in the eighth century, we can
hardly doubt that it was still more so during the next two hundred
years of which the literary records are so scanty. Such a view is
supported by the numerous miniatures of dancers and tumblers, jugglers
and bear-leaders, in both Latin and Early English manuscripts of this
period[125], and by the glosses which translate such terms as _mimus_,
_iocista_, _scurra_, _pantomimus_ by _gligmon_, reserving _scôp_ for
the dignified _poeta_[126]. This distinction I regard as quite a late
one, consequent upon the degeneracy introduced by _mimi_ from south
Europe into the lower ranks of the gleemen. Some writers, indeed, think
that it existed from the beginning, and that the _scôp_ was always the
resident court poet, whereas the _gleómon_ was the wandering singer,
often a borrower rather than a maker of songs, who appealed to the
smaller folk[127]. But the theory is inconsistent with the data of
_Widsith_. The poet there described is sometimes a wanderer, sometimes
stationary. He is evidently at the height of his profession, and has
sung before every crowned head in Europe, but he calls himself a
_gleómon_. Nor does the etymology of the words _scôp_ and _gleómon_
suggest any vital difference of signification[128].

The literary records of the continental Teutons are far scantier
than those of the English. But amongst them also Latin and barbaric
traditions seem to have merged in the _ioculator_. Ancestral deeds
were sung to the harp, and therefore, it may be supposed, by a _scôp_,
and not a _chorus_, before the Ostrogoths in Italy, at the beginning
of the sixth century[129]. In the year 507 Clovis the Frank sent to
Theodoric for a _citharoedus_ trained in the musical science of the
South, and Boethius was commissioned to make the selection[130]. On the
other hand, little as the barbarians loved the theatre, the _mimi_ and
_scurrae_ of the conquered lands seem to have tickled their fancy as
they sat over their wine. At the banquet with which Attila entertained
the imperial ambassadors in 448, the guests were first moved to
martial ardour and to tears by the recital of ancient deeds of prowess,
and then stirred to laughter by the antics of a Scythian and a Moorish
buffoon[131]. Attila was a Hun and no German; but the Vandals who
invaded Africa in 429 are recorded to have taken to the _spectacula_
so extravagantly popular there[132], and Sidonius tells how _mimici
sales_, chastened in view of barbaric conceptions of decency, found a
place in the festivities of another Theodoric, king from 462 to 466 of
the Visigoths in Gaul[133]. Three centuries later, under Charlemagne,
the blending of both types of entertainer under the common designation
of _ioculator_ seems to be complete. And, as in contemporary England,
the animosity of the Church to the _scenici_ is transferred wholesale
to the _ioculatores_, without much formal attempt to discriminate
between the different grades of the profession. Alcuin may perhaps be
taken as representing the position of the more rigid disciplinarians
on this point. His letter to the English bishop, Higbald, does not
stand alone. In several others he warns his pupils against the
dangers lurking in _ludi_ and _spectacula_[134], and he shows himself
particularly exercised by the favour which they found with Angilbert,
the literary and far from strict-lived abbot of St. Richer[135]. The
influence of Alcuin with Charlemagne was considerable, and so far as
ecclesiastical rule went, he had his way. A capitulary (†787) excluded
the Italian clergy from uncanonical sports[136]. In 789 bishops,
abbots, and abbesses were forbidden to keep _ioculatores_[137], and in
802 a decree applying to all in orders required abstinence from idle
and secular amusements[138]. These prohibitions were confirmed in the
last year of Charlemagne’s reign (813) by the council of Tours[139].
But as entertainers of the lay folk, the minstrels rather gained than
lost status at the hands of Charlemagne. Personally he took a distinct
interest in their performances. He treasured up the heroic _cantilenae_
of his race[140], and attempted in vain to inspire the _saevitia_ of
his sons with his own enthusiasm for these[141]. The chroniclers more
than once relate how his policy was shaped or modified by the chance
words of a _ioculator_ or _scurra_[142]. The later tradition of the
_jougleurs_ looked back to him as the great patron of their order, who
had given them all the fair land of Provence in fee[143]: and it is
clear that the songs written at his court form the basis not only of
the _chansons de gestes_, but also, as we found to be the case with the
English war-songs, of many passages in the chronicles themselves[144].
After Charlemagne’s death the minstrels fell for a time on evil days.
Louis the Pious by no means shared his father’s love for them. He
attempted to suppress the _cantilenae_ on which he had been brought up,
and when the _mimi_ jested at court would turn away his head and refuse
to smile[145]. To his reign may perhaps be ascribed a decree contained
in the somewhat dubious collection of Benedictus Levita, forbidding
idle dances, songs and tales in public places and at crossways on
Sundays[146], and another which continued for the benefit of the
minstrels the legal incapacity of the Roman _scenici_, and excluded
_histriones_ and _scurrae_ from all privilege of pleading in courts of
justice[147].

The ill-will of a Louis the Pious could hardly affect the hold which
the minstrels had established on society. For good or for bad, they
were part of the mediaeval order of things. But their popularity had
to maintain itself against an undying ecclesiastical prejudice. They
had succeeded irrevocably to the heritage of hate handed down from
the _scenici infames_. To be present at their performances was a sin
in a clerk, and merely tolerated in a layman. Largesse to them was
declared tantamount to robbery of the poor[148]. It may be fairly said
that until the eleventh century at least the history of minstrelsy
is written in the attacks of ecclesiastical legislators, and in the
exultant notices of monkish chroniclers when this or that monarch
was austere enough to follow the example of Louis the Pious, and
let the men of sin go empty away[149]. Throughout the Middle Ages
proper the same standpoint was officially maintained[150]. The canon
law, as codified by Gratian, treats as applicable to minstrels the
pronouncements of fathers and councils against the _scenici_, and adds
to them others more recent, in which clergy who attend _spectacula_, or
in any way by word or deed play the _ioculator_, are uncompromisingly
condemned[151]. This temper of the Church did not fail to find its
expression in post-Conquest England. The council of Oxford in 1222
adopted for this country the restatement of the traditional rule by the
Lateran council of 1215[152]; and the stricter disciplinary authorities
at least attempted to enforce the decision. Bishop Grosseteste
of Lincoln, for instance, pressed it upon his clergy in or about
1238[153]. The reforming provisions of Oxford in 1259 laid down that,
although minstrels might receive charitable doles in monasteries, their
_spectacula_ must not be given[154]; and a similar prohibition, couched
in very uncomplimentary terms, finds a place in the new statutes drawn
up in 1319 for the cathedral church of Sarum by Roger de Mortival[155].
A few years later the statutes of St. Albans follow suit[156], while
in 1312 a charge of breaking the canons in this respect brought
against the minor clergy of Ripon minster had formed the subject
of an inquiry by Archbishop Greenfield[157]. Such notices might be
multiplied[158]; and the tenor of them is echoed in the treatises of
the more strait-laced amongst monkish writers. John of Salisbury[159],
William Fitz Stephen[160], Robert Mannyng of Brunne[161], are at one in
their disapproval of _ioculatores_. As the fourteenth century draws to
its close, and the Wyclifite spirit gets abroad, the freer critics of
church and state, such as William Langland[162] or the imagined author
of Chaucer’s _Parson’s Tale_[163], take up the same argument. And they
in their turn hand it on to the interminable pamphleteering of the
Calvinistic Puritans[164].

                           THE MINSTREL LIFE

The perpetual _infamia_ of the minstrels is variously reflected in the
literature of their production. Sometimes they take their condemnation
lightly enough, dismissing it with a jest or a touch of bravado. In
_Aucassin et Nicolete_, that marvellous romance of the _viel caitif_,
when the hero is warned that if he takes a mistress he must go to hell,
he replies that, to hell will he go, for thither go all the goodly
things of the world. ‘Thither go the gold and the silver, and the vair
and the grey, and thither too go harpers and minstrels and the kings
of the world. With these will I go, so that I have Nicolete, my most
sweet friend, with me’[165]. At other times they show a wistful sense
of the pathos of their secular lot. They tell little stories in which
heaven proves more merciful than the vice-gerents of heaven upon earth,
and Virgin or saint bestows upon a minstrel the sign of grace which the
priest denies[166]. But often, again, they turn upon their persecutors
and rend them with the merciless satire of the _fabliaux_, wherein it
is the clerk, the theologian, who is eternally called upon to play the
indecent or ridiculous part[167].

Under spiritual disabilities the minstrels may have been, but so far as
substantial popularity amongst all classes went, they had no cause from
the eleventh to the fourteenth century to envy the monks. As a social
and literary force they figure largely both on the continent and in
England. The distinctively Anglo-Saxon types of _scôp_ and _gleómon_ of
course disappear at the Conquest. They do not cease to exist; but they
go under ground, singing their defiant lays of Hereward[168]; and they
pursue a more or less subterranean career until the fourteenth century
brings the English tongue to its own again. But minstrelsy was no less
popular with the invaders than with the invaded. Whether the _skald_
had yet developed amongst the Scandinavian pirates who landed with
Rollo on the coasts of France may perhaps be left undetermined[169]:
for a century and a half had sufficed to turn the Northmen into Norman
French, and with the other elements of the borrowed civilization had
certainly come the _ioculator_. In the very van of William’s army
at Senlac strutted the minstrel Taillefer, and went to his death
exercising the double arts of his hybrid profession, juggling with
his sword, and chanting an heroic lay of Roncesvalles[170]. Twenty
years later, Domesday Book records how Berdic the _ioculator regis_
held three vills and five carucates of land in Gloucestershire, and
how in Hampshire Adelinda, a _ioculatrix_, held a virgate, which
Earl Roger had given her[171]. During the reigns of the Angevin and
Plantagenet kings the minstrels were ubiquitous. They wandered at their
will from castle to castle, and in time from borough to borough, sure
of their ready welcome alike in the village tavern, the guildhall,
and the baron’s keep[172]. They sang and jested in the market-places,
stopping cunningly at a critical moment in the performance, to gather
their harvest of small coin from the bystanders[173]. In the great
castles, while lords and ladies supped or sat around the fire, it was
theirs to while away many a long bookless evening with courtly _geste_
or witty sally. At wedding or betrothal, baptism or knight-dubbing,
treaty or tournament, their presence was indispensable. The greater
festivities saw them literally in their hundreds[174], and rich was
their reward in money and in jewels, in costly garments[175], and in
broad acres. They were licensed vagabonds, with free right of entry
into the presence-chambers of the land[176]. You might know them from
afar by their coats of many colours, gaudier than any knight might
respectably wear[177], by the instruments upon their backs and those
of their servants, and by the shaven faces, close-clipped hair and
flat shoes proper to their profession[178]. This kenspeckle appearance,
together with the privilege of easy access, made the minstrel’s dress
a favourite disguise in ages when disguise was often imperative. The
device attributed by the chroniclers to Alfred and to Anlaf becomes in
the romances one of the commonest of _clichés_[179]. The readiness with
which the minstrels won the popular ear made them a power in the land.
William de Longchamp, the little-loved chancellor of Richard I, found
it worth his while to bring a number of them over from France, that
they might sing his praises abroad in the public places[180]. Nor were
they less in request for satire than for eulogy. The English speaking
minstrels, in particular, were responsible for many songs in derision
of unpopular causes and personalities[181]; and we need not doubt
that ‘the lay that Sir Dinadan made by King Mark, which was the worst
lay that ever harper sang with harp or with any other instruments,’
must have had its precise counterparts in actual life[182]. The Sarum
statutes of 1319 lay especial stress on the flattery and the evil
speaking with which the minstrels rewarded their entertainers[183].
Sometimes, indeed, they over-reached themselves, for Henry I is related
to have put out the eyes of Lucas de Barre, a Norman _jougleur_, or
perhaps rather _trouvère_, who made and sang songs against him[184].
But Lucas de Barre’s rank probably aggravated his offence, and as a
rule the minstrels went scot-free. A wiser churchman here and there
was not slow to perceive how the unexampled hold of minstrelsy on
the popular ear might be turned to the service of religion. Eadhelm,
standing in gleeman’s attire on an English bridge to mingle words of
serious wisdom with his _carmina trivialia_, is one instance[185]. And
in the same spirit St. Francis, himself half a troubadour in youth,
would call his Minorites _ioculatores Domini_, and send them singing
over the world to beg for their fee the repentance and spiritual joy
of their hearers[186]. A popular hymn-writer of the present day is
alleged to have thought it ‘hard that the devil should have all the
good tunes’; but already in the Middle Ages religious words were being
set to secular music, and graced with the secular imagery of youth and
spring[187].

But if the minstrels were on the one hand a force among the people,
on the other they had the ear of kings. The English court to judge
by the payments recorded in the exchequer books, must have been full
of them[188]. The fullest and most curious document on the subject
dates from the reign of Edward I. It is a roll of payments made on the
occasion of a Whitsuntide feast held in London in the year 1306, and a
very large number of the minstrels recorded are mentioned by name[189].
At the head of the list come five minstrels with the high-sounding
title of _le roy_[190], and these get five marks apiece. A number of
others follow, who received sums varying from one mark upwards. Most
of these have French names, and many are said to be in the company of
this or that noble or reverend guest at the feast. Finally, two hundred
marks were distributed in smaller sums amongst the inferior minstrels,
_les autres menestraus de la commune_, and some of these seem to have
been of English birth. Below the _roys_ rank two minstrels, Adam le
Boscu and another, who are dignified with the title of _maistre_, which
probably signifies that they were clerks[191]. The other names are
mainly descriptive, ‘Janin le Lutour,’ ‘Gillotin le Sautreour,’ ‘Baudec
le Taboureur,’ and the like; a few are jesting stage names, such as
the inferior performers of our music halls bear to-day[192]. Such are
‘Guillaume sanz Maniere,’ ‘Reginaldus le Menteur,’ ‘le Petit Gauteron,’
‘Parvus Willielmus,’ and those of the attractive comedians Perle in the
Eghe, and Matill’ Makejoye. The last, by the way, is the only woman
performer named. The resources of Edward I could no doubt stand the
strain of rewarding with royal magnificence the entertainers of his
guests. There is plenty of evidence, however, that even on secular
grounds the diatribes of the moralists against the minstrels were often
enough justified. To the lavish and unthrifty of purse they became
blood-suckers. Matilda, the wife of Henry I, is said to have squandered
most of her revenues upon them[193]; while the unfortunate Robert
of Normandy, if no less a chronicler than Ordericus Vitalis may be
believed, was stripped by these rapacious gentry to the very skin[194].
Yet for all the days of honour and all the rich gifts the minstrel life
must have had its darker side. Easily won, easily parted with; and the
lands and laced mantles did not last long, when the elbow itched for
the dice-box. This was the incurable ruin of the minstrel folk[195].
And even that life of the road, so alluring to the fever in the blood,
must have been a hard one in the rigours of an English climate. To
tramp long miles in wind and rain, to stand wet to the skin and hungry
and footsore, making the slow _bourgeois_ laugh while the heart was
bitter within; such must have been the daily fate of many amongst the
humbler minstrels at least[196]. And at the end to die like a dog in
a ditch, under the ban of the Church and with the prospect of eternal
damnation before the soul.

Kings and nobles were not accustomed to depend for their entertainment
merely upon the stray visits of wandering minstrels. Others more or
less domiciled formed a permanent part of the household. These indeed
are the minstrels in the stricter sense of that term--_ministri_,
_ministeriales_. In Domesday Book, as we have seen, one Berdic bears
the title of the _ioculator regis_. Shortly afterwards Henry I had his
_mimus regis_, by name Raherus, who made large sums by his _suavitas
iocularis_, and founded the great priory of St. Bartholomew at
Smithfield[197]. Laying aside his parti-coloured coat, he even became
himself the first prior of the new community. The old spirit remained
with him, however; and it is recorded that the fame of the house was
largely magnified by means of some feigned miracles which Raherus put
forth. Richard I was a noted lover of song, and the names of more than
one minstrel of his are preserved. There was Ambroise, who was present
at Richard’s coronation in 1189 and at the siege of Acre in 1191, and
who wrote a history, still extant, of the third crusade[198]. And there
was that Blondiaux or Blondel de Nesle, the story of whose discovery
of his captive master, apocryphal though it may be, is in all the
history books[199]. Henry III had his _magister Henricus versificator_
in 1251[200], and his _magister Ricardus citharista_ in 1252[201]. A
harper was also amongst the _ministri_ of Prince Edward in the Holy
War[202], and when the prince became Edward I, he still retained one in
his service. He is mentioned as Walter de Stourton, the king’s harper,
in 1290[203], and as the _citharista regis_ in 1300[204]. Edward II had
several minstrels, to one of whom, William de Morlee, known as _Roy de
North_, he made a grant of land[205]. By this time the royal minstrels
seem to have become a regular establishment of no inconsiderable
numbers. Under Edward III they received 7¹⁄₂_d._ a day[206]. A little
later in the reign, between 1344 and 1347, there were nineteen who
received 12_d._ a day in war, when they doubtless formed a military
band, and 20_s._ a year in peace. These included five trumpeters, one
citoler, five pipers, one tabouretter, two clarions, one nakerer,
and one fiddler, together with three additional minstrels, known as
waits[207]. The leader of the minstrels bore the title of _rex_, for in
1387 we find a licence given by Richard II to his _rex ministrallorum_,
John Caumz, permitting him to pass the seas[208]. Henry V had fifteen
minstrels when he invaded France in 1415, and at a later date eighteen,
who received 12_d._ a day apiece[209]. At the end of his reign his
minstrels received 100_s._ a year, and this annuity was continued under
Henry VI, who in 1455 had twelve of them, besides a wait. In the next
year this king issued a commission for the impressing of boys to fill
vacancies in the body[210]. Edward IV had thirteen minstrels and a
wait[211]. By 1469 these had been cut down to eight. At their head was
a chief, who was now called, not as in Richard II’s time _rex_, but
_marescallus_[212]. The eight king’s minstrels and their _marescallus_
can be traced through the reign of Henry VII, and so on into the
sixteenth century[213].

Nor was the royal household singular in the maintenance of a permanent
body of minstrels. The _citharista_ of Margaret, queen of Edward I,
is mentioned in 1300, and her _istrio_ in 1302[214]. Philippa, queen
of Edward III, had her minstrels in 1337[215], and those of Queen
Elizabeth were a regular establishment in the reign of Henry VII[216].
The Scottish court, too, had its recognized troupe, known by the early
years of the sixteenth century as the ‘minstrels of the chekkar[217].’
As with kings and queens so with lesser men. The list of minstrels
at court in 1306 includes the harpers and other musicians of several
lords, both English and foreign[218]. In 1308 the earl of Lancaster had
a body of _menestralli_ and an _armiger menestrallorum_[219]. During
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries entries of payments to the
minstrels of a vast number of _domini_, small and great, are common in
the account books[220]. Henry, earl of Derby, took minstrels with him
in his expeditions abroad of 1390 and 1392[221]; while the _Household
Book_ of the earl of Northumberland (†1512) shows that he was
accustomed to entertain ‘a Taberett, a Luyte, and a Rebecc,’ as well as
six ‘trompettes[222].’ Minstrels are also found, from the beginning of
the fifteenth century, in the service of the municipal corporations.
London, Coventry, Bristol, Shrewsbury, Norwich, Chester, York,
Beverley, Leicester, Lynn, Canterbury had them, to name no others.
They received fixed fees or dues, wore the town livery and badge of a
silver scutcheon, played at all local celebrations and festivities, and
were commonly known as _waits_[223]. This term we have already found
in use at court, and the ‘Black Book,’ which contains the household
regulations of Edward IV, informs us that the primary duty of a wait
was to ‘pipe the watch,’ summer and winter, at certain fixed hours of
the night[224].

It must not be supposed that established minstrels, whether royal,
noble, or municipal, were always in constant attendance on their lords.
Certain fixed services were required of them, which were not very
serious, except in the case of waits[225]; for the rest of their time
they were free. This same ‘Black Book’ of Edward IV is very explicit on
the point. The minstrels are to receive a yearly fee and a livery[226].
They must attend at court for the five great feasts of the year. At
other times, two or three out of their number, or more if the king
desire it, are to be in waiting. The last regulation on the subject
is curious. The king forbids his minstrels to be too presumptuous or
familiar in asking rewards of any lord of the land; and in support of
this he quotes a similar prohibition by the Emperor Henry II[227].
Doubtless, in the intervals of their services, the household minstrels
travelled, like their unattached brethren of the road, but with the
added advantage of a letter of recommendation from their lord, which
ensured them the hospitality of his friends[228]. Such letters were
indeed often given, both to the minstrels of a man’s own household and
as testimonials to other minstrels who may have especially pleased the
giver. Those interesting collections of mediaeval epistolary formulae,
the _summae dictaminis_, contain many models for them, and judging by
the lavish eulogy which they employ, the minstrels themselves must have
had a hand in drawing them up[229]. Many minstrels probably confined
themselves to short tours in the vicinity of their head quarters;
others, like Widsith, the Anglo-Saxon _scôp_, were far travellers. John
Caumz received a licence from Richard II to cross the seas, and in 1483
we find Richard III entertaining minstrels of the dukes of Austria
and Bavaria[230]. Possibly the object of John Caumz was to visit one
of the _scolae ministrallorum_ in France, where experiences might be
exchanged and new songs learnt. Beauvais, Lyon, Cambrai were famous for
these schools, which were held year by year in Lent, when performances
were stopped; and the wardrobe accounts of Edward III record grants of
licences and expenses to Barbor and Morlan, two bagpipers, to visit the
_scolas ministrallis in partibus trans mare_[231].

From the fourteenth century it is possible to trace the growth of the
household minstrels as a privileged class at the expense of their less
fortunate rivals. The freedom of access enjoyed by the entertainers of
earlier days was obviously open to abuse. We have seen that in 1317
it led to the offering of an insult to Edward II by an emissary clad
as a minstrel at his own table. It was only two years before that a
royal proclamation had considerably restrained the liberty of the
minstrels. In view of the number of idle persons who ‘under colour of
mynstrelsie’ claimed food, drink, and gifts in private houses, it was
ordered ‘that to the houses of prelates earls and barons none resort
to meate and drynke, unless he be a mynstrel, and of these mynstrels
that there come none except it be three or four minstrels of honour
at the most in one day, unlesse he be desired of the lorde of the
house.’ The houses of meaner men are to be altogether exempt, except
at their desire[232]. I think it is probable that by ‘minstrels of
honour’ we must here understand ‘household minstrels[233]’; and that
the severity of the ordinance must have come upon those irresponsible
vagrants who had not the shelter of a great man’s name. With the
Statutes of Labourers in the middle of the fourteenth century begins a
history of legislation against ‘vacabonds and valiant beggars,’ which
put further and serious difficulties in the way of the free movement
of the migratory classes through the country[234]. Minstrels, indeed,
are not specifically declared to be ‘vacabonds’ until this legislation
was codified by William Cecil in 1572[235]; but there is evidence that
they were none the less liable to be treated as such, unless they
had some protection in the shape of livery or licence. At Chester
from the early thirteenth century, and at Tutbury in Staffordshire
from 1380, there existed courts of minstrelsy which claimed to issue
licences to all performers within their purview. It is not probable
that this jurisdiction was very effective. But a step taken by Edward
IV in 1469 had for its avowed object to strengthen the hands of what
may be called official minstrelsy. Representation had been made to the
king that certain rude husbandmen and artificers had usurped the title
and livery of his minstrels, and had thus been enabled to gather an
illegitimate harvest of fees. He therefore created or revived a regular
guild or fraternity of minstrels, putting his own household performers
with their _marescallus_ at the head of it, and giving its officers
a disciplinary authority over the profession throughout the country,
with the exception of Chester. It is not improbable, although it is
not distinctly stated, that admission into the guild was practically
confined to ‘minstrels of honour.’ Certainly one of the later local
guilds which grew up in the sixteenth century, that of Beverley,
limited its membership to such as could claim to be ‘mynstrell to some
man of honour or worship or waite of some towne corporate or other
ancient town, or else of such honestye and conyng as shalbe thought
laudable and pleasant to the hearers[236].’ In any case the whole drift
of social development was to make things difficult for the independent
minstrels and to restrict the area of their wanderings.

The widespread popularity of the minstrels amongst the mediaeval laity,
whether courtiers, burghers, or peasants, needs no further labouring.
It is more curious to find that in spite of the formal anathemas of the
Church upon their art, they were not, as a matter of fact, rigorously
held at arm’s length by the clergy. We find them taking a prominent
part in the holyday festivities of religious guilds[237]; we find
them solacing the slow progress of the pilgrimages with their ready
wit and copious narrative or song[238]; we find them received with
favour by bishops, even upon their visitations[239], and not excluded
from a welcome in the hall of many a monastery. As early as 1180, one
Galfridus, a _citharoedus_, held a ‘corrody,’ or right to a daily
commons of food and drink in the abbey of Hyde at Winchester[240].
And payments for performances are frequent in the accounts of the
Augustinian priories at Canterbury[241], Bicester, and Maxtoke, and
the great Benedictine houses of Durham, Norwich, Thetford, and St.
Swithin’s, Winchester[242], and doubtless in those of many another
cloistered retreat. The Minorite chroniclers relate, how at the time
of the coming of the friars in 1224 two of them were mistaken for
minstrels by the porter of a Benedictine grange near Abingdon, received
by the prior and brethren with unbecoming glee, and when the error was
discovered, turned out with contumely[243]. At such semi-religious
foundations also, as the college of St. Mary at Winchester, or
Waynflete’s great house of St. Mary Magdalen in Oxford, minstrels of
all degrees found, at least by the fifteenth century, ready and liberal
entertainment[244].

How, then, is one to reconcile this discrepancy between the actual
practice of the monasteries and the strict, the uncompromising
prohibition of minstrelsy in rule and canon? An incomplete answer
readily presents itself. The monks being merely human, fell short of
the ideal prescribed for them. We do not now learn for the first time,
that the ambitions of the pious founder, the ecclesiastical law-giver,
the patristic preacher, were one thing; the effective daily life of
churchmen in many respects quite another. Here, as in matters of even
more moment, did mediaeval monasticism ‘dream from deed dissever’--

    ‘The reule of Seint Maure or of Seint Beneit,
    By-cause that it was old and som-del streit
    This ilke monk leet olde thinges pace,
    And held after the newe world the space.’

True enough, but not the whole truth. It doubtless explains the
behaviour of the Benedictines of Abingdon; but we can hardly suppose
that when Robert de Grosseteste, the sworn enemy of ecclesiastical
abuses, kept his harper’s chamber next his own, he was surreptitiously
allowing himself an illegitimate gratification which he denied to his
clergy. The fact is that the condemnations of the Church, transferred,
as we have seen, wholesale from the _mimi_ and _histriones_ of the
decaying Empire, were honestly not applicable without qualification,
even from the ecclesiastical point of view, to their successors, the
_mimi_ and _histriones_ of the Middle Ages. The traditions of the Roman
stage, its manners, its topics, its ethical code, became indeed a large
part of the direct inheritance of minstrelsy. But, as we have seen,
they were far from being the whole of that inheritance. The Teutonic
as well as the Latin element in the civilization of western Europe
must be taken into account. The minstrel derives from the disreputable
_planipes_; he derives also from the _scôp_, and has not altogether
renounced the very different social and ethical position which the
_scôp_ enjoyed. After all, nine-tenths of the secular music and
literature, something even of the religious literature, of the Middle
Ages had its origin in minstrelsy. Practically, if not theoretically,
the Church had to look facts in the face, and to draw a distinction
between the different elements and tendencies that bore a single name.
The formularies, of course, continued to confound all minstrels under
the common condemnation of _ioculatores_. The Church has never been
good at altering its formularies to suit altered conditions. But it
has generally been good at practical compromises. And in the case of
minstrelsy, a practical compromise, rough enough, was easily arrived at.

The effective conscience of the thirteenth-century Church had clearly
come to recognize degrees in the ethical status of the minstrels.
No more authoritative exponent of the official morals of his day
can be desired than St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Thomas Aquinas is
very far from pronouncing an unqualified condemnation of all secular
entertainment. The profession of an _histrio_, he declares, is by no
means in itself unlawful. It was ordained for the reasonable solace
of humanity, and the _histrio_ who exercises it at a fitting time
and in a fitting manner is not on that account to be regarded as a
sinner[245]. Another contemporary document is still more explicit.
This is the _Penitential_ written at the close of the thirteenth
century by Thomas de Cabham, sub-dean of Salisbury and subsequently
archbishop of Canterbury[246]. In the course of his analysis of human
frailty, Thomas de Cabham makes a careful classification from the
ethical point of view, of minstrels. There are those who wear horrible
masks, or entertain by indecent dance and gesture. There are those
again who follow the courts of the great, and amuse by satire and by
raillery. Both these classes are altogether damnable. Those that remain
are distinguished by their use of musical instruments. Some sing wanton
songs at banquets. These too are damnable, no less than the satirists
and posture-mongers. Others, however, sing of the deeds of princes, and
the lives of the saints. To these it is that the name _ioculatores_
more strictly belongs, and they, on no less an authority than that of
Pope Alexander himself[247], may be tolerated.

Of the three main groups of minstrels distinguished by Thomas de
Cabham, two correspond roughly to the two broad types which, from the
point of view of racial tradition, we have already differentiated. His
musicians correspond to the Teutonic gleemen and their successors;
his posture-mongers and buffoons to the Roman _mimi_ and their
successors. Who then are Thomas de Cabham’s third and intermediate
group, the satirists whose lampoons beset the courts of the great?
Well, raillery and invective, as we have seen, were common features
of minstrelsy; but Gautier may very likely be right when he surmises
that Thomas de Cabham has particularly in mind the _scolares vagantes_,
who brought so much scandal upon the Church during the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries[248]. Some of these were actually out at elbows
and disfrocked clerks; others were scholars drifting from university
to university, and making their living meantime by their wits; most
of them were probably at least in minor orders. But practically they
lived the life of the minstrels, tramping the road with them, sharing
the same temptations of wine, women, and dice, and bringing into the
profession a trained facility of composition, and at least a flavour
of classical learning[249]. They were indeed the main intermediaries
between the learned and the vernacular letters of their day; the spilth
of their wit and wisdom is to be found in the burlesque Latin verse of
such collections as the _Carmina Burana_, riotous lines, by no means
devoid of poetry, with their half-humorous half-pathetic burden,

    ‘In taberna quando sumus
    Non curamus quid sit humus[250].’

And especially they were satirists, satirists mainly of the hypocrisy,
cupidity and evil living of those in the high places of the Church,
for whom they conceived a grotesque expression in Bishop Golias, a
type of materialistic prelate, in whose name they wrote and whose
_pueri_ or _discipuli_ they declared themselves to be[251]. _Goliardi_,
_goliardenses_, their reputation in the eyes of the ecclesiastical
authorities was of the worst, and their ill practices are coupled with
those of the minstrels in many a condemnatory decree[252].

It is not with the _goliardi_ then, that Thomas de Cabham’s relaxation
of the strict ecclesiastical rigours is concerned. Neither is it,
naturally enough, with the lower minstrels of the _mimus_ tradition.
Towards these Thomas de Cabham, like his predecessors, is inexorable.
And even of the higher minstrels the musicians and singers, his
toleration has its limits. He discriminates. In a sense, a social
and professional sense, all these higher minstrels fall into the
same class. But from the ethical point of view there is a very
marked distinction amongst them. Some there are who haunt taverns
and merry-makings with loose songs of love and dalliance. These it
is not to be expected that the holy mother Church should in any way
countenance. Her toleration must be reserved for those more reputable
performers who find material for their verse either in the life
and conversation of the saints and martyrs themselves, or at least
in the noble and inspiring deeds of national heroes and champions.
Legends of the saints and gests of princes: if the minstrels will
confine themselves to the celebration of these, then, secure in
the pronouncement of a pope, they may claim a hearing even from
the devout. It would be rash to assert that even the comparatively
liberal theory of Thomas de Cabham certainly justified in all cases
the practice of the monasteries. But it is at least noteworthy that
in several instances where the subjects of the minstrelsy presented
for the delectation of a cowled audience remain upon record, they do
fall precisely within the twofold definition which he lays down. At
Winchester in 1338 the minstrel Herbert sang the song of Colbrond (or
Guy of Warwick), and the gest of the miraculous deliverance of Queen
Emma; while at Bicester in 1432 it was the legend of the Seven Sleepers
of Ephesus that made the Epiphany entertainment of the assembled canons.

If now we set aside the very special class of ribald _galiardi_, and
if we set aside also the distinction drawn by Thomas de Cabham on
purely ethical grounds between the minstrels of the love-songs and the
minstrels of saintly or heroic gest, the net result is the twofold
classification of higher and lower minstrels already familiar to us.
Roughly--it must always be borne in mind how roughly--it corresponds
on the one hand to the difference between the Teutonic and the Roman
tradition, on the other to the distinction between the established
‘minstrel of honour’ and his unattached rival of the road. And there
is abundant evidence that such a distinction was generally present,
and occasionally became acute, in the consciousness of the minstrels
themselves. The aristocrats of minstrelsy, a Baudouin or a Jean de
Condé, or a Watriquet de Couvin, have very exalted ideas as to the
dignity of their profession. They will not let you, if they can help
it, put the _grans menestreus_ on the same level with every-day
_jangleur_ of poor attainments and still poorer repute[253]. In
the _Dit des Taboureurs_ again it is a whole class, the _joueurs de
vielle_, who arise to vindicate their dignity and to pour scorn upon
the humble and uninstructed drummers[254]. But the most instructive and
curious evidence comes from Provence. It was in 1273, when the amazing
growth of Provençal poetry was approaching its sudden decay, that the
last of the great troubadours, Guiraut de Riquier, addressed a verse
_Supplicatio_ to Alphonso X of Castile on the state of minstrelsy.
He points out the confusion caused by the indiscriminate grouping
of poets, singers, and entertainers of all degrees under the title
of _joglars_, and begs the king, as high patron of letters, to take
order for it. A reply from Alphonso, also in verse, and also, one
may suspect, due to the fertile pen of Guiraut Riquier, is extant.
Herein he establishes or confirms a fourfold hierarchy. At the head
come two classes, the _doctors de trobar_ and the _trobaires_, who are
composers, the former of didactic, the latter of ordinary songs and
melodies. Beneath these are the _joglars_ proper, instrumentalists
and reciters of delightful stories, and beneath these again the
_bufos_, the entertainers of common folk, who have really no claim
to be considered as _joglars_ at all[255]. One of the distinctions
here made is new to us. The difference between _doctor de trobar_ and
_trobaire_ is perhaps negligible. But that between the _trobaire_ or
composer and the _joglar_ or executant of poetry, is an important one.
It is not, however, so far as the Teutonic element in minstrelsy goes,
primitive. The _scôpas_ and the French or Anglo-Norman _ioculatores_
up to the twelfth century composed their verses as a class, and sang
them as well[256]. In Provence, however, the Teutonic element in
minstrelsy must have been of the slightest, and perhaps the Roman
tradition, illustrated by the story of Laberius, of a marked barrier
between composing and executing, had vaguely lingered. At any rate it
is in Provence, in the eleventh century, that the distinction between
_trobaire_ and _joglar_ makes its appearance. It never became a very
complete one. The _trobaire_ was generally, not always, of gentle or
burgess birth; sometimes actually a king or noble. In the latter case
he contented himself with writing his songs, and let the _joglars_
spread them abroad. But the bulk of the _trobaires_ lived by their art.
They wandered from castle to castle, alone with a _vielle_, or with
_joglars_ in their train, and although they mingled with their hosts
on fairly equal terms, they did not disdain to take their rewards of
horse or mantle or jewel, just like any common performer. Moreover,
they confined themselves to lyric poetry, leaving the writing of epic,
so far as epic was abroad in Provence, to the _joglars_[257]. From
Provence, the _trobaire_ spread to other countries, reappearing in
the north of France and England as the _trouvère_. We seem to trace
an early _trouvère_ in Lucas de Barre in the time of Henry I. But
it is Eleanor of Poitiers, daughter of the _trobaire_ count William
of Poitiers, and mother of the _trouvère_ Richard Cœur de Lion,
who appears as the chief intermediary between north and south. The
intrusion of the _trouvère_ was the first step in the degradation of
minstrelsy. Amongst the Anglo-Saxons, even apart from the _cantilenae_
of the folk, the professional singer had no monopoly of song. Hrothgar
and Alfred harped with their _scôpas_. But if there had been a similar
tendency amongst the continental Teutons who merged in the French
and Norman-French, it had been checked by the complete absorption
of all literary energies, outside the minstrel class, in neo-Latin.
It was not until the twelfth century, and as has been said, under
Provençal influence, that secular-minded clerks, and exceptionally
educated nobles, merchants, or officials, began to devote themselves
to the vernacular, and by so doing to develop the _trouvère_ type.
The _trouvère_ had the advantage of the minstrel in learning and
independence, if not in leisure; and though the latter long held his
own by the side of his rival, he was fated in the end to give way,
and to content himself with the humbler task of spreading abroad what
the _trouvère_ wrote[258]. By the second quarter of the fourteenth
century, the conquest of literature by the _bourgeoisie_ was complete.
The interest had shifted from the minstrel on the hall floor to the
burgher or clerk in the _puy_; the prize of a successful poem was no
longer a royal mantle, but a laureate crown or the golden violet of the
_jeux floraux_; and its destiny less to be recited at the banquet, than
read in the bower. In England the completion of the process perhaps
came a little later, and was coincident with the triumph of English,
the tongue of the _bourgeois_, over French, the tongue of the noble.
The full flower of minstrelsy had been the out-at-elbows vagabond,
Rutebeuf. The full flower of the _trouvère_ is the comptroller of the
customs and subsidies of the port of London, Geoffrey Chaucer.

The first distinction, then, made by Guiraut Riquier, that between
_trobaire_ and _joglar_, implies a development from within minstrelsy
itself that was destined one day to overwhelm it. But the second,
that between the _joglar_ and the _bufo_, is precisely the one
already familiar to us, between the minstrels of the _scôp_ and the
minstrels of the _mimus_ tradition. And, as has been said, it is
partly, if not entirely, identical with that which grew up in course
of time between the protected minstrels of the court and of great
men’s houses, and their vagrant brethren of the road. This general
antithesis between the higher and lower mintrelsy may now, perhaps, be
regarded as established. It was the neglect of it, surely, that led to
that curious and barren logomachy between Percy and Ritson, in which
neither of the disputants can be said to have had hold of more than a
bare half of the truth[259]. And it runs through the whole history of
minstrelsy. It became acute, no doubt, with the growth in importance
of the minstrels of honour in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
But it had probably been just as acute, if not more so, at the very
beginning of things, when the clash of Teutonic and Roman civilization
first brought the bard face to face with the serious rivalry of the
mime. Bard and mime merged without ever becoming quite identical; and
even at the moment when this process was most nearly complete, say in
the eleventh century, the _jouglerie seigneuriale_, to use Magnin’s
happy terms, was never quite the same thing as the _jouglerie foraine
et populaire_[260], least of all in a country like England where
differences of tongue went to perpetuate and emphasize the breach.

Nevertheless, the antithesis may easily be pushed too far. After
all, the minstrels were entertainers, and therefore their business
was to entertain. Did the lord yawn over a gest or a saintly legend?
the discreet minstrel would be well advised to drop high art, and
to substitute some less exacting, even if less refined fashion of
passing the time. The instincts of boor and baron were not then, of
course, so far apart as they are nowadays. And as a matter of fact
we find many of the most eminent minstrels boasting of the width
and variety of their accomplishments. Thus of Baudouin II, count of
Guisnes (1169-1206), it is recorded that he might have matched the most
celebrated professionals, not only in _chansons de gestes_ and _romans
d’aventure_ but also in the _fabliaux_ which formed the delight of the
vulgar _bourgeoisie_[261]. Less aristocratic performers descended even
lower than Baudouin de Guisnes. If we study the répertoires of such
_jougleurs_ as the diabolic one in Gautier de Coincy’s miracle[262],
or Daurel in the romance of _Daurel et Beton_[263], or the disputants
who vaunt their respective proficiencies in _Des Deus Bordeors
Ribauz_[264], we shall find that they cover not only every conceivable
form of minstrel literature proper, but also tricks with knives and
strings, sleight of hand, dancing and tumbling. Even in Provence, the
_Enseignamens_ for _joglars_ warn their readers to learn the arts of
imitating birds, throwing knives, leaping through hoops, showing off
performing asses and dogs, and dangling marionettes[265]. So that one
discerns the difference between the lower and the higher minstrels to
have been not so much that the one did not sink so low, as that the
other, for lack of capacity and education, did not rise so high.

The palmy days of minstrelsy were the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. The germ of decay, however, which appeared when the
separation grew up between _trouvère_ and _jougleur_, and when men
began to read books instead of listening to recitations, was further
developed by the invention of printing. For then, while the _trouvère_
could adapt himself readily enough to the new order of things, the
_jougleur’s_ occupation was gone. Like Benedick he might still be
talking, but nobody marked him. Eyes cast down over a page of Chaucer
or of Caxton had no further glitter or tear for him to win[266]. The
fifteenth, and still more the sixteenth century, witness the complete
break-up of minstrelsy in its mediaeval form. The mimes of course
endured. They survived the overthrow of mediaevalism, as they had
survived the overthrow of the Empire[267]. The Tudor kings and nobles
had still their jugglers, their bearwards, their domestic buffoons,
jesters or fools[268]. Bearbaiting in Elizabethan London rivalled the
drama in its vogue. Acrobats and miscellaneous entertainers never
ceased to crowd to every fair, and there is applause even to-day
in circus and music-hall for the old jests and the old somersaults
that have already done duty for upwards of twenty centuries. But the
_jougleur_ as the thirteenth century knew him was by the sixteenth
century no more. Professional musicians there were in plenty; ‘Sneak’s
noise’ haunted the taverns of Eastcheap[269], and instrumentalists
and vocalists in royal palaces and noble mansions still kept the name
and style of minstrels. But they were not minstrels in the old sense,
for with the production of literature, except perhaps for a song here
and there, they had no longer anything to do. That had passed into
other hands, and even the lineaments of the _trouvère_ are barely
recognizable in the new types of poets and men of letters whom the
Renaissance produced. The old fashioned minstrel in his style and habit
as he lived, was to be presented before Elizabeth at Kenilworth as an
interesting anachronism[270]. Some of the discarded entertainers, as we
shall see, were absorbed into the growing profession of stage-players;
others sunk to be ballad singers. For to the illiterate the
story-teller still continued to appeal. The ballad indeed, at least on
one side of it, was the _detritus_, as the _lai_ had been the germ, of
romance[271], and at the very moment when Spenser was reviving romance
as a conscious archaism, it was still possible for a blind fiddler with
a ballad to offend the irritable susceptibilities of a Puritan, or to
touch the sensitive heart-strings of a Sidney[272]. But as a social and
literary force, the glory of minstrelsy had departed[273].

                              CHAPTER IV

                        THE MINSTREL REPERTORY

The floor of a mediaeval court, thronged with minstrels of every
degree, provided at least as various an entertainment as the Roman
stage itself[274]. The performances of the mimes, to the accompaniment
of their despised tabor or wry-necked fife, undoubtedly made up in
versatility for what they lacked in decorum. There were the _tombeors_,
_tombesteres_ or _tumbleres_, acrobats and contortionists, who
twisted themselves into incredible attitudes, leapt through hoops,
turned somersaults, walked on their heads, balanced themselves in
perilous positions. Female tumblers, _tornatrices_, took part in these
feats, and several districts had their own characteristic modes of
tumbling, such as _le tour français_, _le tour romain_, _le tour de
Champenois_[275]. Amongst the _tombeors_ must be reckoned the rarer
_funambuli_ or rope-walkers, such as he whom the Corvei annals record
to have met with a sorry accident in the twelfth century[276], or he
who created such a _furore_ in the thirteenth by his aerial descent
from the cathedral at Basle[277]. Nor are they very distinct from the
crowd of dancers, male and female, who are variously designated as
_saltatores_ and _saltatrices_, ‘sautours,’ ‘sailyours,’ ‘hoppesteres.’
Indeed, in many mediaeval miniatures, the daughter of Herodias, dancing
before Herod, is represented rather as tumbling or standing on her head
than in any more subtle pose[278]. A second group includes the jugglers
in the narrower sense, the _jouers des costeax_ who tossed and caught
knives and balls[279], and the practitioners of sleight of hand, who
generally claimed to proceed by _nigremance_ or sorcery[280]. The two
seem to have shared the names of _prestigiatores_ or _tregetours_[281].
Other mimes, the _bastaxi_, or _jouers des basteax_, brought round,
like the Punch and Judy men of our own day, little wooden performing
puppets or marionettes[282]. Others, to whom Thomas de Cabham more
particularly refers, came in masked as animals, and played the dog, the
ass or the bird with appropriate noises and behaviour[283]. Others,
again, led round real animals; generally bears or apes, occasionally
also horses, cocks, hares, dogs, camels and even lions[284]. Sometimes
these beasts did tricks; too often they were baited[285], and from
time to time a man, lineal descendant of the imperial gladiators,
would step forward to fight with them[286]. To the gladiatorial shows
may perhaps also be traced the fight with wooden swords which often
formed a part of the fun[287]. And, finally, whatever the staple of
the performance, there was the _parade_ or preliminary patter to call
the audience together, and throughout the ‘carping,’ a continuous
flow of rough witticism and repartee, such as one is accustomed to
hear Joey, the clown, in the pauses of a circus, pass off on Mr.
Harris, the ring-master[288]. Here came in the especial talents of the
_scurra_, _bordeor_ or _japere_, to whom the moralists took such marked
exception. ‘_L’uns fet l’ivre, l’autre le sot_’ says the _fabliau_; and
indeed we do not need the testimony of Thomas de Cabham or of John of
Salisbury to conclude that such buffoonery was likely to be of a ribald
type[289].

Even in the high places of minstrelsy there was some measure of
variety. A glance at the pay-sheet of Edward I’s Whitsuntide feast
will show that the minstrels who aspired to be musicians were
habitually distinguished by the name of the musical instrument on which
they played. They are _vidulatores_, _citharistae_, _trumpatores_,
_vilours_, _gigours_, _crouderes_, _harpours_, _citolers_, _lutours_,
_trumpours_, _taboreurs_ and the like. The harp (_cithara_), played
by twitching the strings, had been the old instrument of the Teutons,
but in the Middle Ages it came second in popularity to the _vielle_
(_vidula_), which was also a string instrument, but, like the modern
fiddle, was played with a bow. The drum (_tympanum_, _tabour_) was,
as we have seen, somewhat despised, and relegated to the mimes. The
trumpeters appear less often singly than in twos and threes, and it
is possible that their performances may have been mainly ceremonial
and of a purely instrumental order. But the use of music otherwise
than to accompany the voice does not seem to have gone, before the
end of the thirteenth century, much beyond the signals, flourishes
and fanfares required for wars, triumphs and processions. Concerted
instrumental music was a later development[290]. The ordinary function
of the harp or _vielle_ in minstrelsy was to assist the voice of
the minstrel in one of the many forms of poetry which the middle
ages knew. These were both lyric and narrative. The distinction is
roughly parallel to that made by Thomas de Cabham when he subdivides
his highest grades of minstrels into those who sing wanton songs at
taverns, and those more properly called _ioculatores_ who solace the
hearts of men with reciting the deeds of the heroes and the lives
of the saints. The themes of mediaeval lyric, as of all lyric, are
largely wantonness and wine; but it must be borne in mind that Thomas
de Cabham’s classification is primarily an ethical one, and does not
necessarily imply any marked difference of professional status between
the two classes. The haunters of taverns and the solacers of the
virtuous were after all the same minstrels, or at least minstrels of
the same order. That the _chansons_, in their innumerable varieties,
caught up from folk-song, or devised by Provençal ingenuity, were
largely in the mouths of the minstrels, may be taken for granted. It
was here, however, that the competition of _trobaire_ and _trouvère_
began earliest, and proved most triumphant, and the supreme minstrel
_genre_ was undoubtedly the narrative. This was, in a sense, their
creation, and in it they held their own, until the laity learned to
read and the _trouvères_ became able to eke out the shortness of their
memories by writing down or printing their stories. With narrative,
no doubt, the minstrels of highest repute mainly occupied themselves.
Harp or _vielle_ in hand they beguiled many a long hour for knight
and _châtelaine_ with the interminable _chansons de gestes_ in honour
of Charlemagne and his heroic band[291], or, when the vogue of these
waned, as in time it did, with the less primitive _romans d’aventure_,
of which those that clustered round the Keltic Arthur were the widest
famed. Even so their repertory was not exhausted. They had _lais_,
_dits_ and _contes_ of every kind; the devout _contes_ that Thomas de
Cabham loved, historical _contes_, romantic _contes_ of less alarming
proportions than the genuine _romans_. And for the _bourgeoisie_ they
had those improper, witty _fabliaux_, so racy of the French soil, in
which the _esprit gaulois_, as we know it, found its first and not its
least characteristic expression. In most of these types the music of
the instrument bore its part. The shorter _lais_ were often accompanied
musically throughout[292]. The longer poems were delivered in a chant
or recitative, the monotony of which was broken at intervals by a
phrase or two of intercalated melody, while during the rest of the
performance a few perfunctory notes served to sustain the voice[293].
And at times, especially in the later days of minstrelsy, the harp
or _vielle_ was laid aside altogether, and the singer became a mere
story-teller. The antithesis, no infrequent one, between minstrel,
and _fabulator_, _narrator_, _fableor_, _conteor, estour_, _disour_,
_segger_, though all these are themselves elsewhere classed as
minstrels, sufficiently suggests this[294]. It was principally, one may
surmise, the _dits_ and _fabliaux_ that lent themselves to unmusical
narration; and when prose crept in, as in time it did, even before
reading became universal, it can hardly have been sung. An interesting
example is afforded by _Aucassin et Nicolete_, which is what is known
as a _cantefable_. That is to say, it is written in alternate sections
of verse and prose. The former have, in the Paris manuscript, a musical
accompaniment, and are introduced with the words ‘_Or se cante_’; the
latter have no music, and the introduction ‘_Or content et dient et
fablent_.’

A further differentiation amongst minstrels was of linguistic origin.
This was especially apparent in England. The mime is essentially
cosmopolitan. In whatever land he finds himself the few sentences of
patter needful to introduce his _tour_ or his _nigremance_ are readily
picked up. It is not so with any entertainer whose performances claim
to rank, however humbly, as literature. And the Conquest in England
brought into existence a class of minstrels who, though they were by
no means mimes, were yet obliged to compete with mimes, making their
appeal solely to the _bourgeoisie_ and the peasants, because their
speech was not that of the Anglo-Norman lords and ladies who formed the
more profitable audiences of the castles. The native English gleemen
were eclipsed at courts by the Taillefers and Raheres of the invading
host. But they still held the road side by side with their rivals,
shorn of their dignities, and winning a precarious livelihood from
the shrunken purses of those of their own blood and tongue[295]. It
was they who sang the unavailing heroisms of Hereward, and, if we may
judge by the scanty fragments and records that have come down to us,
they remained for long the natural focus and mouthpiece of popular
discontent and anti-court sentiment. In the reign of Edward III a
gleeman of this type, Laurence Minot, comes to the front, voicing the
spirit of an England united in its nationalism by the war against
France; the rest are, for the most part, nameless[296]. Naturally the
English gleemen did not remain for ever a proscribed and isolated folk.
One may suspect that at the outset many of them became bilingual. At
any rate they learnt to mingle with their Anglo-Norman _confrères_:
they borrowed the themes of continental minstrelsy; translating
_roman_, _fabliau_ and _chanson_ into the metres and dialects of the
vernacular; and had their share in that gradual fusion of the racial
elements of the land, whose completion was the preparation for Chaucer.

Besides the Saxons, there were the Kelts. In the provinces of France
that bordered on Armorica, in the English counties that marched
with Wales, the Keltic harper is no unusual or negligible figure.
Whether such minstrels ranked very high in the bardic hierarchy of
their own peoples may be doubted; but amid alien folk they achieved
popularity[297]. Both Giraldus Cambrensis and Thomas the author
of _Tristan_ speak of a certain _famosus fabulator_ of this class,
Bledhericus or Breri by name[298]. Through Breri and his like the
Keltic traditions filtered into Romance literature, and an important
body of scholars are prepared to find in _lais_ sung to a Welsh or
Breton harp the _origines_ of Arthurian romance[299]. In England the
Welsh, like the English-speaking minstrels, had a political, as well
as a literary significance. They were the means by which the spirit
of Welsh disaffection under English rule was kept alive, and at times
fanned into a blaze. The fable of the massacre of the bards by Edward
I is now discredited, but an ordinance of his against Keltic ‘bards
and rhymers’ is upon record, and was subsequently repeated under Henry
IV[300].

An important question now presents itself. How far, in this
heterogeneous welter of mediaeval minstrelsy, is it possible to
distinguish any elements which can properly be called dramatic? The
minstrels were entertainers in many _genres_. Were they also actors?
An answer may be sought first of all in their literary remains. The
first condition of drama is dialogue, and dialogue is found both in
lyric and in narrative minstrelsy. Naturally, it is scantiest in lyric.
But there is a group of _chansons_ common to northern France and to
southern France or Provence, which at least tended to develop in this
direction. There are the _chansons à danser_, which are frequently
a semi-dialogue between a soloist and a chorus, the one singing the
verses, the other breaking into a burden or refrain. There are the
_chansons à personnages_ or _chansons de mal mariée_, complaints of
unhappy wives, which often take the form of a dialogue between the
woman and her husband, her friend or, it may be, the poet, occasionally
that of a discussion on courtly love in general. There are the _aubes_,
of which the type is the morning dialogue between woman and lover
adapted by Shakespeare with such splendid effect in the third act of
_Romeo and Juliet_. And finally there are the _pastourelles_, which are
generally dialogues between a knight and a shepherdess, in which the
knight makes love and, successful or repulsed, rides away. All these
_chansons_, like the _chansons d’histoire_ or _de toile_, which did
not develop into dialogues, are, in the form in which we have them, of
minstrel origin. But behind them are probably folk-songs of similar
character, and M. Gaston Paris is perhaps right in tracing them to the
_fêtes du mai_, those agricultural festivals of immemorial antiquity
in which women traditionally took so large a part. A further word will
have to be said of their ultimate contribution to drama in a future
chapter[301].

Other lyrical dialogues of very different type found their way into
the literature of northern France from that of Provence. These were
the elaborate disputes about abstract questions, generally of love,
so dear to the artistic and scholastic mind of the _trobaire_. There
was the _tenson_ (Fr. _tençon_) in which two speakers freely discussed
a given subject, each taking the point of view which seems good to
him. And there was the _joc-partitz_ or _partimen_ (Fr. _jeu-parti_
or _parture_), in which the challenger proposed a theme, indicated
two opposed attitudes towards it, and gave his opponent his choice
to maintain one or other[302]. Originally, no doubt the _tensons_
and the _jocs-partitz_ were, as they professed to be, improvised
verbal tournaments: afterwards they became little more than academic
exercises[303]. To the drama they have nothing to say.

The dialogue elements in lyric minstrelsy thus exhausted, we turn to
the wider field of narrative. But over the greater space of this field
we look in vain. If there is anything of dialogue in the _chansons de
gestes_ and the _romans_ it is merely reported dialogue such as every
form of narrative poetry contains, and is not to the purpose. It is not
until we come to the humbler branches of narrative, the unimportant
_contes_ and _dits_, that we find ourselves in the presence of dialogue
proper. _Dits_ and _fabliaux dialogués_ are not rare[304]. There is the
already quoted _Deus Bordeors Ribauz_ in which two _jougleurs_ meet
and vaunt in turn their rival proficiencies in the various branches of
their common art[305]. There is Rutebeuf’s _Charlot et le Barbier_,
a similar ‘flyting’ between two gentlemen of the road[306]. There is
_Courtois d’Arras_, a version of the Prodigal Son story[307]. There
is _Le Roi d’Angleterre et le Jongleur d’Ely_, a specimen of witty
minstrel repartee, of which more will be said immediately. These
dialogues naturally tend to become of the nature of disputes, and they
merge into that special kind of _dit_, the _débat_ or _disputoison_
proper. The _débat_ is a kind of poetical controversy put into the
mouths of two types or two personified abstractions, each of which
pleads the cause of its own superiority, while in the end the decision
is not infrequently referred to an umpire in the fashion familiar in
the eclogues of Theocritus[308]. The _débats_ thus bear a strong
resemblance to the lyric _tençons_ and _jeux-partis_ already mentioned.
Like the _chansons_, they probably owe something to the folk festivals
with their ‘flytings’ and seasonal songs. In any case they are common
ground to minstrelsy and to the clerkly literature of the Middle Ages.
Many of the most famous of them, such as the _Débat de l’Hiver et de
l’Été_, the _Débat du Vin et de l’Eau_, the _Débat du Corps et de
l’Âme_, exist in neo-Latin forms, the intermediaries being naturally
enough those _vagantes_ or wandering scholars, to whom so much of the
interaction of learned and of popular literature must be due[309]. And
in their turn many of the _débats_ were translated sooner or later into
English. English literature, indeed, had had from Anglo-Saxon days a
natural affinity for the dialogue form[310], and presents side by
side with the translated _débats_ others--_strifs_ or _estrifs_ is the
English term--of native origin[311]. The thirteenth-century _Harrowing
of Hell_ is an _estrif_ on a subject familiar in the miracle plays:
and for an early miracle play it has sometimes been mistaken[312]. Two
or three other _estrifs_ of English origin are remarkable, because the
interlocutors are not exactly abstractions, but species of birds and
animals[313].

Dialogue then, in one shape or another, was part of the minstrel’s
regular stock-in-trade. But dialogue by itself is not drama. The notion
of drama does not, perhaps, necessarily imply scenery on a regular
stage, but it does imply impersonation and a distribution of rôles
between at least two performers. Is there anything to be traced in
minstrelsy that satisfies these conditions? So far as impersonation is
concerned, there are several scattered notices which seem to show that
it was not altogether unknown. In the twelfth century for instance,
Ælred, abbot of Rievaulx, commenting on certain unpleasing innovations
in the church services of the day, complains that the singers use
gestures just like those of _histriones_, fit rather for a _theatrum_
than for a house of prayer[314]. The word _theatrum_ is, however, a
little suspicious, for an actual theatre in the twelfth century is
hardly thinkable, and with a learned ecclesiastic one can never be sure
that he is not drawing his illustrations rather from his knowledge of
classical literature than from the real life around him. It is more
conclusive, perhaps, when _fabliaux_ or _contes_ speak of minstrels as
‘doing’ _l’ivre_, or _le cat_, or _le sot_[315]; or when it appears
from contemporary accounts that at a performance in Savoy the manners
of England and Brittany were mimicked[316]. In Provence _contrafazedor_
seems to have been a regular name for a minstrel[317]; and the facts
that the minstrels wore masks ‘with intent to deceive’[318], and were
forbidden to wear ecclesiastical dresses[319], also point to something
in the way of rudimentary impersonation.

As for the distribution of rôles, all that can be said, so far as the
_débats_ and _dits dialogués_ go, is, that while some of them may
conceivably have been represented by more than one performer, none
of them need necessarily have been so, and some of them certainly
were not. There is generally a narrative introduction and often a
sprinkling of narrative interspersed amongst the dialogue. These parts
may have been pronounced by an _auctor_ or by one of the interlocutors
acting as _auctor_, and some such device must have been occasionally
necessitated in the religious drama. But there is really no difficulty
in supposing the whole of these pieces to have been recited by a single
minstrel with appropriate changes of gesture and intonation, and in
_The Harrowing of Hell_, which begins ‘A strif will I tellen of,’ this
was clearly the case. The evidences of impersonation given above are of
course quite consistent with such an arrangement; or, for the matter of
that, with sheer monologue. The minstrel who recited Rutebeuf’s _Dit
de l’Erberie_ may readily be supposed to have got himself up in the
character of a quack[320].

But the possibilities of secular mediaeval drama are not quite
exhausted by the _débats_ and _dits dialogués_. For after all, the
written literature which the minstrels have left us belongs almost
entirely to those higher _strata_ of their complex fraternity which
derived from the thoroughly undramatic Teutonic _scôp_. But if
mediaeval farce there were, it would not be here that we should look
for it. It would belong to the inheritance, not of the _scôp_, but of
the _mimus_. The Roman _mimus_ was essentially a player of farces;
that and little else. It is of course open to any one to suppose that
the _mimus_ went down in the seventh century playing farces, and that
his like appeared in the fifteenth century playing farces, and that
not a farce was played between. But is it not more probable on the
whole that, while occupying himself largely with other matters, he
preserved at least the rudiments of the art of acting, and that when
the appointed time came, the despised and forgotten farce, under the
stimulus of new conditions, blossomed forth once more as a vital and
effective form of literature? In the absence of data we are reduced
to conjecture. But the mere absence of data itself does not render
the conjecture untenable. For if such rudimentary, or, if you please,
degenerate farces as I have in mind, ever existed in the Middle Ages,
the chances were all against their literary survival. They were
assuredly very brief, very crude, often improvised, and rarely, if
ever, written down. They belonged to an order of minstrels far below
that which made literature[321]. And one little bit of evidence which
has not yet been brought forward seems to point to the existence of
something in the way of a secular as well as a religious mediaeval
drama. In the well-known Wyclifite sermon against miracle plays, an
imaginary opponent of the preacher’s argument is made to say that after
all it is ‘lesse yvels that thei have thyre recreaceon by pleyinge of
myraclis than bi pleyinge of other japis’; and again that ‘to pley in
rebaudye’ is worse than ‘to pley in myriclis[322].’ Now, there is of
course no necessary dramatic connotation either in the word ‘pley’ or
in the word ‘japis,’ which, like ‘bourde’ or ‘gab’ is frequently used
of any kind of rowdy merriment, or of the lower types of minstrelsy in
general[323]. But on the other hand the whole tone of the passage seems
to draw a very close parallel between the ‘japis’ and the undeniably
dramatic ‘myriclis,’ and to imply something in the former a little
beyond the mere recitation, even with the help of impersonation, of a
solitary mime.

Such rude farces or ‘japis’ as we are considering, if they formed
part of the travelling equipment of the humbler mimes, could only
get into literature by an accident; in the event, that is to say, of
some minstrel of a higher class taking it into his head to experiment
in the form or to adapt it to the purposes of his own art. And this
is precisely what appears to have happened. A very natural use of
the farce would be in the _parade_ or preliminary patter, merely
about himself and his proficiency, which at all times has served the
itinerant entertainer as a means whereby to attract his audiences.
And just as the very similar _boniment_ or patter of the mountebank
charlatan at a fair became the model for Rutebeuf’s _Dit de l’Erberie_,
so the _parade_ may be traced as the underlying motive of other _dits_
or _fabliaux_. The _Deus Bordeors Ribauz_ is itself little other than a
glorified _parade_, and another, very slightly disguised, may be found
in the discomfiture of the king by the characteristic repartees of the
wandering minstrel in _Le Roi d’Angleterre et le Jougleur d’Ely_[324].
The _parade_, also, seems to be the origin of a certain familiar type
of dramatic prologue in which the author or the presenters of a play
appear in their own persons. The earliest example of this is perhaps
that enigmatic _Terentius et Delusor_ piece which some have thought to
point to a representation of Terence somewhere in the dark ages between
the seventh and the eleventh century[325]. And there is a later one in
the _Jeu du Pèlerin_ which was written about 1288 to precede Adan de la
Hale’s _Jeu de Robin et Marion_.

The renascence of farce in the fifteenth century will call for
consideration in a later chapter. It is possible that, as is here
suggested, that renascence was but the coming to light again of an
earth-bourne of dramatic tradition that had worked its way beneath
the ground ever since the theatres of the Empire fell. In any case,
rare documents of earlier date survive to show that it was at least
no absolutely sudden and unprecedented thing. The _jeux_ of Adan de
la Hale, indeed, are somewhat irrelevant here. They were not farces,
and will fall to be dealt with in the discussion of the popular
_fêtes_ from which they derive their origin[326]. But the French
farce of _Le Garçon et l’Aveugle_, ascribed to the second half of the
thirteenth century, is over a hundred years older than any of its
extant successors[327]. And even more interesting to us, because it is
of English _provenance_ and in the English tongue, is a fragment found
in an early fourteenth-century manuscript of a dramatic version of the
popular mediaeval tale of Dame Siriz[328]. This bears the heading _Hic
incipit interludium de Clerico et Puella_. But the significance of this
fateful word _interludium_ must be left for study at a later period,
when the history of the secular drama is resumed from the point at
which it must now be dropped.

                                BOOK II

                              FOLK DRAMA

    Stultorum infinitus est numerus.

                              ECCLESIASTES.

                               CHAPTER V

                       THE RELIGION OF THE FOLK

    [_Bibliographical Note._--The conversion of heathen England is
    described in the _Ecclesiastical History_ of Bede (C. Plummer,
    _Baedae Opera Historica_, 1896). Stress is laid on the imperfect
    character of the process by L. Knappert, _Le Christianisme et le
    Paganisme dans l’Histoire ecclésiastique de Bède le Vénérable_
    (in _Revue de l’Histoire des Religions_, 1897, vol. xxxv). A
    similar study for Gaul is E. Vacandard, _L’Idolatrie dans la
    Gaule_ (in _Revue des Questions historiques_, 1899, vol. lxv).
    Witness is borne to the continued presence of pre-Christian
    elements in the folk-civilization of western Europe both by the
    general results of folk-lore research and by the ecclesiastical
    documents of the early Middle Ages. Of these the most important
    in this respect are--(1) the _Decrees_ of Councils, collected
    generally in P. Labbe and G. Cossart, _Sacrosancta Concilia_
    (1671-2), and J. D. Mansi, _Sacrorum Conciliorum nova et
    amplissima Collectio_ (1759-98), and for England in particular
    in D. Wilkins, _Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae_ (1737)
    and A. W. Haddan and W. Stubbs, _Councils and Ecclesiastical
    Documents relating to Great Britain and Ireland_ (1869-78).
    An interesting series of extracts is given by G. Gröber, _Zur
    Volkskunde aus Concilbeschlüssen und Capitularien_ (1894):--(2)
    the _Penitentials_, or catalogues of sins and their penalties
    drawn up for the guidance of confessors. The most important
    English example is the _Penitential of Theodore_ (668-90), on
    which the _Penitentials of Bede_ and _of Egbert_ are based.
    Authentic texts are given by Haddan and Stubbs, vol. iii, and,
    with others of continental origin, in F. W. H. Wasserschleben,
    _Die Bussordnungen der abendländischen Kirche_ (1851), and H.
    J. Schmitz, _Die Bussbücher und die Bussdisciplin der Kirche_
    (1883). The most interesting for its heathen survivals is
    the eleventh-century _Collectio Decretorum_ of Burchardus of
    Worms (Migne, _P. L._ cxl, extracts in J. Grimm, _Teutonic
    Mythology_, iv. 1740):--(3) _Homilies_ or _Sermons_, such as the
    _Sermo_ ascribed to the seventh-century St. Eligius (_P. L._
    lxxxvii. 524, transl. Grimm, iv. 1737), and the eighth-century
    Frankish pseudo-Augustinian _Homilia de Sacrilegiis_ (ed.
    C. P. Caspari, 1886):--(4) the _Vitae_ of the apostles of
    the West, St. Boniface, St. Columban, St. Gall, and others.
    A critical edition of these is looked for from M. Knappert.
    The _Epistolae_ of Boniface are in _P. L._ lxxxix. 593:--(5)
    _Miscellaneous Documents_, including the sixth-century _De
    correctione Rusticorum_ of Bishop Martin of Braga in Spain (ed.
    C. P. Caspari, 1883) and the so-called _Indiculus Superstitionum
    et Paganiarum_ (ed. H. A. Saupe, 1891), a list of heathen
    customs probably drawn up in eighth-century Saxony.--The view
    of primitive religion taken in this book is largely, although
    not altogether in detail, that of J. G. Frazer, _The Golden
    Bough_ (1890, 2nd ed. 1900), which itself owes much to E. B.
    Tylor, _Primitive Culture_ (1871); W. Robertson Smith, _Religion
    of the Semites_ (2nd ed. 1894); W. Mannhardt, _Der Baumkultus
    der Germanen_ (1875); _Antike Wald-und Feldkulte_ (1875-7). A
    more systematic work on similar lines is F. B. Jevons, _An
    Introduction to the History of Religion_ (1896): and amongst many
    others may be mentioned A. Lang, _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_
    (1887, 2nd ed. 1899), the conclusions of which are somewhat
    modified in the same writer’s _The Making of Religion_ (1898);
    Grant Allen, _The Evolution of the Idea of God_ (1897); E. S.
    Hartland, _The Legend of Perseus_ (1894-6); J. Rhys, _The Origin
    and Growth of Religion as illustrated by Celtic Heathendom_
    (1888). The last of these deals especially with Keltic _data_,
    which may be further studied in H. D’Arbois de Jubainville, _Le
    Cycle mythologique irlandais et la Mythologie celtique_ (1884),
    together with the chapter on _La Religion_ in the same writer’s
    _La Civilisation des Celtes et celle de l’Épopée homérique_
    (1899) and A. Bertrand, _La Religion des Gaulois_ (1897).
    Teutonic religion has been more completely investigated. Recent
    works of authority are E. H. Meyer, _Germanische Mythologie_
    (1891); W. Golther, _Handbuch der germanischen Mythologie_
    (1895); and the article by E. Mogk on _Mythologie_ in H. Paul’s
    _Grundriss der germanischen Philologie_, vol. iii (2nd ed. 1897).
    The collection of material in J. Grimm’s _Teutonic Mythology_
    (transl. J. S. Stallybrass, 1880-8) is still of the greatest
    value. The general facts of early German civilization are
    given by F. B. Gummere, _Germanic Origins_ (1892), and for the
    Aryan-speaking peoples in general by O. Schräder, _Prehistoric
    Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples_ (transl. F. B. Jevons, 1890),
    and _Reallexicon der indo-germanischen Altertumskunde_ (1901).
    In dealing with the primitive calendar I have mainly, but not
    wholly, followed the valuable researches of A. Tille, _Deutsche
    Weihnacht_ (1893) and _Yule and Christmas_ (1899), a scholar the
    loss of whom to this country is one of the lamentable results of
    the recent war.]

Minstrelsy was an institution of the folk, no less than of the court
and the _bourgeoisie_. At many a village festival, one may be sure,
the taberers and buffoons played their conspicuous part, ravishing the
souls of Dorcas and Mopsa with merry and doleful ballads, and tumbling
through their amazing programme of monkey tricks before the ring of
wide-mouthed rustics on the green. Yet the soul and centre of such
revels always lay, not in these alien professional _spectacula_, but
in other entertainments, home-grown and racy of the soil, wherein the
peasants shared, not as onlookers only, but as performers, even as
their fathers and mothers, from immemorial antiquity, had done before
them. A full consideration of the village _ludi_ is important to the
scheme of the present book for more than one reason. They shared with
the _ludi_ of the minstrels the hostility of the Church. They bear
witness, at point after point, to the deep-lying dramatic instincts
of the folk. And their substantial contribution to mediaeval and
Renaissance drama and dramatic _spectacle_ is greater than has been
fully recognized.

Historically, the _ludi_ of the folk come into prominence with
the attacks made upon them by the reforming ecclesiastics of the
thirteenth century and in particular by Robert Grosseteste, bishop
of Lincoln[329]. Between 1236 and 1244 Grosseteste issued a series
of disciplinary pronouncements, in which he condemned many customs
prevalent in his diocese. Amongst these are included miracle plays,
‘scotales’ or drinking-bouts, ‘ram-raisings’ and other contests of
athletic prowess, together with ceremonies known respectively as the
_festum stultorum_ and the _Inductio Maii sive Autumni_[330]. Very
similar are the prohibitions contained in the _Constitutions_ (1240)
of Walter de Chanteloup, bishop of Worcester[331]. These particularly
specify the _ludus de Rege et Regina_, a term which may be taken as
generally applicable to the typical English folk-festival, of which
the _Inductio Maii sive Autumni_, the ‘May-game’ and ‘mell-supper,’
mentioned by Grosseteste, are varieties[332]. Both this _ludus_, in its
various forms, and the less strictly popular _festum stultorum_, will
find ample illustration in the sequel. Walter de Chanteloup also lays
stress upon an aggravation of the _ludi inhonesti_ by the performance
of them in churchyards and other holy places, and on Sundays or the
vigils and days of saints[333].

The decrees of the two bishops already cited do not stand alone. About
1250 the University of Oxford found it necessary to forbid the routs
of masked and garlanded students in the churches and open places of
the city[334]. These appear to have been held in connexion with the
feasts of the ‘nations’ into which a mediaeval university was divided.
Articles of visitation drawn up in connexion with the provisions of
Oxford in 1253 made inquiry as to several of the obnoxious _ludi_ and
as to the measures adopted to check them throughout the country[335].
Prohibitions are upon record by the synod of Exeter in 1287[336],
and during the next century by the synod of York in 1367[337], and
by William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, in 1384[338]; while
the denunciations of the rulers of the church find an unofficial
echo in that handbook of ecclesiastical morality, Robert Mannyng of
Brunne’s _Handlyng Synne_[339]. There is, however, reason to suppose
that the attitude thus taken up hardly represents that of the average
ecclesiastical authority, still less that of the average parish
priest, towards the _ludi_ in question. The condemnatory decrees
should probably be looked upon as the individual pronouncements of
men of austere or reforming temper against customs which the laxer
discipline of their fellows failed to touch; perhaps it should rather
be said, which the wiser discipline of their fellows found it better to
regulate than to ban. At any rate there is evidence to show that the
village _ludi_, as distinct from the _spectacula_ of the minstrels,
were accepted, and even to some extent directed, by the Church. They
became part of the parochial organization, and were conducted through
the parochial machinery. Doubtless this was the course of practical
wisdom. But the moralist would find it difficult to deny that Robert
Grosseteste and Walter de Chanteloup had, after all, some reason on
their side. On the one hand they could point to the ethical lapses
of which the _ludi_ were undoubtedly the cause--the drunkenness, the
quarrels, the wantonings, by which they were disgraced[340]. And on
the other they could--if they were historically minded--recall the
origin of the objectionable rites in some of those obscure survivals
of heathenism in the rustic blood, which half a dozen centuries of
Christianity had failed to purge[341]. For if the comparative study
of religions proves anything it is, that the traditional beliefs and
customs of the mediaeval or modern peasant are in nine cases out of ten
but the _detritus_ of heathen mythology and heathen worship, enduring
with but little external change in the shadow of an hostile creed.
This is notably true of the village festivals and their _ludi_. Their
full significance only appears when they are regarded as fragments of
forgotten cults, the naïve cults addressed by a primitive folk to the
beneficent deities of field and wood and river, or the shadowy populace
of its own dreams. Not that when even the mediaeval peasant set up his
May-pole at the approach of summer or drove his cattle through the
bonfire on Midsummer eve, the real character of his act was at all
explicit in his consciousness. To him, as to his descendant of to-day,
the festival was at once a practice sanctioned by tradition and the
rare amusement of a strenuous life: it was not, save perhaps in some
unplumbed recesses of his being, anything more definitely sacred. At
most it was held to be ‘for luck,’ and in some vague general way, to
the interest of a fruitful year in field and fold. The scientific
anthropologist, however, from his very different point of view, cannot
regard the conversion to Christianity as a complete solution of
continuity in the spiritual and social life of western Europe. This
conversion, indeed, was clearly a much slower and more incomplete
process than the ecclesiastical chroniclers quite plainly state. It
was so even on the shores of the Mediterranean. But there the triumph
of Christianity began from below. Long before the edict of Milan, the
new religion, in spite of persecutions, had got its firm hold upon
the masses of the great cities of the Empire. And when, less than a
century later, Theodosius made the public profession of any other faith
a crime, he was but formally acknowledging a _chose jugée_. But even in
these lands of the first ardour the old beliefs and, above all, the old
rituals died hard. Lingering unacknowledged in the country, the pagan,
districts, they passed silently into the dim realm of folk-lore. How
could this but be more so when Christianity came with the missionaries
of Rome or of Iona to the peoples of the West? For with them conversion
was hardly a spontaneous, an individual thing. As a rule, the baptism
of the king was the starting-point and motive for that of his
followers: and the bulk of the people adopted wonderingly an alien cult
in an alien tongue imposed upon them by the will of their rulers. Such
a Christianity could at best be only nominal. Ancient beliefs are not
so easily surrendered: nor are habits and instincts, deep-rooted in
the lives of a folk, thus lightly laid down for ever, at the word of a
king. The churches of the West had, therefore, to dispose somehow of a
vast body of practical heathenism surviving in all essentials beneath
a new faith which was but skin-deep. The conflict which followed is
faintly adumbrated in the pages of Bede: something more may be guessed
of its fortunes by a comparison of the customs and superstitions
recorded in early documents of church discipline with those which,
after all, the peasantry long retained, or even now retain.

Two letters of Gregory the Great, written at the time of the mission of
St. Augustine, are a key to the methods adopted by the apostles of the
West. In June 601, writing to Ethelbert of Kent by the hands of abbot
Mellitus, Gregory bade the new convert show zeal in suppressing the
worship of idols, and throwing down their fanes[342]. Having written
thus, the pope changed his mind. Before Mellitus could reach England,
he received a letter instructing him to expound to Augustine a new
policy. ‘Do not, after all,’ wrote Gregory, ‘pull down the fanes.
Destroy the idols; purify the buildings with holy water; set relics
there; and let them become temples of the true God. So the people will
have no need to change their places of concourse, and where of old
they were wont to sacrifice cattle to demons, thither let them continue
to resort on the day of the saint to whom the church is dedicated, and
slay their beasts no longer as a sacrifice, but for a social meal in
honour of Him whom they now worship[343].’ There can be little doubt
that the conversion of England proceeded in the main on the lines thus
laid down by Gregory. Tradition has it that the church of Saint Pancras
outside the walls of Canterbury stands on the site of a fane at which
Ethelbert himself once worshipped[344]; and that in London St. Paul’s
replaced a temple and grove of Diana, by whom the equivalent Teutonic
wood-goddess, Freyja, is doubtless intended[345]. Gregory’s directions
were, perhaps, not always carried out quite so literally as this. When,
for instance, the priest Coifi, on horseback and sword in hand, led
the onslaught against the gods of Northumbria, he bade his followers
set fire to the fane and to all the hedges that girt it round[346]. On
the other hand, Reduald, king of East Anglia, must have kept his fane
standing, and indeed he carried the policy of amalgamation further
than its author intended, for he wavered faint-heartedly between the
old religion and the new, and maintained in one building an _altare_
for Christian worship and an _arula_ for sacrifice to demons[347].
Speaking generally, it would seem to have been the endeavour of
the Christian missionaries to effect the change of creed with as
little dislocation of popular sentiment as possible. If they could
extirpate the essentials, or what they considered as the essentials,
of heathenism, they were willing enough to leave the accidentals to be
worn away by the slow process of time. They did not, probably, quite
realize how long it would take. And what happened in England, happened
also, no doubt, on the continent, save perhaps in such districts as
Saxony, where Christianity was introduced _vi et armis_, and therefore
in a more wholesale, if not in the end a more effectual fashion[348].

The measure of surviving heathenism under Christianity must have
varied considerably from district to district. Much would depend on
the natural temper of the converts, on the tact of the clergy and on
the influence they were able to secure. Roughly speaking, the old
worships left their trace upon the new society in two ways. Certain
central practices, the deliberate invocation of the discarded gods, the
deliberate acknowledgement of their divinity by sacrifice, were bound
to be altogether proscribed[349]. And these, if they did not precisely
vanish, at least went underground, coming to light only as shameful
secrets of the confessional[350] or the witch-trial[351], or when the
dominant faith received a rude shock in times of especial distress,
famine or pestilence[352]. Others again were absorbed into the scheme
of Christianity itself. Many of the protective functions, for instance,
of the old pantheon were taken over bodily by the Virgin Mary, by St.
John, St. Michael, St. Martin, St. Nicholas, and other personages of
the new dispensation[353]. And in particular, as we have seen shadowed
forth in Pope Gregory’s policy, the festal customs of heathenism,
purified so far as might be, received a generous amount of toleration.
The chief thing required was that the outward and visible signs of the
connexion with the hostile religion should be abandoned. Nor was this
such a difficult matter. Cult, the sum of what man feels it obligatory
upon him to do in virtue of his relation to the unseen powers, is
notoriously a more enduring thing than belief, the speculative, or
mythology, the imaginative statement of those relations. And it was
of the customs themselves that the people were tenacious, not of the
meaning, so far as there was still a meaning, attached to them, or
of the names which their priests had been wont to invoke. Leave them
but their familiar revels, and the ritual so indissolubly bound up
with their hopes of fertility for their flocks and crops, they would
not stick upon the explicit consciousness that they drank or danced
in the might of Eostre or of Freyr. And in time, as the Christian
interpretation of life became an everyday thing, it passed out of sight
that the customs had been ritual at all. At the most a general sense
of their ‘lucky’ influence survived. But to stop doing them; that was
not likely to suggest itself to the rustic mind. And so the church and
the open space around the church continued to be, what the temple and
the temple precinct had been, the centre, both secular and religious,
of the village life. From the Christian point of view, the arrangement
had its obvious advantages. It had also this disadvantage, that so
far as obnoxious elements still clung to the festivals, so far as the
darker practices of heathenism still lingered, it was precisely the
most sacred spot that they defiled. Were incantations and spells still
muttered secretly for the good will of the deposed divinities? it was
the churchyard that was sure to be selected as the nocturnal scene of
the unhallowed ceremony. Were the clergy unable to cleanse the yearly
wake of wanton dance and song? it was the church itself, by Gregory’s
own decree, that became the focus of the riot.

The partial survival of the village ceremonies under Christianity will
appear less surprising when it is borne in mind that the heathenism
which Christianity combated was itself only the final term of a long
process of evolution. The worshippers of the Keltic or Teutonic deities
already practised a traditional ritual, probably without any very
clear conception of the _rationale_ on which some at least of the acts
which they performed were based. These acts had their origin far back
in the history of the religious consciousness; and it must not be
supposed, because modern scholarship, with its comparative methods, is
able to some extent to reconstruct the mental conditions out of which
they arose, that these conditions were still wholly operative in the
sixth, any more than in the thirteenth or the twentieth century. Side
by side with customs which had still their definite and intelligible
significance, religious conservatism had certainly preserved others
of a very primitive type, some of which survived as mere fossils,
while others had undergone that transformation of intention, that
pouring of new wine into old bottles, which is one of the most familiar
features in the history of institutions. The heathenism of western
Europe must be regarded, therefore, as a group of religious practices
originating in very different strata of civilization, and only fused
together in the continuity of tradition. Its permanence lay in the
law of association through which a piece of ritual originally devised
by the folk to secure their practical well-being remained, even after
the initial meaning grew obscure, irrevocably bound up with their
expectations of that well-being. Its interest to the student is that of
a development, rather than that of a system. Only the briefest outline
of the direction taken by this development can be here indicated. But
it must first be pointed out that, whether from a common derivation,
or through a similar intellectual structure reacting upon similar
conditions of life, it seems, at least up to the point of emergence
of the fully formed village cult, to have proceeded on uniform lines,
not only amongst the Teutonic and Keltic tribes who inhabited western
and northern Europe and these islands, but also amongst all the
Aryan-speaking peoples. In particular, although the Teutonic and the
Keltic priests and bards elaborated, probably in comparatively late
stages of their history, very different god-names and very different
mythologies, yet these are but the superstructure of religion; and it
is possible to infer, both from the results of folk-lore and from the
more scanty documentary evidence, a substantial identity throughout
the whole Kelto-Teutonic group, of the underlying institutions
of ritual and of the fundamental theological conceptions[354].
I am aware that it is no longer permissible to sum up all the
facts of European civilization in an Aryan formula. Ethnology has
satisfactorily established the existence on the continent of at least
two important racial strains besides that of the blonde invader from
Latham-land[355]. But I do not think that any of the attempts hitherto
made to distinguish Aryan from pre-Aryan elements in folk-lore have
met with any measure of success[356]. Nor is it quite clear that any
such distinction need have been implied by the difference of blood.
Archaeologists speak of a remarkable uniformity of material culture
throughout the whole of Europe during the neolithic period; and there
appears to be no special reason why this uniformity may not have
extended to the comparatively simple notions which man was led to form
of the not-man by his early contacts with his environment. In any case
the social amalgamation of Aryan and pre-Aryan was a process already
complete by the Middle Ages; and for the purpose of this investigation
it seems justifiable, and in the present state of knowledge even
necessary, to treat the village customs as roughly speaking homogeneous
throughout the whole of the Kelto-Teutonic area.

An analysis of these customs suggests a mental history somewhat as
follows. The first relations of man to the not-man are, it need hardly
be said, of a practical rather than a sentimental or a philosophic
character. They arise out of an endeavour to procure certain goods
which depend, in part at least, upon natural processes beyond man’s
own control. The chief of these goods is, of course, food; that is to
say, in a primitive state of civilization, success in hunting, whether
of berries, mussels and ‘witchetty grubs,’ or of more elusive and
difficult game; and later, when hunting ceases to be the mainstay of
existence, the continued fertility of the flocks and herds, which form
the support of a pastoral race, and of the cornfields and orchards
which in their turn come to supplement these, on the appearance of
agriculture. Food once supplied, the little tale of primitive man’s
limited conception of the desirable is soon completed. Fire and a
roof-tree are his already. But he asks for physical health, for
success in love and in the begetting of offspring, and for the power
to anticipate by divination that future about which he is always so
childishly curious. In the pursuit, then, of these simple goods man
endeavours to control nature. But his earliest essays in this direction
are, as Dr. Frazer has recently pointed out, not properly to be called
religion[357]. The magical charms by which he attempts to make the
sun burn, and the waters fall, and the wind blow as it pleases him,
certainly do not imply that recognition of a quasi-human personality
outside himself, which any religious definition may be supposed to
require as a minimum. They are rather to be regarded as applications of
primitive science, for they depend upon a vague general notion of the
relations of cause and effect. To assume that you can influence a thing
through what is similar to it, or through what has been in contact with
it, which, according to Dr. Frazer, are the postulates of magic in its
mimetic and its sympathetic form respectively, may be bad science, but
at least it is science of a sort, and not religion.

The magical charms play a large part in the village ritual, and will
be illustrated in the following chapter. Presently, however, the
scientific spirit is modified by that tendency of animism through
which man comes to look upon the external world not as mere more or
less resisting matter to be moved hither or thither, but rather as a
debateable land peopled with spirits in some sense alive. These spirits
are the active forces dimly discerned by human imagination as at work
behind the shifting and often mysterious natural phenomena--forces of
the moving winds and waters, of the skies now clear, now overcast, of
the animal races of hill and plain, of the growth waxing and waning
year by year in field and woodland. The control of nature now means the
control of these powers, and to this object the charms are directed. In
particular, I think, at this stage of his development, man conceives
a spirit of that food which still remains in the very forefront of his
aspirations, of his actual food-plant, or of the animal species which
he habitually hunts[358]. Of this spirit he initiates a cult, which
rests upon the old magical principle of the mastering efficacy of
direct contact. He binds the spirit literally to him by wearing it as a
garment, or absorbs it into himself in a solemn meal, hoping by either
process to acquire an influence or power over it. Naturally, at this
stage, the spirit becomes to the eye of his imagination phytomorphic or
theriomorphic in aspect. He may conceive it as especially incarnate in
a single sacred plant or animal. But the most critical moment in the
history of animism is that at which the elemental spirits come to be
looked upon as anthropomorphic, made in the likeness of man himself.
This is perhaps due to the identification of them with those other
quasi-human spirits, of whose existence man has by an independent
line of thought also become aware. These are the ghostly spirits of
departed kinsmen, still in some shadowy way inhabiting or revisiting
the house-place. The change does not merely mean that the visible
phytomorphic and theriomorphic embodiments of mental forces sink into
subordination; the plants and animals becoming no more than symbols and
appurtenances of the anthropomorphic spirit, or temporary forms with
which from time to time he invests himself. A transformation of the
whole character of the cult is involved, for man must now approach the
spirits, not merely by charms, although conservatism preserves these
as an element in ritual, but with modifications of the modes in which
he approaches his fellow man. He must beg their favour with submissive
speech or buy it with bribes. And here, with prayer and oblation,
religion in the stricter sense makes its appearance.

The next step of man is from the crowd of animistic spirits to
isolate the god. The notion of a god is much the old notion of an
anthropomorphic elemental spirit, widened, exalted, and further
removed from sense. Instead of a local and limited home, the god has
his dwelling in the whole expanse of heaven or in some distant region
of space. He transcends and as an object of cult supplants the more
bounded and more concrete personifications of natural forces out of
which he has been evolved. But he does not annul these: they survive
in popular credence as his servants and ministers. It is indeed on the
analogy of the position of the human chief amongst his _comitatus_
that, in all probability, the conception of the god is largely arrived
at. Comparative philology seems to show that the belief in gods is
common to the Aryan-speaking peoples, and that at the root of all the
cognate mythologies there lies a single fundamental divinity. This is
the Dyaus of the Indians, the Zeus of the Greeks, the Jupiter of the
Romans, the Tiwaz (O.H.G. Zîu, O.N. Týr, A.-S. Tîw) of the Teutons.
He is an embodiment of the great clear sunlit heavens, the dispenser
of light to the huntsman, and of warmth and moisture to the crops.
Side by side with the conception of the heaven-god comes that of his
female counterpart, who is also, though less clearly, indicated in
all the mythologies. In her earliest aspect she is the lady of the
woods and of the blossoming fruitful earth. This primary dualism is an
extremely important factor in the explanation of early religion. The
all-father, the heaven, and the mother-goddess, the earth, are distinct
personalities from the beginning. It does not appear possible to
resolve one into a mere doublet or derivative of the other. Certainly
the marriage of earth and heaven in the showers that fertilize the
crops is one of the oldest and most natural of myths. But it is
generally admitted that myth is determined by and does not determine
the forms of cult. The heaven-god and the earth-goddess must have
already had their separate existence before the priests could hymn
their marriage. An explanation of the dualism is probably to be traced
in the merging of two cults originally distinct. These will have been
sex-cults. Tillage is, of course, little esteemed by primitive man.
It was so with the Germans, even up to the point at which they first
came into contact with the Romans[359]. Yet all the Aryan languages
show some acquaintance with the use of grains[360]. The analogy with
existing savages suggests that European agriculture in its early stages
was an affair of the women. While the men hunted or afterwards tended
their droves of cattle and horses, the women grubbed for roots, and
presently learnt to scratch the surface of the ground, to scatter the
seed, and painfully to garner and grind the scanty produce[361]. As the
avocations of the sexes were distinct, so would their magic or their
religion be. Each would develop rites of its own of a type strictly
determined by its practical ambitions, and each would stand apart from
the rites of the other. The interest of the men would centre in the
boar or stag, that of the women in the fruit-tree or the wheat-sheaf.
To the former the stone altar on the open hill-top would be holy; to
the latter the dim recesses of the impenetrable grove. Presently when
the god concept appeared, the men’s divinity would be a personification
of the illimitable and mysterious heavens beneath which they hunted
and herded, from which the pools were filled with water, and at times
the pestilence was darted in the sun rays; the women’s of the wooded
and deep-bosomed earth out of which their wealth sprang. This would
as naturally take a female as that a male form. Agriculture, however,
was not for ever left solely to the women. In time pasturage and
tillage came to be carried on as two branches of a single pursuit,
and the independent sex-cults which had sprung out of them coalesced
in the common village worship of later days. Certain features of the
primitive differentiation can still be obscurely distinguished. Here
and there one or the other sex is barred from particular ceremonies,
or a male priest must perform his mystic functions in woman’s garb.
The heaven-god perhaps remains the especial protector of the cattle,
and the earth-goddess of the corn. But generally speaking they have
all the interests of the farm in a joint tutelage. The stone altar
is set up in the sacred grove; the mystic tree is planted on the
hill-top[362]. Theriomorphic and phytomorphic symbols shadow forth a
single godhead[363]. The earth-mother becomes a divinity of light. The
heaven-father takes up his abode in the spreading oak.

The historic religions of heathenism have not preserved either the
primitive dualistic monotheism, if the phrase may be permitted, or
the simplicity of divine functions here sketched. With the advance of
civilization the objects of worship must necessarily take upon them new
responsibilities. If a tribe has its home by the sea, sooner or later
it trusts frail barks to the waters, and to its gods is committed the
charge of sea-faring. When handicrafts are invented, these also become
their care. When the pressure of tribe upon tribe leads to war, they
champion the host in battle. Moral ideas emerge and attach themselves
to their service: and ultimately they become identified with the rulers
of the dead, and reign in the shadowy world beyond the tomb. Another
set of processes combine to produce what is known as polytheism.
The constant application of fixed epithets to the godhead tends in
the long run to break up its unity. Special aspects of it begin to
take on an independent existence. Thus amongst the Teutonic peoples
Tiwaz-Thunaraz, the thunderous sky, gives rise to Thunar or Thor,
and Tiwaz-Frawiaz, the bounteous sky, to Freyr. And so the ancient
heaven-god is replaced by distinct gods of rain and sunshine, who,
with the mother-goddess, form that triad of divinities so prominent
in several European cults[364]. Again as tribes come into contact
with each other, there is a borrowing of religious conceptions, and
the tribal deities are duplicated by others who are really the same
in origin, but have different names. The mythological speculations of
priests and bards cause further elaboration. The friendly national
gods are contrasted with the dark hostile deities of foreign enemies.
A belief in the culture-hero or semi-divine man, who wrests the gifts
of civilization from the older gods, makes its appearance. Certain
cults, such as that of Druidism, become the starting-point for even
more philosophic conceptions. The personal predilection of an important
worshipper or group of worshippers for this or that deity extends his
vogue. The great event in the later history of Teutonic heathenism is
the overshadowing of earlier cults by that of Odin or Wodan, who seems
to have been originally a ruler of the dead, or perhaps a culture-hero,
and not an elemental god at all[365]. The multiplicity of forms under
which essentially the same divinity presents itself in history and
in popular belief may be illustrated by the mother-goddess of the
Teutons. As Freyja she is the female counterpart of Freyr; as Nerthus
of Freyr’s northern doublet, Njordr. When Wodan largely absorbs the
elemental functions, she becomes his wife, as Frîja or Frigg. Through
her association with the heaven-gods, she is herself a heaven-as well
as an earth-goddess[366], the Eostre of Bede[367], as well as the Erce
of the Anglo-Saxon ploughing charm[368]. She is probably the Tanfana
of Tacitus and the Nehellenia of the Romano-Germanic votive stones. If
so, she must have become a goddess of mariners, for Nehellenia seems to
be the Isis of the _interpretatio Romana_. As earth-goddess she comes
naturally into relation with the dead, and like Odin is a leader of the
rout of souls. In German peasant-lore she survives under various names,
of which Perchta is the most important; in witch-lore, as Diana, and
by a curious mediaeval identification, as Herodias[369]. And her more
primitive functions are largely inherited by the Virgin, by St. Walpurg
and by countless local saints.

Most of the imaginative and mythological superstructure so briefly
sketched in the last paragraph must be considered as subsequent in
order of development to the typical village cult. Both before and
in more fragmentary shape after the death of the old Keltic and
Teutonic gods, that continued to be in great measure an amalgam of
traditional rites of forgotten magical or pre-religious import. So
far as the consciousness of the mediaeval or modern peasant directed
it to unseen powers at all, which was but little, it was rather to
some of these more local and bounded spirits who remained in the train
of the gods, than to the gods themselves. For the purposes of the
present discussion, it is sufficient to think of it quite generally
as a cult of the spirits of fertilization, without attaching a very
precise connotation to that term. Unlike the domestic cult of the
ancestral ghosts, conducted for each household by the house-father
at the hearth, it was communal in character. Whatever the tenure of
land may have been, there seems no doubt that up to a late period
‘co-aration,’ or co-operative ploughing in open fields, remained the
normal method of tillage, while the cattle of the community roamed in
charge of a public herd over unenclosed pastures and forest lands[370].
The farm, as a self-sufficing agricultural unit, is a comparatively
recent institution, the development of which has done much to render
the village festivals obsolete. Originally the critical moments of
the agricultural year were the same for the whole village, and the
observances which they entailed were shared in by all.