CHAPTER II

MIMUS AND SCÔP

[_Bibliographical Note_ (for chs. ii-iv).--By far the best account of minstrelsy is the section on _Les Propagateurs des Chansons de Gestes_ in vol. ii of L. Gautier, _Les Épopées françaises_ (2nd ed. 1892), bk. ii, chs. xvii-xxi. It may be supplemented by the chapter devoted to the subject in J. Bédier, _Les Fabliaux_ (2nd ed. 1895), and by the dissertation of E. Freymond, _Jongleurs und Menestrals_ (Halle, 1883). I have not seen A. Olrik, _Middelalderens vandrende Spillemænd_ (_Opuscula Philologica_, Copenhagen, 1887). Some German facts are added by F. Vogt, _Leben und Dichten der deutschen Spielleute im Mittelalter_ (1876), and A. Schultz, _Das höfische Leben zur Zeit der Minnesinger_ (2nd ed. 1889), i. 565, who gives further references. The English books are not good, and probably the most reliable account of English minstrelsy is that in the following pages; but materials may be found in J. Strutt, _Sports and Pastimes of the People of England_ (1801, ed. W. Hone, 1830); T. Percy, _Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_ (ed. H. B. Wheatley, 1876, ed. Schroer, 1889); J. Ritson, _Ancient English Metrical Romances_ (1802), _Ancient Songs and Ballads_ (1829); W. Chappell, _Old English Popular Music_ (ed. H. E. Wooldridge, 1893); F. J. Crowest, _The Story of British Music, from the Earliest Times to the Tudor Period_ (1896); J. J. Jusserand, _English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages_ (trans. L. T. Smith, 4th ed. 1892). The early English data are discussed by R. Merbot, _Aesthetische Studien zur angelsächsischen Poesie_ (1883), and F. M. Padelford, _Old English Musical Terms_ (1899). F. B. Gummere, _The Beginnings of Poetry_ (1901), should be consulted on the relations of minstrelsy to communal poetry; and other special points are dealt with by O. Hubatsch, _Die lateinischen Vagantenlieder des Mittelalters_ (1870); G. Maugras, _Les Comédiens hors la Loi_ (1887), and H. Lavoix, _La Musique au Siècle de Saint-Louis_ (in G. Raynaud, _Recueil de Motets français_, 1883, vol. ii). To the above list of authorities should of course be added the histories of literature and of the drama enumerated in the _General Bibliographical Note_.]

The fall of the theatres by no means implied the complete extinction of the _scenici_. They had outlived tragedy and comedy: they were destined to outlive the stage itself. Private performances, especially of _pantomimi_ and other dancers, had enjoyed great popularity under the Empire, and had become an invariable adjunct of all banquets and other festivities. At such revels, as at the decadence of the theatre and of public morals generally, the graver pagans had looked askance[89]: the Church naturally included them in its universal condemnation of _spectacula_. Chrysostom in the East[90], Jerome in the West[91], are hostile to them, and a canon of the fourth-century council of Laodicea, requiring the clergy who might be present at weddings and similar rejoicings to rise and leave the room before the actors were introduced, was adopted by council after council and took its place as part of the ecclesiastical law[92]. The permanence of the regulation proves the strength of the habit, which indeed the Church might ban, but was not able to subdue, and which seems to have commended itself, far more than the theatre, to Teutonic manners. Such irregular performances proved a refuge for the dispossessed _scenici_. Driven from their theatres, they had still a vogue, not only at banquets, but at popular merry-makings or wherever in street or country they could gather together the remnant of their old audiences. Adversity and change of masters modified many of their characteristics. The _pantomimi_, in particular, fell upon evil times. Their subtle art had had its origin in an exquisite if corrupt taste, and adapted itself with difficulty to the ruder conditions of the new civilizations[93]. The _mimi_ had always appealed to a common and gross humanity. But even they must now rub shoulders and contend for _denarii_ with jugglers and with rope-dancers, with out-at-elbows gladiators and beast-tamers. More than ever they learnt to turn their hand to anything that might amuse; learnt to tumble, for instance; learnt to tell the long stories which the Teutons loved. Nevertheless, in essentials they remained the same; still jesters and buffoons, still irrepressible, still obscene. In little companies of two or three, they padded the hoof along the roads, travelling from gathering to gathering, making their own welcome in castle or tavern, or, if need were, sleeping in some grange or beneath a wayside hedge in the white moonlight. They were, in fact, absorbed into that vast body of nomad entertainers on whom so much of the gaiety of the Middle Ages depended. They became _ioculatores_, _jongleurs_, minstrels[94].

The features of the minstrels as we trace them obscurely from the sixth to the eleventh century, and then more clearly from the eleventh to the sixteenth, are very largely the features of the Roman _mimi_ as they go under, whelmed in the flood which bore away Latin civilization. But to regard them as nothing else than _mimi_ would be a serious mistake. On another side they have a very different and a far more reputable ancestry. Like other factors in mediaeval society, they represent a merging of Latin and the Teutonic elements. They inherit the tradition of the _mimus_: they inherit also the tradition of the German _scôp_[95]. The earliest Teutonic poetry, so far as can be 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].

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