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.

##