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36

THE MINSTREL IN THE CASTLE HALL.

In very early days the Bards and Scalds of northern Europe sang their own verses to the music of the harp, much as Homer used to sing by the shore of the sounding Egean. The minstrels of later days recited sometimes their own compositions, but oftener the poems of others. And by no means ignoble was the occupation of these musical wanderers. When Alfred donned the minstrel's dress, he took a downward step, to be sure, but by no means so great a downward step as the Emperor Napoleon would take, if he laid aside the imperial purple for the robes of a first tenor in the Italian Opera. And when Alfred walked among the tents of Guthrum's camp, a servant bore his harp behind him—a thing which would have at once revealed the secret of the singer, if it had not been a very usual occurrence. Gleeman and Jogeler (our juggler; the French, jongleur; the Latin, joculator) were other names for the minstrel craft in old English days.

Nor was there any more honoured or more welcome guest than this wanderer, whose time of triumph came when the rough substantial supper had vanished before the hungry hunters and their dogs, and the cups of mead or wine began to circle round the hall. Mimicry and action accompanied the music and the song. And as the wine fumes mounted to the brain, and the wild torrent of melody drove their pulses into madder flow, the battle-day seemed to have come again. War-cries rang through the smoky hall; and in the ruddy light, which streamed from crackling logs or flaring pine-knots, flushed brows grew a darker red; and hands, veined as if with whip-cord, clutched fiercely at knife or bill-hook, and wheeled the weapon in flashing circles through the air. Love, too, was the minstrel's theme; and here the power of his song struck even deeper to those simple hearts than when he sang of war, although the eye gleamed with another light, and the stern warshout faded into gentler tones.

The minstrels in feudal times were probably divided into various classes, which were distinguished as Squire minstrels, Yeoman minstrels, &c. Those attached to noble houses wore the arms of their patron, hung round the neck by a silver chain. The distinctive badge of the profession was the wrest or tuning-key. Many

THE PICTURE OF A MINSTREL.

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minstrels carried a tabor; but some played on a viele, supposed to have been like a guitar, in the top of which one hand turned a handle, while the other touched the keys of the instrument. The minstrel's dress, of which an idea may be gathered from the following passage, bore some resemblance to that of the monks.

An old letter, written by a man who was present at the grand entertainment given at Kenilworth in 1575 to Queen Elizabeth, describes the dress of a minstrel, who took a prominent part in the pageant. He was dressed in a long gown of Kendal green, with sleeves hanging down to the middle of the leg; a red belt girt his waist; his tonsure, like a monk's, was shaven round; his head was bare; a red ribbon hung round his neck; his shoes were cleanly blacked with soot; all his ruffs (this fashion belonged to Elizabeth's own day) stuck stiffly out with the setting-sticks, which then did the work of starch; and round his neck were suspended the arms of Islington. Although this depicts the minstrel at a later stage than that of which we write, when the profession had fallen low in public esteem, it may yet serve to give us an idea of the kind of men who wandered from hall to hall, embalming in song those picturesque old histories of early English days, whose very roughness of flow is a new charm, and whose large admixture of highly-coloured fable, if detracting from their historic worth, yet endeared them all the more to the hearts of the simple people, whose delight it was to sing and hear them by the winter fire or beneath the summer trees.

The application of the word Minstrel changed a good deal during the decay of chivalry. At first used to denote those wandering historians of whom we have spoken, "abstracts and brief chronicles of the time," who sang of love or war in lordly halls, playing a musical accompaniment and gesturing with imitative motions, it came to apply afterwards chiefly to the musician. The song was dropped, and so were the gestures. The Poet took up the song; the Juggler and Tumbler took up the bodily movements; while the Minstrel remained a player of music only. Had Alfred Tennyson lived six hundred years ago, in order to win the laurelcrown which he worthily wears as first minstrel in the land, he

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FALL OF THE MINSTREL CRAFT.

would have needed, in addition to his fine poetic genius, something of the pliant muscle that bears Blondin along the perilous rope, and the rapid finger with which Ernst draws the music of the spheres from tightened cat-gut.

An Act of 1597, by which Elizabeth included wandering minstrels among rogues, vagabonds, and beggars, gave a mortal wound to the minstrel craft. Cromwell, too, denounced terrible penalties against fiddlers or minstrels. So low had the brotherhood of old Homer fallen!

In more enlightened days the poet and the musician have found once more something like their fitting station in society; but the tumbler, representing the mere physical element of the old minstrel craft, still remains among the dregs of the middle classes— but a step or two above the point where Elizabeth and Cromwell left the poor degraded minstrels.

MINSTRELSY.-The poetry of the Saxons was distinguished from their prose by a peculiar kind of alliteration. Metre or rhyme they had none. These attributes of English verse were imported from the Continent by the Normans, who copied both from the decayed Latin. Even before the age of Constantine a species of rhythmical poetry, in which the metrical quantity of syllables was almost wholly disregarded, and the accent alone attended to in pronunciation, became common, especially in the mouths of the lower classes of those that spoke Latin. In this rhythmical verse the number of syllables was irregular. That rhyme was used in Latin poetry from the end of the fourth century is a distinctly proved fact.

No work, in which rhyme or metre was used, can be traced in our literature until after the Norman Conquest. A few lines in the Saxon Chronicle on the death of the Conqueror, and a short canticle, said by Matthew Paris to have been dictated by the Virgin Mary to a hermit of Durham, are perhaps the earliest specimens of rhyme in English verse. Through Layamon's poem, written in the time of Henry II., numbers of short verses are scattered which rhyme together pretty exactly. There are, besides, some eight-syllable lines in imitation of Wace's metre. But, on

BIRTH OF OUR METRICAL ROMANCE,

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the whole, the Brut is, like old Saxon verse, without either metre or rhyme. Then comes a gap of a century, during which no maker of English rhymes appeared, at least so far as we know. Metrical romances in Latin and French were plentiful enough, and on them all the literary talent of the time was spent; for the one tongue was the speech of courtiers, and the other that of churchmen. The English, thoroughly out of fashion, was left in its fall to the serfs and boors of the land.

But a day came, about the opening of the thirteenth century, when the enslaved speech began to raise its diminished head and assert its native power, and then metrical romances were written in an English form. These first faltering steps of an infant literature were nearly all translations from the French romances, some of which have been already noticed.

Tyrwhitt says: "I am inclined to believe that we have no English romance prior to the age of Chaucer, which is not a translation or imitation of some earlier French romance."

The story-books, called Gesta, whose anecdotes were the delight of the cloister, and often lent a charm to the teachings of the pulpit, were the grand store-houses, from which the romancers drew the material of their tales.

A monk, named Robert of Gloucester, whose known life is summed up in the single fact that he lived in the abbey of that city, wrote, after 1278, a Rhyming Chronicle in English, narrating British history to the end of Henry III.'s reign. The earlier part of this work, which seems to be written in west country English, and is printed in lines of fourteen syllables, is a free translation from Geoffrey of Monmouth. Warton condemns it as "totally destitute of art or imagination.”

Robert Mannyng of Brunne in Lincolnshire, writing half a century later, also produced a Rhyming Chronicle, translated from the French of Wace and Langtoft. The latter of these was a canon regular of St. Austin, at Bridlington in Yorkshire. Another name well known in the list of minstrels is that of Thomas the Rhymer, who flourished during the thirteenth century in the south of Scotland. His full name is thought to have been Thomag

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HISTORY OF ENGLISH METRICAL ROMANCE.

Learmount of Ercildoun (now Earlston near Melrose). He and an unknown poet, Kendal, are mentioned by Robert of Brunne as the authors of "Sir Tristrem," a romance which was little known until it was published by Sir Walter Scott at the outset of his literary career.

Dr. Craik thus sums up the leading facts in the history of English metrical romance :

1. At least the first examples of it were translations from the French.

2. If any such were produced so early as before the close of the twelfth century (of which we have no evidence), they were probably designed for the entertainment of the mere commonalty, to whom alone the French language was unknown.

3. In the thirteenth century were composed the earliest of those we now possess in their original form.

4. In the fourteenth century the English took the place of the French metrical romance in all classes. This was its brightest era.

5. In the fifteenth it was supplanted by another species of poetry, among the more educated classes, and had also to contend with another rival in the prose romance; but, nevertheless, it still continued to be produced, although in less quantity and of an inferior fabric.

6. It did not altogether cease to be read and written until after the commencement of the sixteenth century.

7. From that time the taste for this earliest form of our poetical literature lay asleep, until, after the lapse of three hundred years, it was re-awakened in this century by Scott.

THE MONK.-Let us now turn from the noisy brilliant scenes, in which the old minstrel was most at home, to the quiet gloom of monastic life, and see what literary work went on within those thick oaken doors, studded with heavy nails, whose hinges creaked out but a churlish welcome to the belated harpist, or often refused to creak at all.

We pass through the arched gateway-rounded if the building be of the earlier Norman style, pointed if of the later Gothic-and

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