an ancient term applied equally to a singer and an instrumental performer, derived from the French menestral, and not used in this country before the Norman Conquest. Our old monkish historians, in speaking of this class, characterize them by the epithet minus, histrio, joculator, or some other word which implies jestication. Hence it would seem that the minstrels, occasionally at least, set off their singing by mimicry or action, uniting the powers of melody, poetry, and dancing. According to Percy, "the minstrels were an order of men in the middle ages who subsisted by the arts of poetry and music, and sang to the harp verses composed by themselves or others." The Teutonic races generally, and especially the Danes, had been accustomed to hold men of this profession in the highest reverence. Their skill was considered as something divine, their persons were deemed sacred, their attendance was solicited by kings, and they were everywhere loaded with honours and rewards. In short, poets and their art were held in that rude admiration which is ever shown by an ignorant people towards such as greatly excel them in intellectual accomplishments. When the Saxons were converted to Christianity, in proportion as letters prevailed amongst them, this rude admiration began to subside, and poets were no longer a peculiar class or profession. The poet and the minstrel became two persons. Poetry was cultivated by men of letters indiscriminately, and many of the most popular rhymes were composed amidst the leisure and retirement of monasteries. But the minstrels continued to be a distinct order of men, and obtained their livelihood by singing verses to the harp at the houses of the great. There they were hospitably and respectfully received, and retained many of the honours conferred upon their predecessors, the bards and the scalds. Although some of them only recited the compositions of others, many of them still composed songs themselves, and all of them could probably invent a few stanzas upon occasion. There is no doubt that most of the old heroic ballads were produced by this order of men. Although some of the longer metrical romances might come from the pen of the monks or others, yet the shorter narratives were probably composed by the minstrels who sung them. From the striking variations which occur in different copies of these old pieces, it is evident that they made no scruple to alter one another's productions, and the reciter added or omitted whole stanzas, according to his own fancy or convenience.

That in the early ages this profession was held in great reverence amongst the northern tribes is curiously illustrated by incidents recorded of several Saxon and Danish princes (of whom the most noted are Alfred the Great among the Saxons, and Anlaf among the Danes), who assumed the disguise of gleemen, and chaunted to the harp, while they successfully explored the camp of the enemy.

From the Conquest downwards, through long ages in England, the profession of the minstrel was a popular and privileged one. There was no period, however, immediately subsequent to the Conquest, in which this entertaining class met with so much royal patronage as during the reign of Richard I. This brilliant Crusader, himself an adept in the minstrel's art, invited to his court, according to Hoveden, many minstrels and troubadours ("cantores et joculatores") from France, whom he loaded with honours and rewards, such as arms, clothes, horses, and money. And the well-known story of Richard's favourite minstrel, Blondell de Nesle, discovering his master by singing a French chanson under the walls of the German castle in which royalty lay imprisoned, if more popular than well authenticated, possesses at least the merit of recording symbolically the traditional devotion of the royal minstrel to his art. It appears from a passage in a letter of Hugh, Bishop of Coventry, that the superior officers of Richard's court had also learnt to patronize these "Jestours that tellen tales;" for William, Bishop of Coventry, chancellor to the king, brought over French minstrels, and loaded them with handsome presents, to sing the praise of Cour de Lion in the public streets.

We occasionally find the minstrels and jestours, or reciters of jestes (gestes) or tales, named separately, as in a prologue of Nassington; but they for the most part belonged to the same class. The minstrels were also sometimes distinguished from the harpers. "In the year 1374," says Warton (Hist. of Eng. Poet., vol. ii., p. 369), "six minstrels, accompanied with four harpers, on the anniversary of Alwyne the bishop, performed their minstreleis at dinner in the hall of the convent of St Swithin at Winchester, and during supper sung the same gest, or tale, in the great arched chamber of the prior."

The instances of regard shown to minstrels during subsequent reigns are very abundant. Edward II. rewarded his minstrel William de Morle, known as "Roi de North," with certain houses in the vill of Pontefract, which had previously belonged to the degraded minstrel John de Boteler, called "Roi Brunard." We find from Rymer, in his Fadera, that in 1415, when Henry V. was on his voyage to France, he was accompanied by eighteen minstrels, who were to receive twelve pence a day each. Indeed, the minstrels were often in those days more amply paid than the clergy. "In this age, as in more enlightened times," says Warton (vol. ii. 309), "the people loved better to be pleased than instructed." During many of the years of the reign of Henry VI., particularly in the year 1430, at the annual feast of the fraternity of the Holy Cross at Abingdon, a town in Berkshire, twelve priests each received four pence for singing a dirge; and the same number of minstrels were rewarded each with two shillings and four pence, beside diet and horse meat. Some of these minstrels came only from Maydenhithie or Maidenhead, a town at no great distance in the same county. In the year 1441 eight priests were hired from Coventry to assist in celebrating a yearly obit in the church of the neighbouring priory of Maxtoke; as were six minstrels, called mimis, belonging to the family of Lord Clinton, who lived in the adjoining castle of Maxtoke, to sing, harp, and play in the hall of the monastery, during the extraordinary refectory allowed to the monks on that anniversary. Two shillings were given to the priests and four to the minstrels; and the latter are said to have supped in camera pietra, or the painted chamber of the convent, with the sub-prior, on which occasion the chamberlain furnished eight massy tapers of wax."

So late as the reign of Henry VIII. these reciters of verses found free access into all companies; into the mansion of the noble as well as into the plebeian tavern. Yet they were gradually sinking into contempt and neglect, and were seldom called upon to furnish a specimen of their venerable art, except when some royal or other great personage condescended on some public occasion to smile benignantly upon the rude pastimes of their ancestors. It should not be forgotten, however, that the genuine minstrel was now seldom to be found in England; that, indeed, the name had become so far degraded as popularly to denote a mere musician. So singular a phenomenon had a veritable minstrel become in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, that when that august personage was entertained at Kenilworth Castle in 1575 by the performance of one of those ancient singers, his appearance and dress excited so much wonder among the spectators, that old Laneham felt called upon to transfer to his book the Privately Pleasures of Kenilworth, a provokingly minute description of the person, dress, and adornments of this extraordinary man of the harp. After describing this "squire minstrel of Middlesex," from his "fair kembled," "finely smoothed" head, to his feet, which were encased in "a pair of pumps; not new, indeed, yet cleanly blacked with soot, and shining like a shoeing horn," the author says—"After three lowlie coorsizes, he elecered his voice with a hem and a reach, and spat out withal, wiped his lips with the hollo of his hand, for fying his napkin, temper'd a string or two with his wiz wreast, and, after warbling on his harp for a prelude, came forth with a sollem song, warranted for storry out of King Arthur's acts."

Towards the end of the sixteenth century this class of men had lost all credit, and were sunk so low in the public opinion, that in the thirty-ninth year of Elizabeth a statute was passed, by which "minstrels," wandering abroad, were included amongst "rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars," and were adjudged to be punished as such.

(For valuable information respecting the minstrel's character and poetry, see Wright's Biographia Literaria Britannica, Anglo-Saxon Period, pp. 3-7; with illustrations from the early Anglo-Saxon poem of Beowulf.)