The myth, and the minstrel life

Who were the minstrels of medieval England? What did they do to earn a living, and what sort of lives did they lead? What music did they play, and what other sorts of entertainment could they offer? Medieval iconography shows that many instrumentalists lived comfortably as liveried servants of royalty and the aristocracy; records of court proceedings show that some of the lower-class independent minstrels had brushes with the law (and this is in fact the only type of evidence we have for most of them). Clearly, these are the two extremes of a wide range of social situations in which minstrels lived, and the picture in reality must be a much more complex one.

When it comes to vocal minstrelsy it is mainly literary evidence that provides information. But here a ready-made picture comes to mind: for everyone ‘knows’ that in medieval England minstrels wandered the countryside, singing love-songs and ballads to the accompaniment of a lute and earning a few pence, a meal or a night's lodging in any place where they were welcomed. While most such men were virtually stateless and included rogues and thieves among their ranks, some – like Robin Hood's Allan-a-Dale – were more respected and worked locally.

This popular myth, apparently confirmed by W.S. Gilbert (in The Mikado, 1885) and Hollywood, offers one version of the minstrel. Another was offered by eighteenth- century antiquaries, who saw the minstrel not as a ragamuffin but as a bard, a figure of great power. The age yearned for a primitive oral past, and found it when in 1760 James Macpherson published his Fragments of Ancient Poetry, the works he attributed to the legendary poet Ossian (Plate 1). These fragments, the ‘words of the bards in the days of song: when the king heard the music of the harps, the tales of other times’, were a literary sensation. There was soon a ferocious debate over just how extensively Macpherson had reworked the materials he had collected from Gaelic oral tradition. Some, like Samuel Johnson, derided the Ossianic corpus as pure forgery. Nevertheless, Ossian was widely celebrated and many regarded the medieval minstrels as the inheritors of this bardic tradition.

A few medieval instruments survive, and although most are very damaged and fragmentary it is still possible, given the necessary study, to learn about their original forms. Of those found and apparently made in England, there is a fourteenth- century straight trumpet in the Museum of London and a citole from the same century in the British Museum. Three late medieval celtic harps also survive, examples of the clarsach found in the Scottish royal accounts. The instruments recovered from the wreck of the Mary Rose, which sank in 1545, are probably later than the period discussed in this book but late medieval in form: two fiddles, a dulcina, three three-hole pipes (two showing evidence of continental manufacture) and fragments of a tabor.

Documentary evidence can sometimes support other kinds of information although it is not often helpful on its own. Much more useful is contemporary iconography, including illustrations of instruments in psalters and manuscripts of various literary works; several magnificent series of wood and stone carvings surviving in major churches at Beverley, Exeter, Lincoln, Manchester and Norwich, among others; and depictions of instrumentalists in the painted glass of some churches, such as the famous series in the Beauchamp Chapel in St Mary’s, Warwick.

Such depictions may be accurately drawn, but one should not assume that they can be taken at face value. Did the illustrator really know what an instrument looked like, and how accurately did he depict it? There are few criteria for this: the level of detail can be considered, and how consistent the depiction is with other illustrations, both by that artist and by others; and one can see how realistic is the depiction of the minstrel's hands on the instrument, whether the method of bowing or plucking strings is likely to be physically possible and comfortable, and so on. This builds up a general impression of the picture's trustworthiness or otherwise, and this in turn enables comparison with other depictions, similarly assessed. The impression gained is always subjective, but, given enough illustrations of a particular type of instrument, it may be strong enough to stand as evidence and be tested against surviving instruments.

The minstrel as traveller

The romantic myth is that the medieval minstrel was a wanderer, going from place to place as the whim took him, welcomed everywhere but constantly moving on. Minstrels did travel, certainly: but it was a purposeful travelling, always in search of reward and usually on a well-beaten path. Independent minstrels often found frequent working of a relatively small area to be fruitful, especially if there were local institutions that needed entertainers on particular occasions. Towns and religious houses celebrated certain events annually, for instance, and multiple saints’ days gave multiple opportunities for work.

For the minstrels of the great lords, travelling was often an annual event, undertaken in the summer months when they were not required in the household, and the distances travelled might be two hundred miles or more. A liveried minstrel might also travel for another reason. In any major household the administration of often widely-separated estates, the processes of government and the maintenance of social networks demanded a large traffic of correspondence. Some messages could be carried in the memory, others in the form of sealed letters. Apart from the heralds, who were used for occasional diplomatic and chivalric announcements, the king employed full-time messengers: the mounted nuncii, and the cokini (cursores from Edward II's reign), who travelled on foot.

The sheer quantity of traffic in these constant communications between households often required other household servants to carry both written and verbal messages: clerks, chaplains and others, including minstrels, depending on the nature of the task and who was available. John the trumpeter was described as cokinus when he was paid his expenses on 31 March 29 Ed I (1301), and appears amongst nuncii when reimbursed for carrying the king's letters at an unknown date in the same regnal year. This was probably John de Depe, who is known to have carried letters at about this time, or perhaps a man employed primarily as a messenger and who was competent at blowing the necessary signals on a trumpet.

In lesser households the task of carrying letters might fall to any suitable servant who could be spared.

Introduction to Part I

These first five chapters consider minstrelsy in households, of which the king's was the most extensive as well as the best-documented. The principal sources of information about the king's household are the financial accounts of the Wardrobe and the Chamber. Not all of the records have survived, but even so there is an astonishing amount of material providing information on the day-to-day activities of household members, including the minstrels. These accounts contain the financial records of some special occasions, and the information these give is very important: but the accounts are also valuable in recording, in considerable quantity and detail, the kind of information that other sources do not – the wages, liveries, gifts, and reimbursements of expenses – and all in the context of often extensive and almost continuous travel as the court moved through the countryside. The information provided is basically objective: and although it is sometimes fragmentary, not easily interpreted, or inaccurate due to the errors of the accounting scribes, it is at least free of the deliberate hyperbole, allusion to symbolisms and other spin-related considerations that often make iconographic and literary sources problematic.

The records of dependent royal households – those of the queen, Prince of Wales and the king's younger sons – are equally detailed. Their survival is less extensive, however, and other secular households, even those of the great nobles, also yield much less documentation. Their recording systems were often robust, but unless the records were archived securely they could be lost or destroyed. Although there are some extensive survivals for short periods of time, most financial evidence consists at best only of a journal – the daily record of transactions – of an individual year or so. There are other types of record that can be useful, such as registers and household ordinances, and these help to build up a picture of life in a major household.

The domestic records of religious houses are likewise variable. At their best, they are the result of a meticulous accounting and archiving system, but in many cases water damage, accidental loss and deliberate destruction (especially at the dissolution of religious houses in the mid-sixteenth century) have ensured that little evidence remains of them. Unsurprisingly, the highest survival-rates are found in the archives of two cathedral priories that were refounded as secular cathedrals with minimum disruption of their lives: Durham and Worcester (although the latter's records are mainly of a later date than we consider here). For most houses, especially those that were dissolved in the 1530s, it is only by very good luck that any records have survived.

Town minstrels in England and abroad

The position of town minstrels, the reasons for their employment and the way in which they were developed varied widely in Europe, and to some extent in England and Scotland. For historical reasons it is useful to consider their position in late medieval Flanders and France before considering the situation in England. While no two towns worked in exactly the same way, the broad outlines of civic security and musical entertainment can be seen.

Many towns in France and Flanders had a bell-tower from which the surrounding countryside could be viewed, and this enabled the performance of several duties. First, because bells could be heard all over the town they could be rung to signal the opening and closing of the town gates at the beginning and end of the day. Second, a watchman could give warning of the approach of an enemy force against which the gates must be closed or of the train of an important personage who must be welcomed; he could also look out for fires at night, very necessary in an age when buildings were largely made of timber and candles or rush lights were the normal lighting. Third, it would be possible to mark certain hours of the day, an important function that could be combined with that of entertaining the citizens with music. Towns therefore employed a watchman – guet in French – who could fulfill, or initiate action towards, these various functions.

This guet did not have to play a musical instrument if bells were used for signalling purposes, but almost everywhere he played some lip-reed instrument. This was at least an animal horn: but easily the most common was a trumpet, occasionally an inexpensive one, sometimes even a valuable silver one, with the guet being known as the city trumpeter. If he were competent as a musician there were also ceremonial functions for which he could be employed. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries some of the more wealthy northern towns in the Flemish orbit added shawmists (usually three) to the trumpeter, forming a standard four-man band.

Minstrel circuits?

Since the 1960s and 70s, when scholars have been editing records of drama and other entertainments in a concentrated fashion, it has been suggested occasionally that players followed ‘circuits’ – well-known itineraries that could be repeated year after year and which presumably offered more or less assured rewards. Giles Dawson made the claim in 1965,1 and subsequently several REED editors have proposed the same: but on the whole they have shown some caution, because the records do not provide firm proof. But the accumulation of hints has been enough to give the editors the feeling that known circuits must have existed. Not surprisingly, but to be treated with equal caution, the records of itinerant minstrelsy, too, have given the impression that regular itineraries might have been followed.

There are good reasons for this provisional conclusion. If a minstrel travelled a large distance – say, to York from the Court at Westminster – the necessity for speed might demand the best road: in this case, the main road north. The journey would almost certainly not be entirely along the main road, however, for several circumstances would require a detour. The first would be the need for an evening meal and lodging for the night, which might be obtained in either a secular or a religious household. The Warwick household books (discussed in Chapter 5) show hospitality being offered to minstrels travelling independently, and such hospitality was also an obligation of conventual houses. The accommodation might be a small, bare guest-room in a priory, but more likely a straw palliasse in a dormitory or a pile of hay in a barn. In a secular household it could mean dossing down in a corner of the hall. The standard of accommodation might depend on the status of the minstrel's employer. What we can be sure of is that the minstrel would take the opportunity to earn some money by performing for his host if he could.

Another reason for leaving the highway would be the occasion of a fair, or of a patronal or other festival at a religious house. If the minstrels were in no particular hurry any lucrative detour would be an attractive proposition. One therefore looks for evidence of minstrel activity in groups of small places connected by relatively minor roads.