Terry Jones' Medieval Lives (6 page)

The role of minstrels naturally developed further as the concept of chivalry became more elaborated; eventually they were expected to act as heralds, turning acts of bravery and prowess during battles and tournaments into songs –
chansons de geste
– that served as celebrations and scorecards. They became PR men and were paid by the hero whose bravery they celebrated. One of the first examples is the specially commissioned life in verse of William Marshal, ‘the flower of chivalry' – paid for by his son in 1219, the year of William's death.

The teller of this biographical
chanson de geste
was probably William's squire. In this rough-and-ready military culture little distinction was made between those servants who could sing or recite poetry and those who could cook or do other chores. Jongleurs were expected to make themselves useful in all sorts of ways. They had instruments and loud voices? Fine, let them act as night watchmen, sounding the alarm in the case of attack or fire.

In 1306, a minstrel called Richard (the Prince of Wales's watchman), raised the alarm at Windsor Castle when a fire started. Thanks to him, the castle was saved. Whether he used it as an opportunity to practise his own art, as a kind of singing telegram (‘Windsor Castle's burning down/burning down/burning down/Windsor Castle's burning down/My fair lady!') is not recorded.

The jongleur who could blow a trumpet, play a fife or bang a drum had obvious uses in the cacophony of the battlefield – to rally the troops or cheer them on, and also to give signals.

The Taillefers of the eleventh century were the guardians and promoters of a culture based on simple piety and violent death, and they were treated exactly as such a culture demands. It cannot have been very rewarding to make a living by reciting poetry to philistines.

Yet out of this strange beginning emerged a literary culture that, by the end of the Middle Ages, was to be one of the greatest achievements of civilization. In most cultures literature is the refined interest of a very restricted group of people. The classical period had produced great epics, histories and the marvellous poetry of an educated and wealthy elite, but its popular culture was profoundly different – it was based around the enjoyment of violent death in the amphitheatre and horse-racing in the hippodrome. Oriental civilizations produced magnificent religious epics, histories, and the subtle poetry and drama of highly sophisticated court elites, while their popular culture tended to exist separately and far more traditionally, based around religious and community rituals. Medieval Europe, most surprisingly, developed forms of story-telling that reached right across the whole of society, with the wit and energy to appeal to an illiterate or semi-literate audience and, at the same time, the subtlety and complexity to satisfy the aesthetes of aristocratic and royal courts.

This was to be intimately bound up with the development of regional (ultimately national) languages which gave an entire society within a language-territory a shared culture. It was, in fact, the singers and story-tellers, the poets and minstrels, who ultimately shaped the history of Europe.

THE BASIC ENTERTAINER

This is hardly what anyone looking at eleventh- and early twelfth-century minstrels would have expected. A lot of the output of those attached to lords and kings, and wearing their livery, consisted of jokes about farting and copulation, and drinking songs. They were turning into general entertainers rather than carriers of fame and memory. Wandering minstrels were rustic showmen, juggling, doing magic, tumbling and moving from door to door trying to scratch a living. The best seem to have been employed mainly to provide background music at feasts, ceremonies and religious rituals. The status of minstrels was low; the language of literacy was Latin but their performances were almost entirely vernacular, and they probably did not look like the cutting edge of European civilization.

The direction they were apparently heading in was well illustrated in 1212, when Randulf, Earl of Chester, was besieged by the Welsh in his castle of Rhuddlan in Flintshire. He sent an appeal for help to Roger de Lacy, justiciar and constable of Chester, affectionately known in the local dungeons as ‘Roger of Hell'.

Roger, casting around for the most effective, vicious and altogether intimidating relief force he could find, realized that Chester was full of jongleurs who had come for the annual fair. He gathered them up and marched them off under his son-in-law Dutton. The Welsh, seeing this fearsome body of determined musicians, singers and prestidigitators bearing down on them ready to launch into an immediate performance of their terrifying arts, fled.

Who but Roger of Hell would have been so ruthless? The event gave rise to the old English oath, now sadly forgotten but well worth reviving if someone would like to make a start: ‘Roger, and by all the fiddlers of Chester!'

This rag-tag army were wandering minstrels, not bound to a lord and wearing his livery. A minstrel without a livery was a bit like a band without a record contract. Livery indicated that a minstrel had both status and a regular income, and made it easier for him to be accepted in the right castles and earn a decent reward. But he still needed a full range of entertainment skills.

One thirteenth-century poem defines a true minstrel as one who can ‘speak and rhyme well, be witty, know the story of Troy, balance apples on the point of knives, juggle, jump through hoops, play the citole, mandora, harp, fiddle, and psaltery'. He is further advised, for good measure, to learn the arts of imitating birds, putting performing asses and dogs through their paces and operating marionettes.

A certain robustness was needed to survive in an environment where good manners was often just a question of not picking your nose in public. A medieval guide to etiquette warns: don't scratch yourself or look for fleas in your breeches or on your chest; don't snap your fingers; don't comb your hair, clean your nails or take your shoes off in the presence of lords and ladies. Messengers arriving at a house removed their weapons, gloves and caps before entering – though they were permitted to keep their caps on if they were bald. The guide also recommends not urinating in the hall – unless you happen to be the head of the household. Which minstrels were not.

The guide also goes into the details about the polite ways to belch, fart and – interestingly enough – defecate.

And the entertainment demanded by early medieval monarchs was reassuringly downmarket. For example, Henry II's favourite minstrel was Roland Le Pettour. The king rewarded him with 30 acres of land for his masterwork, described as ‘a leap, a whistle and a fart'. Roland's great musical talent, it seems, was that he could fart tunes. The land was solemnly passed down from father to son for many generations, on the condition that the incumbent turn up at court each Christmas Day to perform the leap, the whistle and the fart!

Another act that was apparently popular with English royalty was a version of putting your head in a lion's mouth, although this one involved a minstrel who spread honey on his member and then brought in a performing bear. What happened next isn't actually explained, but whatever it was probably doesn't figure in
Winnie-the-Pooh
.

Not everyone approved. John of Salisbury, bishop of Chartres, a historian and elegant Latin stylist of the twelfth century, thought jongleurs were quite simply appalling:

Even they whose exposures are so indecent they make a cynic blush are not debarred from distinguished houses
 . . .
they are not even turned out when with more hellish tumult they defile the air and more shamelessly disclose that which in shame they had concealed. Does he appear a man of wisdom who has eye or ear for such as these?

Policraticus

RAHERE

There were, of course, many different kinds of minstrels and entertainers, some of whom the Church had no problem with – after all, there were said to be minstrels in heaven. Other performers, though, who encouraged dancing and ribaldry, were plainly servants of the devil. And some minstrels evidently had career paths that led to higher things, the most famous of these being one Rahere.

According to his own account,
*2
Rahere was a low-born character who managed to infiltrate himself into the court of Henry I on the basis of his entertainment value. While it is not clear what this means, and it has been suggested that he may have held a clerical position, the language he uses suggests that he performed as a jongleur or jester. He evidently made a significant sum of money – given the rewards available some years later for a leap, a whistle and a fart, it is likely that minstrelsy was the best way for a poor boy to do this. But there was obviously more to him than that; a ‘Rahere' is listed at the time as a canon of St Paul's Cathedral.

For some reason he made a penance-pilgrimage to Rome where he fell seriously ill, and vowed that if he recovered he would build a hospital for the poor. On his return journey he had a delirious vision of hell, then one of St Bartholomew who instructed him to build a church in the London suburb of Smooth Field (Smithfield), where there were horse and cattle markets.

Henry I gave Rahere a licence to build a church and hospital on land to the east of the market; most of it was marsh but there was a firmer piece of rising ground used for public executions, and Rahere had the gallows moved so that he could construct a large priory and, nearby, a hospital. A charter of 1147 defines the purpose of St Bartholomew's Hospital as to provide shelter and care for the poor, the sick, the homeless and orphans.

The site was consecrated by the end of 1129 and Rahere became the first prior. Crowds of pilgrims, the sick and people who had been cured in the hospital gathered at the church on St Bartholomew's feast day, and in 1133 Rahere was given a royal charter which licensed a three-day St Bartholomew's Fair, one curious feature of which was that no outlaw or criminal could be arrested while attending it. The hospital and fair became enduring features of London life, and the choir of the priory is one of the few medieval structures still standing in London. Rahere himself, like Dick Whittington, became a mythologized figure of poor-boy-made-good.

EDWARD II'S MINSTRELS

The fortunes of English minstrels probably reached their zenith during the reign of Edward II, who was a minstrel fanatic. His father was away a lot and the nurse who brought him up was a minstrel, which may explain why he was so fond of them. So fond, in fact, that the treasury rolls showing the expenditure for his coronation list 154 musicians. They also show that on the anniversary of the death of his lover, Piers Gaveston, Edward cheered himself up by travelling to France and being entertained by Bernard the Fool and 54 naked dancers.

Edward seems to have been in the habit of throwing money at anyone who made him laugh – and it evidently didn't take much to make him laugh. Jack of St Albans was paid 50 shillings because ‘he danced before the king on a table and made him laugh very greatly'. And he awarded the princely sum of 20 shillings to one of his cooks ‘because he rode before the King . . . and often fell from his horse, at which the King laughed very greatly'.

The barons tried to restrict Edward's extravagant entertainment budget by creating exact job descriptions for every member of the household. This meant an end to multitasking minstrels – now they had to be either jugglers or flute players or whatever, and their numbers were to be strictly limited: ‘There shall be trumpeters and 2 other minstrels, and sometimes more and sometimes less, who shall play before the king and it shall please him.'

The barons were not the only people who were trying to limit the number of minstrels. The minstrels themselves were trying to protect their profession and to make it more exclusive. Fraternities or guilds of musicians seem to have been formed in London at least as early as 1350. One of their main objectives was the exclusion of ‘foreign' musicians (those who were not Londoners). Another was to stop amateurs from performing in taverns, inns and at weddings. The route to minstrelsy was now through apprenticeship, and the guilds in London, York, Beverley and Canterbury were careful to restrict the number of trainees.

If this seems to be an industry under threat attempting to protect itself, that is about right. The English music and story-telling business was taking a new turn, evidenced by the appearance in the fourteenth century of a new vernacular literature in the form of romantic poetry. The poems were mostly translations of French romances.

ROMANCING THE EPIC

In France (and to some extent Italy and Germany) a change had been taking place in the content of
chansons de geste
since the middle of the twelfth century. Like the earlier ones, they were still usually stories of conflict between Christians and Saracens; but magical and romantic themes had begun to take over, with evil knights, the rescue of ladies and the frequent appearance of magic rings, belts and swords. A heroic tradition is converted into a romantic one. There is an emphasis on describing Islam as idolatrous, and Muslims as superstitious, treacherous and polygamous; the Saracen world is as exotic as it is dangerous, and Muslim women are presented as lascivious and seductive, irresistibly attracted to Christian knights and, after willing conversion, faithful only to them. Some historians of the literature have suggested that a little wishful thinking might have been involved, but this seems mean-minded. All adventure stories involve wishful thinking; the interesting question is the nature of the wish.

One of the most significant examples of the new mood in European poetry is
Le Roman d'Eneas
, a French version of Virgil's
Aeneid
which appeared anonymously in about 1160. The emphasis is on story elements that were new to Virgil as well as to French poetry – the feelings of two women, Dido and Lavinia, who are in love with Aeneas. A new literary principle had appeared: the principle of overpowering love.