vailed among both people, and that the Minstrel was a privileged character with each.

But, if these facts had never existed, it can be proved from undoubted records, that the Minstrel was a regular and stated officer in the court of our Anglo-Saxon kings: for in Domesday-book, Joculator Regis, the King's Minstrel, is expressly mentioned in Gloucestershire; in which county it should seem that he had lands assigned him for his maintenance, (Q).

III. We have now brought the inquiry down to the Norman conquest; and as the Normans had been a late colony from Norway and Denmark, where the Scalds had arrived to the highest pitch of credit before Rollo's expedition into France, we cannot doubt but this adventurer, like the other northern princes, had many of these men in his train, who settled with him in his new duchy of Normandy, and left behind them successors in their art: so that, when his descendant, William the Bastard, invaded this kingdom in the following century,* that mode of entertainment could not but be still familiar with the Normans. And that this is not mere conjecture will appear from a remarkable fact, which shows that the arts of Poetry and Song were still as reputable among the Normans in France, as they had been among their ancestors in the north; and that the profession of Minstrel, like that of Scald, was still aspired to by the most gallant soldiers. In William's army was a valiant warrior, named Taillefer, who was distinguished no less for the minstrelarts (R), than for his courage and intrepidity. This man asked leave of his commander to begin the onset, and obtained it. He accordingly advanced before the army,

* Rollo was invested in his new duchy of Normandy A. D. 912. William invaded England A. D. 1066.

and with a loud voice animated his countrymen with songs in praise of Charlemagne and Roland, and other heroes of France; then rushing among the thickest of the English, and valiantly fighting, lost his life.

Indeed the Normans were so early distinguished for their minstrel-talents, that an eminent French writer (s) makes no scruple to refer to them the origin of all modern poetry, and shows that they were celebrated for their songs near a century before the Troubadours of Provence, who are supposed to have led the way to the poets of Italy, France, and Spain.*

We see, then, that the Norman conquest was rather likely to favour the establishment of the minstrel profession in this kingdom, than to suppress it: and although the favour of the Norman conquerors would be probably confined to such of their own countrymen as excelled in the minstrel arts; and in the first ages after the Conquest no other songs would be listened to by the great nobility, but such as were composed in their own Norman French; yet as the great mass of the original inhabitants were not extirpated, these could only understand their own native Gleemen or Minstrels, who must still be allowed to exist, unless it can be proved that they were all proscribed and massacred, as, it is said, the Welsh Bards were afterwards by the severe policy of King Edward I. But this we know was not the case; and even the cruel attempts of that monarch, as we shall see below, proved ineffectual, (s 2).

The honours shown to the Norman or French Minstrels by our princes and great barons, would naturally have been imitated by their English vassals and tenants, even if no favour or distinction had ever been shown here to the same order of men in the Anglo-Saxon and Danish reigns.

* Vide Hist. des Troubadours, 3 tom. passim; and vide Fableaux ou Contes du XII. et du XIII. Siécle, traduits, &c. avec des Notes historiques et critiques, &c. par M. Le Grand. Paris, 1781. 5 tom. 12mo.

So that we cannot doubt but the English Harper and Songster would, at least in a subordinate degree, enjoy the same kind of honours, and be received with similar respect, among the inferior English gentry and populace. I must be allowed, therefore, to consider them as belonging to the same community, as subordinate members at least of the same college; and therefore, in gleaning the scanty materials for this slight history, I shall collect whatever incidents I can find relating to minstrels and their art, and arrange them, as they occur in our own annals, without distinction; as it will not be always easy to ascertain, from the slight mention of them by our regular historians, whether the artists were Norman or English. For it need not be remarked, that subjects of this trivial nature are but incidentally mentioned by our ancient annalists, and were fastidiously rejected by other grave and serious writers; so that, unless they were accidentally connected with such events as became recorded in history, they would pass unnoticed through the lapse of ages, and be as unknown to posterity as other topics relating to the private life and amusements of the greatest nations.

On this account it can hardly be expected that we should be able to produce regular and unbroken annals of the minstrel art and its professors, or have sufficient information whether every minstrel or harper composed himself, or only repeated, the songs he chanted. Some probably did the one, and some the other: and it would have been wonderful indeed, if men whose peculiar profession it was, and who devoted their time and talents to entertain their hearers with poetical compositions, were peculiarly deprived of all poetical genius themselves, and had been under a physical incapacity of composing those common popular rhymes which were the usual subjects of their recitation. Whoever examines any considerable quantity of these, finds them in style and colouring as different from the elaborate

production of the sedentary composer at his desk or in his cell, as the rambling harper or minstrel was remote in his modes of life and habits of thinking from the retired scholar or the solitary monk, (T).

It is well known that on the Continent, whence our Norman nobles came, the bard who composed, the harper who played and sang, and even the dancer and the mimic, were all considered as of one community, and were even all included under the common name of Minstrels.* I must therefore be allowed the same application of the term here, without being expected to prove that every singer composed, or every composer chanted, his own song; much less that every one excelled in all the arts which were occasionally exercised by some or other of this fraternity.

IV. After the Norman conquest, the first occurrence which I have met with relating to this order of men, is the founding of a priory and hospital by one of them: scil. the Priory and Hospital of St. Bartholomew, in Smithfield, London, by Royer or Raherus, the King's Minstrel, in the third year of King Henry I., A. D. 1102. He was the first Prior of his own establishment, and presided over it to the time of his death, (T 2).

In the reign of King Henry II. we have upon record the name of Galfrid, or Jeffrey, a harper, who in 1180 received a corrody, or annuity, from the abbey of Hide, near Winchester; and, as in the early times every harper was expected to sing, we cannot doubt but this reward was given to him for his music and his songs; which, if they were for the solace of the monks there, we may conclude would be in the English language, (u).

Under his romantic son, King Richard I., the minstrel profession seems to have acquired additional splendour.

* See note (B) and (AA).

Richard, who was the great hero of chivalry, was also the distinguished patron of poets and minstrels. He was himself of their number, and some of his poems are still extant.* They were no less patronised by his favourites and chief officers. His Chancellor, William bishop of Ely, is expressly mentioned to have invited singers and minstrels from France, whom he loaded with rewards; and they in return celebrated him as the most accomplished person in the world, (u 2). This high distinction and regard, although confined perhaps in the first instance to poets and songsters of the French nation, must have had a tendency to do honour to poetry and song among all his subjects, and to encourage the cultivation of these arts among the natives; as the indulgent favour shown by the monarch or his great courtiers to the Provençal Troubadour, or Norman Rymour, would naturally be imitated by their inferior vassals to the English Gleeman or Minstrel. At more than a century after the Conquest, the national distinctions must have begun to decline, and both the Norman and English languages would be heard in the houses of the great, (u 3); so that probably about this era, or soon after, we are to date that remarkable intercommunity and exchange of each other's compositions, which we discover to have taken place at some early period between the French and English minstrels; the same set of phrases, the same species of characters, incidents, and adventures, and often the same identical stories, being found in the old metrical romances of both nations, (v).

The distinguished service which Richard received from

* See a pathetic Song of his in Mr. Walpole's Catalogue of Royal Authors, vol. i. p. 5. The reader will find a translation of it into modern French, in Hist. Litéraire des Troubadours, 1774,3 tom. 12mo. See vol. i. (p. 58), where some more of Richard's poetry is translated. In Dr. Burney's Hist. of Music, vol. ii. p. 238, is a poetical version of it in English.