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(S2). 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. 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 noticed 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[18]. 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 (T2).