Page:A History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England During the Middle Ages.djvu/196

 176 Hijlory of 'Domejitc Manners tongue by the fharp point." In the Life of Hereward, the gleeman (whofe name is there tranllated hy joculator) is reprefented as concihating the favour of the new Norman lords by mimicking the unrefined manners of the Saxons, and throwing upon them indecent jefts and reproaches. But, in the later Anglo-Saxon period at leaft, the words fcop and gledman appear to have been confidered as equivalent ; for, in another hall-fcene in Beowulf, where the fcop performs his craft, we are told that — Led^ luas afungen, The lay ivas fung, gleomannes gyd, the gleeman s recital, gamen eft aftah, paft'me began again, heorhtode benc-five'g. the hench-noije became loud. — Beowulf, 1. 2323. There is here evidently an intimation of merrier fongs than thofe fung by the fcop, and whatever his performances were, they drew a louder welcome. And in a fragment of another romance which has come down to us, the gleeman Widfeth bears witnefs to the wandering charafter of his clafs, and enumerates in a long lift the various courts of different chiefs and peoples which he had vifited. We learn, alio, that among the Anglo-Saxons there were gleemen attached to the courts or houfe- holds of the kings and great chieftains. Under Edward the Confeffor, as we learn from the Domefday Survey, Berdic, the king's joculator, poffelfed three villas in Gloucefterfliire. On the continent, when we firft become acquainted with the hiftory of the popular literature, we find the minftrels, the reprefentatives of the ancient bards, appearing as the compofers and chanters of the poems which told the ftories of .the old heroes of romance, and they feem alfo to have been accompanied ufually with the harp, or with fome other ftringed inftrument. They fpeak of themfelves, in thefe poems, as wandering about from caflle to caftle, wherever any feafting was going on, as being everywhere welcome, and as depending upon the liberality either of the lord of the feaft, or of the guefts, for their living. Occa- fional complaints would lead us to fuppofe that this liberality was not always great, and the poems themfelves contain formules of begging- appeals, which are not very dignified or delicate. Thus, in the romance of" Gui de Bourgogne," the minftrel interrupts his narrative, to inform his hearers