Page:A History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England During the Middle Ages.djvu/203

 and Sentiments. The firft piece in the colleftion has for its fubje£l his own poverty. He complains of being reduced to fuch diftrefs, that he had been obhged for fome time to Hve upon the generofity of his friends 5 that people no longer fliowed any liberality to poor minftrels ; that he was perifhing with cold and hunger ; and that he had no other bed but the bare flraw. In another poem, entitled Rutebeuf's Marriage, he informs us that his privations were made more painful by the circumftance of his having a threw for his wife. In a third he laments over the lofs of the fight of his right eye, and informs us that, among other misfortunes, his wife had jufl been delivered of a child, and his horfe had broke its leg, fo that, while he had no means of fupporting a nurfe for the former, the latter accident had deprived him of the power of going to any diftance to exer- cile his minfi:relfy craft, Rutebeuf repeats his laments on his extreme poverty in feveral other pieces, and they have an echo in thofe of other minftrels of his age. We find, in fa6t, in the verfe-writers of the latter half of the thirteenth century, and in fome of thofe of the fourteenth, a general complaint of the negleft of the minftrels, and of the degeneracy of minftrelfy. In a poem againft the growing tafte for the tabor, printed in M. Jubinal's volume, entitled " Jougleurs et Trouveres," the low ftate into which the minftrels' art had fallen is afcribed to a growing love for inftruments of an undignified charatter, fuch as the tabor, which is faid to have been brought to us from the Arabs, and the pipe. If an ignorant Ihepherd from the field, fays the writer of this poem, but play on the tabor and pipe, he becomes more popular than the man who plays on the viol ever fo well — S^ai- funs bcrglers de chans tabor e et chalemcle. Plus toji eji apde que cil qui bien ulele. Everybody followed the tabor, he fays, and the good minftrels were no longer in vogue, though their fiddles were fo much fuperior to the flutes, and flajolets {Jiajols), and tabors of the others. He confoles himfelf, however, with the refleftion that the holy Virgin Mary never loved the tabor, and that no fuch vulgar inftrument was admitted at her wedding ; while flie had in various ways Ihown her favour to the jougleurs. "I pray God," our minftrel continues, " that he will fend mifchief to him who