But the decline of minstrelsy had already set in, as we know. from Piers Noir/II 11 1?, the best single source of information for England. Minstrels as a class Langland severely satirized. calling them prattlers and buffoons, foul and scurrilous of speech, indeed the very children of Satan. Yet in England minstrels may have had a closer connection with genuine poets than they hail on the Continent. Nvliere from the outset thee sons of the Roman mini and seance (com pare 'scurrilous') and of the old bards of the North were abhorred by the Cluu•ch, 31ass and absolution were denied them: indeed, they were under perpetual excommunication, and were as• sured that they would spend eternity at the bot tom of hell. Nor bad they—on the Continent, at all events—any standing before the secular law. Those who harmed them Went unpun yet if a minstrel was ill handled, he 11:1(1 the privilege of beating the shadow of his of fender.
31ost minstrels were itinerant; others were retained by lords as jesters. Not seldom tiny were won1111, or, at all events, women followed many a band of minstrels and lived their hard dissolute life, The very nano• of minstrel was a byword. hut everywhere they Were Wei vonle. After the invention of printing. there was little place for the minstrel as an between author and public. Ile
gradually found his main occupation as a ballad singer at street corners or at the wassails of the inore ignorant barons. still con tinued, it is true, to be retained at Court. and ample provision Was made for their maintenanee. But by an act of Parliament in the thirty ninth year of Elizabeth's reign, ',Midst rids alirtiall' Were classed a- and vagabonds,' and were ordered to he 1.11111,111.11 as such.
In spite of new social conditions. minstrelsy was "low in dying 010, I:eorgc the Second main tained a eompany of twenty•fonr innsiehins, who Were eniph)yell i11 the serViee 1If the Chapel loyal and in rendering odes on birthdays and New Year's. Seott, as is well known, collected the minstrelsy of the Scottish border, consisting of traditional ballads that were still recited. And in the Lay of the Last Minstrel is described it wandering harper who is supposed to have lived tit the close of the seventeenth century. Re cently. too. W. B. Yeats has discovered 'the last gleeman in Ireland,' a certain Alichael Moran, blind almost from birth. "Ile was," says Yeats, "a true gleeman, being alike poet, jester. and IICWsillan Ot the people." The descendant of the old gleeman, it is said, is still not unknown in the Orkneys.