The English Medieval Minstrel

Minstrels were popular at every level of society in the middle ages, and on all kinds of occasions; they were an indispensable adjunct to social intercourse and celebration, from the coronations of kings to the hurly-burly of street-market and fair. But strangely enough, though many historians have touched on their history at different points and in different periods, this is the first book to attempt to tell the whole of their story, and to put it into a developing, historical perspective.Originally, `minstrel' meant `little servant of the king'. An essential charactistic was versatility: musical skills were important, but never sufficient in themselves. Among those accounted minstrels in contemporary records were fools, acrobats, singers, actors, conjurors, puppeteers and dice-throwers, even exhibitors of performing animals; all of these feature in these pages. While examining the evidence for such well-known minstrels as Taillefer, Blondel and Rahere, the author has also uncovered some little-known but equally fascinating individuals: a fool of King John's called William Picol, a knighted buffoon of Henry III (Sir Fortunatus de Luca) and Thomas Dodmore, the blind harper of Richard II. Henry V is revealed as an accomplished harpist, Henry VI recoils in shocked disapproval from bare-breasted French dancers, and we learn the identity of Henry VIII's most intimate chamber minstrels. In his final chapter, the author discusses the dispersal of the minstrels as they took divergent paths in becoming specialist musicians, players or clowns. JOHN SOUTHWORTH has spent much of his life in and around the theatre. He studied at the Old Vic Theatre School, joined the Stratford Memorial Theatre company for a year, directed at Ipswich Theatre during the 1970s, and has been a freelance actor in a variety of roles.