When Europe emerged from the turmoil, throat-cutting, and intellectual barrenness of the centuries immediately succeeding the fall of the Roman Empire, music presented itself in a twofold aspect, which might be typified in two representative figures, the Minstrel or Gleeman, and the Monk. The Monk living and working quietly behind the strong walls of his monastery. The Minstrel, hopping from town to town all over the land the plaything of fortune, a man mixing with all classes of society, the friend and favourite of every one, utterly destitute of all status, and a man whom it was scarcely a crime to defraud or kill. The letter of music dwelt in the monasteries, but the spirit of music, staggered drunk, sometimes quite literally, by the roadside.
The outcast, wayfaring class, typified by the Minstrel, and which, comprising Minstrels, Jugglers, Acrobats, Mountebanks, Quacks, &c., held such an important place in the social economy of the Middle Ages, is supposed to have been a direct survival of the gladiatorial caste of Imperial Rome. In addition, it is probable that the adverse attitude of the Christian Church at large, towards those whose business in life is the providing of amusement for others, was also an inheritance from the days of the decadent Empire.
With more peaceful times arose an art more entitled to the name of Minstrelsy than the rude efforts of the strollers who gave entertainments before castle gates and in market-places. For a long period, Provence was the most peaceful land in Europe: it appears to have lain out of the track of warfare and misery, and in that sunny land Minstrelsy was undisturbedly cultivated by high and low. From the eleventh century, the Troubadours were treated with honour and respect.
The history of the Troubadour as existing in Provenge, in the days prior to the Albigensian Crusade, forms one of the most striking and unique episodes in literary and musical history. The social position of the Troubadours was a curious one. Recruited, as was the order, from all ranks of society, the Troubadour might be the son of a knight, as was Guiilem de Cabestanh; or he might belong to the trading classes, as did Peire Vidal, the son of a furrier at Toulouse. In any sphere of life, however, the fact of being a Troubadour at once placed a man on a sort of equality with the greatest; for a Troubadour was essentially a privileged person.
To the qualifications of the minstrel, the man with whom at first sight he would appear to have most in common, he added the caustic tongue of the jester, something of the inviolability of the herald and the Churchman, and, as often as not, the lance and shield of the knight. Roughly, he combined in his person the elements of those two modern institutions, Public Opinion and the Press. Like the minstrel at large, he was a kind of peripatetic newspaper, for his compositions found their way through the land more quickly than the last news from the Crusades.
Extracts taken
Tags: Gleeman, Minstrel, Music, musical history, secular music, Troubadour
