minstrel

minstrel, (from Latin ministerium, “service”), between the 12th and 17th centuries, a professional entertainer of any kind, including jugglers, acrobats, and storytellers; more specifically, a secular musician, usually an instrumentalist. In some contexts, minstrel more particularly denoted a player of wind instruments, and in the 15th century it was sometimes even used for an instrument that he played, the shawm (an early form of oboe). The word minstrel—derived from the Old French and Provençal menestral—replaced the earlier jongleur (Provençal: joglar) about the 14th century.

The minstrel profession antedates its name. In the 4th century the gléoman is heard of among the Angles, and in the 6th century the Germanic scop is referred to. The Old English poem “Widsith” describes the role of a fictitious scop in Germanic society. In the 12th century there emerges a clearer picture of the performance and social situation of the minstrel. Many were attached to courts, some as musicians. Others, the great majority, traveled widely, staying for short times at places of potential patronage. Most minstrels were unable to write their music down; their art was one of memory and improvisation. Consequently, little of their music survives, but it is not unlikely that the best minstrels, some of whom commanded large salaries, performed music equal in sophistication to surviving examples of the 12th- and 13th-century polyphony (part music) that was composed by clerics (those who could write).

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The 14th and 15th centuries witnessed the development of minstrel guilds in towns all over Europe. The guilds made the minstrel more a part of his society, required that he be properly trained by another member of the guild, and saw to it that there was work for him. In the later 15th century, town ordinances in Flanders even stipulated that the minstrels practice together regularly and give concerts at specified times. Their performances were mostly outdoors or at large gatherings, and so the preferred instruments were the louder ones—shawms, pipes, trumpets, and drums.

The little surviving instrumental music from these centuries apparently comes not from the town guilds but from the musicians established in noble houses. At the accession of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, in 1419, his court included six trumpeters, four menestrels, and a harpist. Later the number of musicians was increased. The relative stability of musicians at that court (one stayed 34 years) suggests a high degree of group improvisational skill among minstrels. Similar groups of musicians were employed at many European courts, and there was a fair degree of contact between them. The Burgundian court records show that during Lent, when entertainment was not permitted, the minstrels were given a special allowance to visit “minstrel schools” in various parts of Europe so that they could learn new tunes and find out what their colleagues elsewhere were playing.

The later 15th century saw a marked increase in literacy among the laity as well as a more simplified musical notation (essentially that still in use). Sixteenth-century manuscripts of wind-band music often also contain church music, suggesting that the distinction between reading clerical musicians and nonreading minstrels was breaking down. Also, the popular dance forms were being used by composers as a framework for composition rather than for improvisation. This convergence of the hitherto distinct styles of minstrelsy and art music contributed to the decline of the minstrel profession. Though the guilds, town bands, and wandering musicians continued to exist, the importance of the minstrel as a separate part of the musical profession faded after the 16th century. The minstrel is related to such other medieval singers as the meistersinger, the minnesinger, the troubadour, and the trouvère.