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The English Medieval Minstrel
Goes deeper than the history of a profession: it suggests a new way of looking at the exercise of power useful and rewarding. Eric Christiansen in the DAILY TELEGRAPH Originally the word minstrel' meant little servant to the king'and the crux of the profession was versatility musical skills were never enough in themselves. Fools, acrobats, singers, conjurors and puppeteers, this is the first book to tell the whole of the minstrels' story and put it into a developing historical perspective.
- GenresNonfiction
204 pages, Hardcover
First published November 30, 1989
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December 8, 2025
An info dump, charming in its author's clear enthusiasm for his subject, but lacking in any meaningful argument, and therefore, trivial when it could have been useful.
The term "minstrel" is derived from the Latin "minister", meaning servant. It came to describe a particular kind of entertainer in medieval court life. "Entertainer", an ambiguous word, is here used deliberately: versatility and flexibility of function were prized, though Southworth exaggerates just how taboo specialization was: many harpists, bards, fools, buffoons, waferers, actors, barbers, farters, acrobats, and so on - even before the specialization from the 16th Century onwards that gave us the court music of Handel, Scarlatti, Bach and the like - were considered minstrels, though they possessed singular skills. Nonetheless, variety was key. A poem by the thirteenth-century Provençal jongleur, Giraud de Calanson, describes a true jongleur as one who can "speak and rhyme well, be witty, know the story of Troy, balance apples on the points of knives, juggle, jump through hoops, play the citole, mandora, harp, fiddle, psaltery..."
Many minstrels attached themselves to kings and other great personages, and were thus on retainers. It is as appendages to these great men that such minstrels make their way to us in the annals of history, an innumerable list of sidekicks providing mostly amusement, distraction, levity; all those matters cast in the realm of the "unserious". Southworth notes only three instances, in all the recorded history of the midddle ages he could find, when minstrels were deemed to have "played a key role" in the political life. Even these cases, though, were at best only slightly significant, for example, in the case of the minstrel who was first to charge into battle. He was soon followed by others, but the fact of his charging first (to the embarrassment of some of his social superiors) is considered by Southworth to be remarkable.
Southworth teases out a tenous dichotomy of "seriousness". Northern Europeans, being pre-literate, had their harper-poets as their historians. Romans, Mediterraneans, being people of the book, had no use for such savagery to carry on their history. Minstrelsy, for them, was for entertainment and the giving of pleasure. The Germanic scôp, the Celtic bard, the Anglo-Saxon gleoman, by virtue of their themes, however, later come to occupy a realm of seriousness not available to their Southern cousins. Beowulf, Chaucer's works, etc., are offshoots of this tradition, whereby once writing became available to the Northerners, their literature emerged more profoundly.
Yet this brutal distinction that Southworth draws explains to us neither the development of the comic/unserious/light tradition (which are, in any case, much older categories that go back to at least the ancient Greeks, as are their antitheticals, all of which, it should be noted, take the form of "serious") in the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic literatures of the middle ages, nor that of the "serious" tradition in the Latin-based literatures of the same period. Tragedy-comedy, Seria-Buffa, serious-unserious: the history of these categories is too complex to be reduced to the mere capacity for writing.
Of course, Southworth's focus is primarily on England, so on some of the comparisons he makes, we can't fault him for not talking about what he wasn't talking about. But some of the points that seem to me arguable are stated so plainly and so blithely that one can't help sensing that some complex explanation has been avoided. The argument is given, for example, that some of the differences between Anglo-Saxon and Celtic traditions of minstrelsy and Mediterranean ones are explained by the fact that the former, never having been exposed to Roman culture in its final, most decadent phases, could reach back into an earlier time, Greek or even biblical, and from there diverge into even greater seriousness. I don't buy it: Dante's Divine Comedy exists.
Of interest is Southworth's engaging discussion on the interactions of some of these minstrels with both the royals who employ and sustain them and the priests/clergy, almost as powerful as the royals, who hate them. Almost all the records we have were by the priests. John of Salisbury is clear in his distaste for the minstrels, for example, yet most of what we know about Eleanor of Aquitaine, that great royal favorer of minstrels, is from accounts by men like John. Southworth only points out that some royals favored the minstrels and some clergy hated them, but he never seems to go further. What then? What do we do with that information?
The term "minstrel" is derived from the Latin "minister", meaning servant. It came to describe a particular kind of entertainer in medieval court life. "Entertainer", an ambiguous word, is here used deliberately: versatility and flexibility of function were prized, though Southworth exaggerates just how taboo specialization was: many harpists, bards, fools, buffoons, waferers, actors, barbers, farters, acrobats, and so on - even before the specialization from the 16th Century onwards that gave us the court music of Handel, Scarlatti, Bach and the like - were considered minstrels, though they possessed singular skills. Nonetheless, variety was key. A poem by the thirteenth-century Provençal jongleur, Giraud de Calanson, describes a true jongleur as one who can "speak and rhyme well, be witty, know the story of Troy, balance apples on the points of knives, juggle, jump through hoops, play the citole, mandora, harp, fiddle, psaltery..."
Many minstrels attached themselves to kings and other great personages, and were thus on retainers. It is as appendages to these great men that such minstrels make their way to us in the annals of history, an innumerable list of sidekicks providing mostly amusement, distraction, levity; all those matters cast in the realm of the "unserious". Southworth notes only three instances, in all the recorded history of the midddle ages he could find, when minstrels were deemed to have "played a key role" in the political life. Even these cases, though, were at best only slightly significant, for example, in the case of the minstrel who was first to charge into battle. He was soon followed by others, but the fact of his charging first (to the embarrassment of some of his social superiors) is considered by Southworth to be remarkable.
Southworth teases out a tenous dichotomy of "seriousness". Northern Europeans, being pre-literate, had their harper-poets as their historians. Romans, Mediterraneans, being people of the book, had no use for such savagery to carry on their history. Minstrelsy, for them, was for entertainment and the giving of pleasure. The Germanic scôp, the Celtic bard, the Anglo-Saxon gleoman, by virtue of their themes, however, later come to occupy a realm of seriousness not available to their Southern cousins. Beowulf, Chaucer's works, etc., are offshoots of this tradition, whereby once writing became available to the Northerners, their literature emerged more profoundly.
Yet this brutal distinction that Southworth draws explains to us neither the development of the comic/unserious/light tradition (which are, in any case, much older categories that go back to at least the ancient Greeks, as are their antitheticals, all of which, it should be noted, take the form of "serious") in the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic literatures of the middle ages, nor that of the "serious" tradition in the Latin-based literatures of the same period. Tragedy-comedy, Seria-Buffa, serious-unserious: the history of these categories is too complex to be reduced to the mere capacity for writing.
Of course, Southworth's focus is primarily on England, so on some of the comparisons he makes, we can't fault him for not talking about what he wasn't talking about. But some of the points that seem to me arguable are stated so plainly and so blithely that one can't help sensing that some complex explanation has been avoided. The argument is given, for example, that some of the differences between Anglo-Saxon and Celtic traditions of minstrelsy and Mediterranean ones are explained by the fact that the former, never having been exposed to Roman culture in its final, most decadent phases, could reach back into an earlier time, Greek or even biblical, and from there diverge into even greater seriousness. I don't buy it: Dante's Divine Comedy exists.
Of interest is Southworth's engaging discussion on the interactions of some of these minstrels with both the royals who employ and sustain them and the priests/clergy, almost as powerful as the royals, who hate them. Almost all the records we have were by the priests. John of Salisbury is clear in his distaste for the minstrels, for example, yet most of what we know about Eleanor of Aquitaine, that great royal favorer of minstrels, is from accounts by men like John. Southworth only points out that some royals favored the minstrels and some clergy hated them, but he never seems to go further. What then? What do we do with that information?
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