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Rutebeuf, one of the trouvères, thirteenth-century French poets, has a description of the scene in which one of the old herbalist doctors who used to go round and collect a crowd by means of songs and music, and then talk medicine to them just as is done even yet in many of the smaller towns of this country is represented as saying to the crowd when he wants to make them realize that he is no ordinary quacksalver, that he is one of the disciples of the great Madame Trot of Salerno.
It is said to have been first written by Eutychianus, who had been a pupil of Theophilus, and who tells the story partly as an eyewitness, partly from the narration of his master. The nun Hroswitha first treated it dramatically in the latter half of the tenth century. Some four hundred years later Rutebeuf made it the theme of a French miracle-play.
The learned editor remarks that bric, which is mentioned in the thirteenth century by Rutebeuf was played, seated, with a little stick; qui féry is probably the modern game called by the French main chaude; pince merille, which is mentioned among the games of Gargantua, was a game in which you pinched one of the players' arms, crying 'Mérille' or 'Morille'. Though the details of these games are vague, there are many analagous games played by children today, and it is easy to guess the kind of thing which is meant.
In his brief critical biography of Rutebeuf, M. Clédat pointed out that for long years the only important literature in Europe was the French, and that the French language had on three several occasions almost established itself as the language of European civilization once in the thirteenth century, again in the seventeenth, and finally when Napoleon had made himself temporarily master of the Continent.
It was no longer a disgrace even to a knight if he refused to take the Cross. Rutebeuf, a French minstrel, who flourished about this time , composed a dialogue between a crusader and a non-crusader, which the reader will find translated in "Way's Fabliaux."
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