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The fat, red-faced gleeman, the listening group, the archer with upraised finger beating in time to the music, and the huge sprawling figure of Hordle John, all thrown into red light and black shadow by the flickering fire in the centre memory was to come often lovingly back to it.
The abbot and the friars led the gleeman to a place in the woods at some distance, where many straight young trees were growing, and they made him cut one down and fashion it to the right length, while the beggars stood round them in a ring, talking and gesticulating. The abbot then bade him cut off another and shorter piece of wood, and nail it upon the first.
But they heard no more, for they had drifted beyond hearing. They had now attained the last ship, when suddenly a watchman sprang to the side. "Boat ahoy! Whence and where?" "From the 'Great Dragon' a poor gleeman and his attendant to his home on the shore." "Come on board then, and wake us with a song. The watch is ours, and we will make it merry."
The others, however, drew closer, leaving the place of honor to the right of the gleeman to the free-handed new-comer. He had thrown off his steel cap and his brigandine, and had placed them with his sword, his quiver and his painted long-bow, on the top of his varied heap of plunder in the corner.
And then his "Aoi" rang forth so loud and clear, like any trumpet blast, under the oaken glades, that the wild men leaped to their feet, and shouted, "Health to the gleeman! Health to the Abbot Thorold!" "I have won them," thought the Abbot to himself.
Three or four of the men round the fire were evidently underkeepers and verderers from the forest, sunburned and bearded, with the quick restless eye and lithe movements of the deer among which they lived. Close to the corner of the chimney sat a middle-aged gleeman, clad in a faded garb of Norwich cloth, the tunic of which was so outgrown that it did not fasten at the neck and at the waist.
They were translated, in the fourth century, into the Latin of the Vulgate. Many an Anglo-Saxon gleeman knew that Latin version. It moulded century after century the liturgy of the European world. It influenced Tyndale's English version of the Psalms, and this has in turn affected the whole vocabulary and style of the modern English lyric.
Here, it is true, were none of the appliances which popular merriment would so readily have found in the England of Elizabeth's time, or that of James no rude shows of a theatrical kind; no minstrel, with his harp and legendary ballad, nor gleeman with an ape dancing to his music; no juggler, with his tricks of mimic witchcraft; no Merry Andrew, to stir up the multitude with jests, perhaps a hundred years old, but still effective, by their appeals to the very broadest sources of mirthful sympathy.
The scop was an originator of poetry, the gleeman more often a mere repeater, although this distinction in the use of the terms was not observed in later times. The Songs of Scop and Gleeman. The subject matter of these songs was suggested by the most common experiences of the time. These were with war, the sea, and death.
And when that was done I sang the song of Bosham bell, with the ending that the gleeman on Colchester Hill had made. Thereat Beorn raised his head and, snarling at me like an angry dog, bade me cease singing of shipwreck. But I heeded him not, and so I sang and he cursed, until at last he wept like an angry child, and I held my peace.
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