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Updated: June 24, 2025
We have first, in France, answering to the Achaean aristocracy, the Frankish noblesse of warriors dwelling in princely courts and strong castles, dominating an older population, owing a practically doubtful fealty to an Over-Lord, the King, passing their days in the chace, in private war, or in revolt against the Over-Lord, and, for all literary entertainment, depending on the recitations of epic poems by jongleurs, who in some cases are of gentle birth, and are the authors of the poems which they recite.
It was her intent to study the ancient Walloon tongue upon its own ground, and to put her studies to some literary effect by an elaborate comparison of the language spoken by the peasantry of the present day with that of the earliest of the French jongleurs and chroniclers. 'So you see, Mr.
These songs were always sung to an accompaniment on some instrument, usually the lute. Those who merely sang them, without being themselves poets, were called jongleurs. The troubadours and jongleurs traveled from court to court, not only in France, but north into Germany and south into Italy, carrying with them the southern French poetry and customs.
Thus it came about that the epic cycle of Charlemagne, after supplanting in men's minds the grand sagas of the pagan North, was itself supplanted by the Arthurian cycle; that the Frankish stories absorbed the wholly discrepant elements of their more fortunate Keltic rivals; that both cycles, having lost all character through fusion and through obliteration by time, became more meaningless generation by generation and year by year, until when the Middle Ages had come to an end, and the great poets of the Renaissance were ready to give this old mediæval epic stuff a definitive and durable artistic shape, there came to the hands of Boiardo and Ariosto, of Tasso and Spenser, only a strange, trumpery material, muddled by jongleurs and romance writers, and reduced to mere fairy stuff, taken seriously only by Don Quixote, and by the authors of the volumes of insane twaddle called after Amadis of Gaul and all his kinsmen.
Nor is it so easy to tell, of each, to which world he belongs, as it was to place the lady, who held out her finger over that gorge called Grand Canyon, and said: "It doesn't look thirteen miles; but they measured it just there! Excuse my pointing!" 1912. "Et nous jongleurs inutiles, frivoles joueurs de luth!". . . Useless jugglers, frivolous players on the lute!
Even in the fourteenth century, in that complete picture which Boccacio gives us of the existing frame of society, we do not find the smallest trace of plays. In place of them they had simply their conteurs, menestriers, jongleurs.
Strolling histriones, jongleurs and minstrels passed from court to court, appeared in castle yards, market places or village greens, recited, acted, sang, danced and played on musical instruments. They afforded a welcome means of communication with the outside world; they broke up the monotony of life when events were few.
In the thirteenth century we find Guirant Riquier, often called the last of the Troubadours, requesting King Alfonso X. of Castile to make a definite classification of Jongleurs, and title the best, thus preventing the indiscriminate mixing of high and low musicians in the public mind.
This was at a time when Italian was not yet a recognized language, and when the men and women who talked in Tuscan, Lombard, or Venetian dialects, wrote in Latin and in French; and while Francesca and Paolo read the story of Launcelot most probably in good mediæval langue d'oil, as befitted people of high birth; the jongleurs, who collected crowds so large as to bar the streets and require the interference of the Bolognese magistrates, sang of Roland and Oliver in a sort of lingua Franca of French Lombard.
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