Irina Dumitrescu’s LRB review (23 May 2024; archived) of Minstrels and Minstrelsy in Late Medieval England by Richard Rastall and Andrew Taylor is full of information about minstrels and their lives; herewith a few bits:
Of all the medieval people who sound as though they should be made up, Roland le Pettour, also known as Roland le Fartere, must be near the top of the list. An entertainer who worked for Henry II, Roland is recorded in several medieval registers as holding substantial tracts of land north of Ipswich. His yearly service to the king, at least as it has come down to us, was ‘saltum, siflum et pettum’: a jump, a whistle and a fart.
Roland fits poorly with the image of medieval minstrels that later took hold. In the 18th and 19th centuries early entertainers were depicted either as quasi-religious bards who plucked their harps at court while intoning the histories of their people, or as romantic wanderers who earned their keep with love songs. In their own time, however, minstrels were viewed less favourably – at best as figures of some social value and at worst as licentious rogues. […]
Despite the scorn directed at minstrels, they were indispensable to medieval society. In The House of Fame, Chaucer imagines Fame living in a castle made of beryl. In the niches he sets every imaginable kind of minstrel, performing stories of woe and of delight – that is, ‘of all that belongs to fame’. Among them are Orpheus playing his harp, the centaur Chiron and a Welsh bard called Glascurion, as well as hosts of lesser harpers. Thousands of other musicians play bagpipes, flutes, clarions and reeds; German pipers demonstrate dance steps; trumpeters provide a ‘bloody’ soundtrack to battle. Chaucer was writing primarily about literary fame, but he recognised that, in a world where literacy was still limited to elites, fame depended on oral performers. […]
Medieval minstrels left few written traces, and the references that do appear in texts from the period already carry a whiff of nostalgia. But a new book co-authored by Richard Rastall and Andrew Taylor sheds some light on the ways they worked and lived. Rastall and Taylor begin by explaining what minstrels were (no simple task). The word comes from the Anglo-Norman menestral, which could refer to a travelling musician or storyteller, or to an artisan or functionary. It is related to the Latin minister, another person who serves in an office. At the most basic level, a minstrel was someone who provided entertainment involving music, or musical accompaniment for specific events. But as the book shows, the job of a minstrel changed depending on time and circumstance, and involved a number of tasks that would rarely fall to a musician today. The other words used also confuse the matter. In some documents a minstrel is called a histrio or a mimus, terms that in classical Latin refer to actors, though medieval minstrels were not usually stage actors. Elsewhere, they appear as squires (scutiferi) or yeomen (valetti). On the battlefield, the work of a minstrel may have overlapped with that of a herald – issuing proclamations, carrying messages, identifying the dead – and some men seem to have done both jobs.
The OED (entry revised 2002) gives this etymology:
< Anglo-Norman menestral, menestrel, minestral, ministral, etc., Old French menestral, menestrel, menesterel, manestrel, etc., servant (c1050), worker, artisan (1170), travelling poet or musician (1170; French ménestrel) < post-classical Latin ministerialis ministerial n.
Notes
Compare Old Occitan menestral artisan, craftsman, architect (13th cent.); also (< French) Italian menestrello (late 19th cent.; earlier †minestrello (14th cent.)), Spanish ministril (14th cent.), Portuguese menestrel (16th cent. as ministrel, 15th cent. as manistrel). Compare also, with suffix substitution, Old French menestrer minstrel (French ménétrier village musician, (now historical) minstrel).
The review ends with these edifying anecdotes:
Not everyone in the Middle Ages appreciated noise at all hours. In 1306, the tailors of Oxford decided to celebrate the Nativity of John the Baptist, according to their custom. They stayed up late in their shops, singing and playing fiddles, harps and any other instruments they had, possibly led by professional musicians. After midnight, they decided to dance in the High Street. A clerk called Gilbert Foxlee objected to the merriment, however, and appeared with an unsheathed sword. Some of the musicians attempted to calm him, but when he threatened to cut off William de Cleydon’s hand he was rushed and stabbed by a group of men. He died from his injuries eight weeks later.
In the Middle English romance Sir Cleges, an Arthurian knight squanders his fortune by giving lavish feasts. He is particularly generous to minstrels, who leave his hall with horses, robes and rings. His wealth gone, Cleges is soon forgotten by his friends. At Christmas, he prays to God for help, and finds a bough of miraculously ripe cherries in his garden. He decides to take them to the king’s court as a gift. When he arrives, dressed in rags, the servants treat him cruelly. But the royal harper recognises him: ‘Sometime men called him Cleges,’ he explains to the king, and the knight’s fortune and reputation are restored at once. Whatever role minstrels played in medieval society, the poem makes one thing clear: entertainers remembered those who paid them well.
Curious about the name Cleges, I found this online edition of the romance, which has a note:
Mc points out that Cleges is an uncommon name found a few times in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur and the Awntyrs of Arthur. Jessie Weston and Mary Housum note the similarity to Chrétien de Troyes’ title character in Cliges, but point out the lack of similarity in plot. The MED defines clege as a noun meaning “horsefly,” which may be a joking comment on Cleges’ horselessness later in the poem.
The MED entry actually says “?A horsefly [see Craigie DOS],” but never mind the uncertainty, it’s a good story.
“… literacy was still limited to elites, fame depended on oral performers. ”
I think, absent printing rather than limited literacy.
A relatively recent (1992) proposal from Patrick Sims-Williams on the name Cligès/Cleges is here:
I have no idea how this has held up since. H. and R. Kahane’s treatment (1961) of Cligès (taking it from Kılıç Arslan II, sultan of Rûm) is here. At the moment I can’t get to Günter Reichenkron, ‘Zur Namensform Cligès’ in Saggi e ricerche in memoria di Ettore Li Gotti (1962), part 3, p. 72–81, and Endre von Ivánka ‘Fragen eines Byzantinisten an Germanisten und Romanisten’, Germanisch-romanische Monatsschrift n.F., Bd. 22 (1972), S. 433–435.
P.S. The entry for cleg ‘gadfly’ in the DSL is here.
Jeffrey Heath describes one of the Timbuktu griot castes: “the hosso, who assist in weddings and are notorious for their foul language and behaviour.” (They are apparently ethnically Fulɓe rather than Songhay.)
So, carnies?
H. and R. Kahane, G. Reichenkron, and E. v. Ivánka all derive Cligès’s name from the name of the Seljuk sultan of Iconium, Kilidj Arslan II
Good lord, that was unexpected! Much as we all love Welsh etymologies, I kind of hope the Seljuk one is valid.
I am happy to let our Welsh brethren the Seljuks claim the word.
the hosso, who assist in weddings and are notorious for their foul language and behaviour.”
One reads that Songhay horso, hosso is a borrowing of Manding woloso ‘one born into slavery, second-generation slave’, literally ‘one born in the house, οἰκογενής’ : wolo ‘be born’ + so ‘house’ (+ -o, the Manding ‘article’?). True?
The idea that “Glygis” is based on a misunderstanding of Old Welsh orthography looks rather fishy. “Branwen” is not really parallel: that was actually /branɣwen/ in Old Welsh.
The mythical king Glywys seems to represent Latin Glevenses “Gloucester folk”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glevum
so his -gu- is not explicable that way.
Though I have wondered idly whether *w may actually have become /ɣw/ non-initially in Welsh, as in e.g. petguar “four” (pedwar now.) The Old Welsh spelling convention looks pretty weird, especially as it antedates the Norman invasions and subsequent Frenchifications. Admittedly that would be an odd sound change, but then non-initial *j most definitely became /ð/ …
One reads that Songhay horso, hosso is a borrowing of Manding woloso ‘one born into slavery, second-generation slave’, literally ‘one born in the house, οἰκογενής’ : wolo ‘be born’ + so ‘house’ (+ -o, the Manding ‘article’?). True?
Sounds like a question for Lameen …
I was – forgive me – hoping for more about the “pettum”.
I wandered off to look up the more recent “Petomane”, & found a little film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntuwg_d5hMc&ab_channel=PROYECTOMEMORY
Oddly, in Castilian.
But it does have English subtitles.
Mr Google claims that Edison made a silent film of one of his performances; but that some colleague or competitor did make a sound recording. I haven’t caught up with that yet…
We were all hoping for more about Roland le Fartere and his pettum. Scholarship has failed us!
…is that the… no, it’s not the etymology, but nearly so!
“From Middle English esquire, from Old French escuier, from Latin scūtārius (“shield-bearer”), from scūtum (“shield”).”
@Catanea: If you were indeed asking about the etymology, it’s pettum< Class. peditum, the past part. of pedere 'to fart'. Interestingly, the Spanish and Italian forms 'pedo' and 'peto' must go back not to pettum (<ped(i)tum), as in French and Catalan, but pe(di)tum, or, for example, the Italian would be '*petto'.
What i was originally going to comment when I saw this post was the thrill of philological horror I felt when it occurred to me that Catalan petó ‘kiss’ might also be somehow related to this root, and how that could have come about. Happily, it seems not to be the case, and it comes from an old word for ‘lip’, pot, with some dissimilation, the latter from *pottu, which is supposedly onomatopoeic, but no time to look into that further…
…derives from a written Old Wesh form… cf. how the Welsh name Branwen, in its Old Welsh form Branguen, gave the French forms Brangain, Brenguein
This idea about Old French Brangain appears to originate with Joseph Loth (1912) Contributions à l’étude des romans de la Table ronde, p. 103–104 here, and it was taken up by Rachel Bromwich, “Some Remarks on the Celtic Sources of ‘Tristan’”, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, Session 1953 (1955), p. 55 here.
Non-existence of printing and low literacy rates are perhaps not independent causal factors but related in a complex chicken-and-egg sort of way? Since the payoff to having become literate (and thus the incentive to achieve that state) maybe increases significantly post-Gutenberg.
The French form Glygis/Cliges derives from a written Old Welsh form of Glywys, i.e. Gliguis
This topic interested me, so I went looking for the attestations of Gliguis. Here is a quick write-up of my notes for anyone else who is interested. See for example no. 255 in V. E. Nash-Williams (1950) The early Christian monuments of Wales, with no. 255 (p. 160), with fig. 173 (p. 159), available here. Dated to the 11th century, apparently. On the same inscription, also the following from Ifor Williams ‘The Ogmore Castle Inscription’ Archaeologia Cambrensis 87 (1932), pp. 232-38 (available here):
Additional information on this inscription here.
All I know is that horso doesn’t look like an originally Songhay term; don’t know enough Bambara to evaluate the proposed etymology, but it looks alright offhand.
Congratulations to all Kusaal speakers on this news, btw: Kusaal language goes live on Wikipedia.
In the grand tradition of Wikipedia, there are major errors on the front page.
This is pretty much complete fantasy.
“Future” is not an aspect. Pʋ and kʋ (not ku) are indeed preverbal negative particles. Neither has anything to do with aspect at all (aspect is marked by verb flexion.)
Pʋ negates the indicative mood. It invariably carries mid tone. No variation, no exceptions. Same for both aspects and all tenses.
Kʋ negates the “future”: I think are actually good reasons to regard this as an irrealis mood in Kusaal, but it usually does mean future (though it can be hypothetical “would have.”) Kʋ has intrinsically low tone, but this is often changed to high by tone sandhi. In no case does that alter the meaning from “will not” to “did not.” (The only way it can interact with meaning at all is that tone sandhi after pronoun subjects is affected by whether or not the clause is subordinate.)
Kusaal is spoken mainly in the Upper East Region of Ghana, Burkina Faso, Togo and some parts of West Africa.
Don’t know what “some parts of West Africa” is doing there. Ghana, Burkina and Togo are parts of West Africa, I suppose. That exhausts everywhere the language is spoken traditionally (Togo pretty marginally, at that.) Whatevs.
Ah. Their source is a journalist with a background in agronomy:
https://muckrack.com/mahmud-mohammed-nurudeen/bio
His name Winna’amzua (“God-friend”) is Kusaal, so he presumably follows in the noble journalistic tradition of supposing that being a native speaker makes you an expert on the linguistics of your language ex officio (as it were.)
(I’m still trying to figure out where he got all this from. It’s not just terminological confusion: it’s factually incorrect, whatever terms you apply or misapply. The only context in which pʋ can negate a clause with future reference is in the prodosis of a conditional sentence, where the indicative and irrealis/”future” can both occur; perhaps he was trying to hear differences in tones in that context and misinterpreted the differences he heard as meaningful in their own right.)
Ah: it may be based on a misreading of Antony Agoswin Musah’s A Grammar of Kusaal, Section 2.3.2.2 “Negation of the future and the factative” (which is itself incorrect in stating that pʋ and kʋ have the same tonal behaviour: only his examples for kʋ are correct.) Such a misreading would still leave Winna’amzua as having taken more trouble over linguistic fact than most journalists, though.
“On the battlefield, the work of a minstrel may have overlapped with that of a herald – issuing proclamations, carrying messages, identifying the dead – and some men seem to have done both jobs.”
Indeed, even at the time of the ‘English’ Civil War drummers (infantry) and trumpeters (cavalry), as well as relaying commands on the battlefield, acted as messengers and were involved in negotiations between the two sides. The popular image of the ‘drummer boy’ belongs to a later era.
In the traditional culture of the Mossi-Dagomba kingdoms, the hereditary drummer clans are the state historians:
https://pdfproc.lib.msu.edu/?file=/DMC/African%20Journals/pdfs/Institue%20of%20African%20Studies%20Research%20Review/1971v7n2/asrv007002007.pdf
The Dagomba drummers are the best organised and have the highest status, which has tended to slant traditional history somewhat: the Dagomba kingdom was in fact an offshoot of the Mamprussi originally, but the latter are not as good at the record-keeping. History is written by those with the best drummers.
Interesting reference later on in the paper to the fact that Ouagadougou is not the most senior Mossi royal line, despite the occasional claims on behalf of the Moogo Naaba. I actually removed the cataracts of the head of the real senior line, who was careful to tell me all about it, as you would if you were in his position. He was a very interesting man to talk to. (I think I have already mentioned somewhere that he offered me one of his daughters in marriage, but I am fairly sure he was only doing it to wind me up.)
In the grand tradition of Wikipedia, there are major errors on the front page.
That’s not a Wikipedia page, it’s a screencap of the front page of kus.wikipedia.org followed by the journalist’s story (apparently “source” means “author” at that site). Kusaal Wikipedia doesn’t seem to have any pages on the Kusaal language or its grammar yet, so the author didn’t get the grammar stuff from there, he got it on his own. As you say, more trouble over linguistic fact than most journalists.
I apologise to the Spirit of Wikipedia.
(The existing WP page on Kusaal is mostly, though not entirely, by me, and is sorely in need of revision, though I say so myself. Many years since I wrote it.)
Don’t know what “some parts of West Africa” is doing there.
Probably meant to say “some other parts of West Africa”, and maybe he’s thinking of very small numbers of people who migrated. He’s excited about seeing his language on the internet and he’s being a booster, I hate to come down on him too hard for that.
I hate to come down on him too hard for that
Yes indeed. Good luck to him.
In fact, his language has many more claims to general linguistic interest than just being a tone language (hardly outré for “Subsaharan” Africa, after all.) Highly complex external sandhi (Sanskrit, nothing), regular and frequent “postsyntactic” nominal compounding (a thing proven not to exist by the Chomskyites, in one of the many achievements of Universal Grammar), lots of serial verb constructions that probably aren’t serial verb constructions at all, internally headed relative clauses despite SVO constituent order (another thing that has been claimed not to exist), but with actual relative pronouns being created in front of our eyes over the past fifty years ….
I wish I had sixpence for every sweeping claim I’ve read about “Niger-Congo” languages, or West African languages, or indeed language in general, which is just straightforwardly falsified by Kusaal (and usually by most of its close relatives too.) Bold theorising without anything like adequate data.
with actual relative pronouns being created in front of our eyes over the past fifty years
Not ex nihilo, I imagine. Pronoun policy is in upheaval elsewhere too. There’s just no satisfying some people.
I myself believe the whole kerfuffle is a diversionary activity, using up time that might otherwise be spent closely monitoring Those Who Call The Shots. It’s not something the latter made up. They just sit out the auto-generated alarms and diversions.
Ladies with fat bottoms, that’s another topic to delve into, in addition to preferred pronouns. I’m the one. Despacito 2 [by Flying Kitty].
Not ex nihilo, I imagine
No, by reanalysis of combinations of demonstrative pronouns with second-position clause-nominalising particles as single units, and then generalising those units to positions which were previously ungrammatical.
(Well, you did ask …)
Pronouns and gender is a non-issue in Kusaal, except for people who wish to be considered inanimate. (I can see that. Sometimes, I, too, feel the lure of inanimacy.)
No, by reanalysis of .., and then generalising …
But why would anyone want to do all that ? A vitamin deficiency ? Upheavals in the syntactic substrate?
Sometimes, I, too, feel the lure of inanimacy.
Remember this cover ?
But why would anyone want to do all that ?
Relative pronoun envy. Or possibly entropy.*
Remember this cover?
Pornography! Think of the children!
* My Kusaasi colleagues would sometimes point out that the Young People of Today didn’t talk proper no more. This is surely a cultural universal.
I’m not high enough (flying like a kitty?) to appreciate this version; have the Udmurt one – for that one it’s enough to be tired. ^_^
Roland fits poorly with the image of medieval minstrels that later took hold.
I was very surprised by the direction the article went from this. I would have thought that the default perception of minstrels was that they were disreputable, low-class entertainers (albeit sometimes credited with a certain cultural knowledge). I thought the contrast to be exposed was that Farting Roland had become a wealthy landowner,l.
I would have thought that the default perception of minstrels was that they were disreputable, low-class entertainers
You’re talking about the perception of people who have an accurate perception of history, which is a small minority. Most people get their idea of history from movies, TV shows, etc.
And minstrel shows.