The fiddle itself appears at this time to have been gradually sinking in credit, and the poets complained that a degraded taste for more vulgar musical instruments was introducing itself. Among these we may mention especially the pipe and tabor. The French antiquary, M. Jubinal, in a very valuable collection of early popular poetry, published under the title of "Jongleurs et Trouvères," has printed a curious poem of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, intended as a protest against the use of the tabor and the bagpipes, which he characterises as properly the musical instruments of the peasantry. Yet people then, he says, were becoming so besotted on such instruments, that they introduced them in places where better minstrelsy would be more suitable. The writer thinks that the introduction of so vulgar an instrument as the tabor into grand festivals could be looked upon in no other light than as one of the signs which might be expected to be the precursors of the coming of Antichrist. "If such people are to come to grand festivals as carry a bushel [_i.e._ a tabor made in the form of a bushel measure, on the end of which they beat], and make such a terrible noise, it would seem that Antichrist must now be being born; people ought to break the head of each of them with a staff." _Déussent itiels genz venir à bele feste Qui portent un boissel, qui mainent tel tempeste, Il samble que Antecrist doie maintenant nestre; L'en duroit d'un baston chascun brisier la teste._ This satirist adds, as a proof of the contempt in which the Virgin Mary held such instruments, that she never loved a tabor, or consented to hear one, and that no tabor was introduced among the minstrelsy at her espousals. "The gentle mother of God," he says, "loved the sound of the fiddle," and he goes on to prove her partiality for that instrument by citing some of her miracles. _Onques le mère Dieu, qui est virge honorée, Et est avoec les angles hautement coronée, N'ama onques tabour, ne point ne li agrée, N'onques tabour n'i ot quant el fu espousée. La douce mère Dieu ama son de viele._ [Illustration: _No. 124. The Tabor, or Drum._] [Illustration: _No. 125. Bruin turned Piper._]