The dinner was always accompanied by music, and itinerant minstrels, mountebanks, and performers of all descriptions, were allowed free access to the hall to amuse the guests by their performances. These were intermixed with dancing and tumbling, and often with exhibitions of a very gross character, which, however, amid the looseness of mediæval manners, appear to have excited no disgust. These practices are curiously illustrated in some of the mediæval illuminations. In the account of the death of John the Baptist, as given in the gospels (Matthew xiv. 6, and Mark vi. 21), we are told, that at the feast given by Herod on his birthday, his daughter Herodias came into the feasting-hall, and (according to our English version) danced before him and his guests. The Latin vulgate has _saltasset_, which is equivalent to the English word but the mediæval writers took the lady’s performances to be those of a regular wandering jougleur; and in two illuminated manuscripts of the early part of the fourteenth century, in the British Museum, she is pictured as performing tricks very similar to those exhibited by the modern beggar-boys in our streets. In the first of these (No. 119), taken from MS. Reg. 2 B. vii., the princess is supporting herself upon her hands with her legs in the air, to the evident admiration of the king, though the guests seem to be paying less attention to her feats of activity. In the second (No. 120), from the Harleian MS. No. 1527, she is represented in a similar position, but more evidently making a somersault. She is here accompanied by a female attendant, who expresses no less delight at her skill than the king and his guests. [Illustration: _No. 119. King Herod and his Daughter Herodias._] [Illustration: _No. 120. Herod and Herodias._]