Our information relating to the Anglo-Saxon minstrel is very imperfect. He had two names--_scop_, which meant literally a “maker,” and belonged probably to the primitive bard or poet; and _glig-man_, or _gleo-man_, the modern gleeman, which signifies literally a man who furnished joy or pleasure, and appears to have had a more comprehensive application, which included all professional performers for other people’s amusement. In Beowulf (l. 180), the “song of the bard” (_sang scopes_) is accompanied by the sound of the harp (_hearpan swég_); and it is probable that the harp was the special instrument of the old Saxon bard, who chanted the mythic and heroic poems of the race. The gleemen played on a variety of instruments, and they also exhibited a variety of other performances for the amusement of the hearers or spectators. In our engraving from an Anglo-Saxon illumination (p. 37), one of the gleemen is tossing knives and balls, which seems to have been considered a favourite exhibition of skill down to a much later period. The early English Rule of Nuns (printed by the Camden Society) says of the wrathful man, that “he skirmishes before the devil with knives, and he is his knife-tosser, and plays with swords, and balances them upon his tongue by the sharp point.” In the Life of Hereward, the gleeman (whose name is there translated by _joculator_) is represented as conciliating the favour of the new Norman lords by mimicking the unrefined manners of the Saxons, and throwing upon them indecent jests and reproaches. But, in the later Anglo-Saxon period at least, the words _scop_ and _gleóman_ appear to have been considered as equivalent; for, in another hall-scene in Beowulf, where the scop performs his craft, we are told that-- _Leoð wæs asungen,_ _The lay was sung,_ _gleómannes gyd,_ _the gleeman’s recital,_ _gamen eft astáh,_ _pastime began again,_ _beorhtode benc-swég._ _the bench-noise became loud._ --Beowulf, l. 2323. There is here evidently an intimation of merrier songs than those sung by the _scop_, and whatever his performances were, they drew a louder welcome. And in a fragment of another romance which has come down to us, the gleeman Widseth bears witness to the wandering character of his class, and enumerates in a long list the various courts of different chiefs and peoples which he had visited. We learn, also, that among the Anglo-Saxons there were gleemen attached to the courts or households of the kings and great chieftains. Under Edward the Confessor, as we learn from the Domesday Survey, Berdic, the king’s _joculator_, possessed three villas in Gloucestershire.