It would appear, indeed, that these French minstrels, the poets by profession, who now become known to us by the name of _trouvères_, or inventors (in the language of the south of France, _trobadors_), held a position towards the _jougleurs_, or _jogleurs_[25] (from the Latin _joculatores_, and this again from _jocus_, game), which the Anglo-Saxon _scop_ held towards the gleeman. Though the mass of the minstrels did get their living as itinerant songsters, they might be respectable, and sometimes there was a man of high rank who became a minstrel for his pleasure; but the jougleurs, as a body, belonged to the lowest and most degraded class of mediæval society, that of the ribalds or letchers, and the more respectable minstrels of former days were probably falling gradually into their ranks. It was the class which abandoned itself without reserve to the mere amusement and pleasure of the aristocracy, and it seems to have been greatly increased by the Crusades, when the jougleurs of the west were brought into relations with those of the east, and learnt a multitude of new ways of exciting attention and making mirth, of which they were previously ignorant. The jougleurs had now become, in addition to their older accomplishments, magicians and conjurers, and wonderfully skilled in every description of sleight of hand, and it is from these qualities that we have derived the modern signification of the word _juggler_. They had also adopted the profession of the eastern story-tellers, as well as their stories, which, however, they turned into verse; and they brought into the west many other exhibitions which did not tend to raise the standard of western morals.