The character of the minstrels, or jougleurs, their wandering life, and the ease with which they were admitted everywhere, caused them to be employed extensively as spies, and as bearers of secret news, and led people to adopt the disguise of a minstrel, as one which enabled them to pass through difficulties unobserved and unchallenged. In the story of Eustace the monk, when Eustace sought to escape from England, to avoid the pursuit of king John, he took a fiddle and a bow (a fiddlestick), and dressed himself as a minstrel, and in this garb he arrived at the coast, and, finding a merchant ready to sail, entered the ship with him. But the steersman, who did not recognise the minstrel as one of the passengers, ordered him out. Eustace expostulated, represented that he was a minstrel, and, after some dispute, the steersman, who seems to have had some suspicions either of his disguise or of his skill, concluded by putting the question, “At all events, if thou knowest any song, friend, let us have it.” The monk was not skilled in singing, but he replied boldly, “Know I one? Yea! of Agoulant, and Aymon, or of Blonchadin, or of Florence of Rome (these were all early metrical romances); there is not a song in the whole world but I know it. I should be delighted, no doubt, to afford you amusement; but, in truth, the sea frightens me so much at present, that I could not sing a song worth hearing.” He was allowed to pass. Some of those who adopted the disguise of the jougleur were better able to sustain it, and minstrelsy became considered as a polite accomplishment, perhaps partly on account of its utility. There is, in the history of the Fitz-Warines, a remarkable character of this description named John de Raunpaygne. Fulke Fitz-Warine had formed a design against his great enemy, Moris Fitz-Roger, and he established himself, with his fellow outlaws, in the forest near Whittington, in Shropshire, to watch him. Fulke then called to him John de Raunpaygne. “John,” said he, “you know enough of minstrelsy and joglery; dare you go to Whittington, and play before Moris Fitz-Roger, and spy how things are going on?” “Yea,” said John. He crushed a herb, and put it in his mouth, and his face began immediately to swell, and became so discoloured, that his own companions hardly knew him; and he dressed himself in poor clothes, and “took his box with his instruments of joglery and a great staff in his hand;” and thus he went to Whittington, and presented himself at the castle, and said that he was a jogeleur. The porter carried him to Sir Moris, who received him well, inquired in the first place for news, and receiving intelligence which pleased him (it was designedly false), he gave the minstrel a valuable silver cup as a reward. Now, “John de Raunpaygne was very ill-favoured in face and body, and on this account the ribalds of the household made game of him, and treated him roughly, and pulled him by his hair and by his feet.