The old styles are continued; the itinerant poets, jugglers, and minstrels have not disappeared; on the contrary, they are more numerous than ever. "Merry England" favours them; they continue to play, as under the first Angevins,[568] a very considerable and multiple part, which it is difficult to estimate. Those people, with their vast memory, are like perambulating libraries; they instruct, they amuse, they edify. Passing from county to county, hawking news, composing satirical songs, they fill also the place of a daily gazette; they represent public opinion, sometimes create it, and often distort it; they are living newspapers; they furnish their auditors with information about the misdeeds of the Government, which, from time to time, seizes the most talkative, and imprisons them to keep them silent. The king has minstrels in his service; they are great personages in their way, pensioned by the prince and despising the others. The nobles also keep some in their pay, which does not prevent their welcoming those who pass; they feast them when they have sung well, and give them furred robes and money.[569] They continue to prosper in the following century. We see at that time the king of England's minstrels, people clever and of good instruction, protesting against the increasing audacity of sham minstrels, whose ignorance casts discredit on the profession. "Uncultured peasants," says the king in a vengeful statute, "and workmen of different kinds in our kingdom of England ... have given themselves out to be our own minstrels."[570] Without any experience or understanding of the art, they go from place to place on festival days, and gather all the money that should have enriched the true artists, those who really devote themselves to their profession and ply no manual craft. Vain efforts; decline was imminent; minstrels were not to recover their former standing. The Renaissance and the Reformation came; and, owing to the printing-press, gay scavoir found other means of spreading through the country. In the sixteenth century, it is true, minstrels still abound, but they are held in contempt; right-minded people, like Philip Stubbes, have no terms strong enough to qualify "suche drunken sockets and bawdye parasits as range the cuntreyes, ryming and singing of uncleane, corrupt, and filthie songes in tavernes, ale-houses, innes, and other publique assemblies.... Every towne, citie, and countrey is full of these minstrelles to pype up a dance to the devill; but of dyvines, so few there be as they maye hardly be seene."[571]