It is true, that neither before nor after the Conquest was there any lack of rhymers in the vulgar tongue, whether Saxon or Norman, or mixed; and they would be the popular poets, but not exactly the poets in fashion at court. At all events, the fashion of writing _court_ poems in low Latin began early and continued long; and we suspect that the Anglo-Saxon gleemen, whom the monkish historians call _joculatores regis_, were for the most part mere merrymen, as their monkish _sobriquet_ implies--jugglers, dancers, fiddlers, tumblers. Berdic, the king's fool, is styled _Joculator Regis_ in Doomsday Book. Some of these retainers, no doubt, could both compose ballads and sing them, suiting the action to the word, and they might occasionally amuse the court with their songs; but the authentic poet for state occasions was the Latin verse-maker. We say this with all due love and regard for our ballad-singers, old and modern, from King Alfred to Alfred Tennyson; and remembering, too, that we have two good sets-offs against Harry Hotspur's sneer at "metre ballad-mongers,"--one in Sir Philip Sidney's declaration that the ballad of the Percy hunt in Cheviotdale stirred his heart like the sound of a trumpet; and another, in the fact that one of the most illustrious of modern Percys, the Bishop of Dromore, owes his well-deserved popular reputation to nothing else than his industry, talent, and good taste in editing the _Reliques of Ancient English Poetry and Old Heroic Ballads_. Robert Baston, from whom we have digressed, was not a ballad-monger, but a Latin versifier _ex officio_. Edward I., in his expedition to Scotland in 1304, took Baston with him, that he might be an eye-witness of his triumph over this country, and celebrate it in Latin verse. Hollinshed comments on this fact as a strong proof of Edward's presumption and overweening confidence in himself; but the censure is not strikingly pertinent, for at this period a poet was a stated officer in the royal retinue, when the monarch went to war. The haughty old king's discomfiture, after all his successes in this favourite enterprise, was as mortifying, but not so comical as the disastrous issue of the campaign to his poet. The jolly prior had not done chanting one of his heroics in honour of Edward's siege of Stirling, when he was pounced on by a foray of Scots, and carried away into durance; nor was this the worst of the misadventure, for, with a shrewdly balancing humour, they obliged him to pay his ransom in verse, and only released him when he had recorded the praises of his captors and their cause. He does not appear to have been much inspired by the subject; for Hector Boece says that he made, "rusty verses" in praise of the Scots; and rusty enough they were, if they all resembled the initial line as it is quoted-- "De planta cudo metrum cum carmine nudo."