The rebec,[10] however, we will welcome, for here we tread upon safe ground. Lying uppermost upon the table before us is a sketch (Fig. 5) of this little pear-shaped instrument which was the parent of the viol, and the darling of the minstrel’s heart. Its progenitor was the rabab of Arabia, and it derived its Frenchified title through the rabab’s Spanish equivalent “rabel,” or “arabel.” Owing to its commodious size, and consequent utility, this little instrument diffused itself rapidly over Europe. To sunny Provence; to France; to Normandy; and lastly to England it went in the hands of Troubadours and Crusaders, and so great was the charm of its coarse strings and rotund form, that mankind cherished it for many centuries. In England it became quite habitual to look upon the violin and the rebec as almost the same instrument; so much so, that the term fiddle became as synonymous with the rebec as with the violin. Thus we find Fletcher, in his “Knight of the Burning Pestle,” putting the following speech into the mouth of one of his characters: “They say ’tis present death for these fiddlers to tune their _rebecs_ before the Grand Turk,” while “Golding,” in Thomas Shadwell’s Comedy of “The Miser,” speaks of the Fiddler’s Violin. The first instrument played with a bow in France, the rebec survived longest in that country, and in the first half of the sixteenth century we find woodcut representations of it in complete “sets”--_i.e._ _soprano_, _alto_, _tenor_, and _bass_--in Martin Agricola’s “Musica Instrumentalis Deudsch.” [Illustration: Fig. 6.--SPANISH MINSTREL (Eleventh-century MS.)]