But from the Anglo-Saxon period to about the middle of the seventeenth century, the nearest approximation to circus performances was afforded by the ‘glee-men,’ and the exhibitors of bears that travestied a dance, and horses that beat a kettle-drum with their fore-feet. Some of the ‘glee-men’ were tumblers and jugglers, and their feats are pourtrayed in several illuminated manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. One of these illuminations, engraved in Strutt’s _Sports_, shows a boy leaping through a hoop; another, in the Cottonian collection, represents a juggler throwing three balls and three knives alternately. What is technically called ‘the shower’ is shown in another illumination of mediæval juggling; and that there were female acrobats in those days appears from a drawing in one of the Sloane collection of manuscripts, in which a girl is shown in the attitude of bending backward. One of the Arundel manuscripts, in the British Museum, shows a dancing bear; and other illuminations, of a later date, represent a horse on the tight-rope, and an ox standing on the back of a horse. Strutt quotes from the seventh volume of the _Archæologia_, the following account of a rope-flying feat performed by a Spaniard in the reign of Edward VI. ‘There was a great rope, as great as the cable of a ship, stretched from the battlements of Paul’s steeple, with a great anchor at one end, fastened a little before the Dean of Paul’s house-gate; and when his Majesty approached near the same, there came a man, a stranger, being a native of Arragon, lying on the rope with his head forward, casting his arms and legs abroad, running on his breast on the rope from the battlement to the ground, as if it had been an arrow out of a bow, and stayed on the ground. Then he came to his Majesty, and kissed his foot; and so, after certain words to his Highness, he departed from him again, and went upwards upon the rope, till he came over the midst of the churchyard, where he, having a rope about him, played certain mysteries on the rope, as tumbling, and casting one leg from another. Then took he the rope, and tied it to the cable, and tied himself by the right leg a little space beneath the wrist of the foot, and hung by one leg a certain space, and after recovered himself again with the said rope, and unknit the knot, and came down again. Which stayed his Majesty, with all the train, a good space of time.’