These efforts of the cloister came in time to blend themselves with more popular forms of the early medieval drama. The natural agents in the transmission of these popular forms were those _mimes_, whom, while the representatives of more elaborate developments, the "pantomimes" in particular, had inevitably succumbed, the Roman drama had left surviving it, unextinguished and unextinguishable. Above all, it is necessary to point out how in the long interval now in question--the "dark ages," which may, from the present point of view, be reckoned from about the 6th to the 11th century--the Latin and the Teutonic elements of what may be broadly designated as medieval "minstrelsy," more or less imperceptibly, coalesced. The traditions of the disestablished and disendowed _mimus_ combined with the "occupation" of the Teutonic _scôp_, who as a professional personage does not occur in the earliest Teutonic poetry, but on the other hand is very distinctly traceable under this name or that of the "gleeman," in Anglo-Saxon literature, before it fell under the control of the Christian Church. Her influence and that of docile rulers, both in England and in the far wider area of the Frank empire, gradually prevailed even over the inherited goodwill which neither Alfred nor even Charles the Great had denied to the composite growth in which _mimus_ and _scôp_ alike had a share. How far the _joculatores_--which in the early middle ages came to be the name most widely given to these irresponsible transmitters of a great artistic trust--kept alive the usage of entertainments more essentially dramatic than the minor varieties of their performances, we cannot say. In different countries these entertainers suited themselves to different tastes, and with the rise of native literatures to different literary tendencies. The literature of the _troubadours_ of Provence, which communicated itself to Spain and Italy, came only into isolated contact with the beginnings of the religious drama; in northern France the _jongleurs_, as the _joculatores_ were now called, were confounded with the _trouvères_, who, to the accompaniment of _vielle_ or harp, sang the _chansons de geste_ commemorative of deeds of war. As appointed servants of particular households they were here, and afterwards in England, called _menestrels_ (from _ministeriales_) or _minstrels_. Such a _histrio_ or _mimus_ (as he is called) was Taillefer, who rode first into the fight at Hastings, singing his songs of Roland and Charlemagne, and tossing his sword in the air and catching it again. In England such accomplished minstrels easily outshone the less versatile gleemen of pre-Norman times, and one or two of them appeared as landholders in Domesday Book, and many enjoyed the favour of the Norman, Angevin and Plantagenet kings. But here, as elsewhere, the humbler members of the craft spent their lives in strolling from castle to convent, from village-green to city-street, and there exhibiting their skill as