Well then might the minstrels imitate the king himself in repeating axioms so well known, and which, according to appearance, there was so little chance of seeing carried out. But ideas, like the seeds of trees falling on the soil, are not lost, and the noble who had gone to sleep to the murmur of verses chanted by the glee-man waked up one day to the tumult of the crowd collected before London, with the refrain of the priest John Ball for its war-cry. And then he had to draw his sword and show by a massacre that the time was not yet come to apply these axioms, and that there was nothing in them save song. Still were the trees dropping their seeds. Poets and popular singers had thus an influence over social movements, less through the maxims scattered throughout their great works than by those little unpolished pieces, struck off on the moment, which the lesser among them composed and sang for the people, at the cross-roads in {216} times of trouble, or by the peasants’ hearth in ordinary times, as a reward for hospitality.[288] [Illustration 40. A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY JUGGLER. (_From MS. 10 E. IV._)] Minstrels, however, as singers of songs, propagators of thoughts, tellers of romances, were to disappear. An age was beginning when books and the art of reading spread among the people, and a more and more numerous public would read and cease to listen; the theatres were, moreover, about to offer a spectacle much superior to that of the little troop of musicians and wandering singers, and would compete with them more powerfully than the “rude husbandmen and artificers of various crafts,” against whose impertinence Edward IV was so indignant. Replaced, unwanted, the minstrels proper ceased to exist as a class, leaving however behind them a variety of men who could claim them as ancestors, street musicians, mirth mongers, or the “blind crouder with no rougher voice then rude stile,” who sang for Sir Philip Sidney “the olde song of Percy and Douglas.” In fact, the period of the Taillefers who would go to death in the fight while singing of Charlemagne was a limited one; the lustre which the jongleurs or trouvères of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who confined themselves to the recitation of poetry, had shed on their profession, was effaced in proportion as they associated {217} more closely with the mannerless bands of tumblers, jugglers, leaders of performing bears (_ursinarii_, the Latin documents of the time name them),[289] conjurors, and ribalds of all kinds.[290]