There are some curious anecdotes showing the kind of people who became minstrels, their wandering habits, their facility of access to all companies and places, and the uses which were sometimes made of their privileges. All our readers will remember how Blondel de Nesle, the minstrel of Richard Coeur de Lion, wandered over Europe in search of his master. There is a less known instance of a similar kind and of the same period. Ela, the heiress of D'Evereux, Earl of Salisbury, had been carried abroad and secreted by her French relations in Normandy. To discover the place of her concealment, a knight of the Talbot family spent two years in exploring that province; at first under the disguise of a pilgrim; then, having found where she was confined, in order to gain admittance, he assumed the dress and character of a harper; and being a jocose person, exceedingly skilled in the Gests of the ancients, he was gladly received into the family. He succeeded in carrying off the lady, whom he restored to her liege lord the king, who bestowed her in marriage, not upon the adventurous knight-minstrel, as ought to have been the ending of so pretty a novelet, but upon his own natural brother, William Longespée, to whom she brought her earldom of Salisbury in dower. Many similar instances, not less valuable evidences of the manners of the times because they are fiction, might be selected from the romances of the Middle Ages; proving that it was not unusual for men of birth and station[352] to assume, for a longer or shorter time, the character and life of the wandering minstrel.