Another of these guilds was the ancient company or fraternity of minstrels in Beverley, of which an account is given in Poulson's "Beverlac" (p. 302). When the fraternity originated we do not know; but they were of some consideration and wealth in the reign of Henry VI., when the Church of St. Mary's, Beverley, was built; for they gave a pillar to it, on the capital of which a band of minstrels are sculptured, of whom we here re-produce a drawing from Carter's "Ancient Painting and Sculpture," to which we shall have presently to ask the reader's further attention. The oldest existing document of the fraternity is a copy of laws of the time of Philip and Mary. They are similar to those by which all trade guilds were governed: their officers were an alderman and two stewards or sears (_i.e._ seers, searchers); the only items in their laws which throw much additional light upon our subject are the one already partly quoted, that they should not take "any new brother except he be mynstrell to some man of honour or worship (proving that men of honour and worship still had minstrels), or waite[357] of some towne corporate or other ancient town, or else of such honestye and conyng as shall be thought laudable and pleasant to the hearers there." And again, "no myler, shepherd, or of other occupation, or husbandman, or husbandman servant, playing upon pype or other instrument, shall sue any wedding, or other thing that pertaineth to the said science, except in his own parish." We may here digress for a moment to say that the shepherds, throughout the Middle Ages, seem to have been as musical as the swains of Theocritus or Virgil; in the MS. illuminations we constantly find them represented playing upon instruments; we give a couple of goatherds from the MS. Royal 2 B vii. folio 83, of early fourteenth-century date. [Illustration: _Goatherds playing Musical Instruments._] [Illustration: _Shepherd with Bagpipes._] Besides the pipe and horn, the bagpipe was also a rustic instrument. There is a shepherd playing upon one in folio 112 of the same MS.; and again, in the early fourteenth-century MS. Royal 2 B vi., on the reverse of folio 8, is a group of shepherds, one of whom plays a small pipe, and another the bagpipes. Chaucer (3rd Book of the "House of Fame") mentions-- "Pipes made of greené corne, As have these little herd gromes, That keepen beastés in the bromes." It is curious to find that even at so late a period as the time of Queen Mary, the shepherds still officiated at weddings and other merrymakings in their villages, so as to excite the jealousy of the professors of the joyous science. The accompanying wood-cut, from a MS. in the French National library, may represent such a rustic merry-making. [Illustration: _Rustic Merry-making._]