CHAPTER VII SECULAR MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES Popular music; fusion of secular and ecclesiastic spirit; Paganism and Christianity; the epic--Folksong; early types in France, _complainte_, narrative song, dance song; Germany and the North; occupational songs--Vagrant musicians; jongleurs, minstrels; the love song--Troubadours and Trouvères; Adam de la Halle--The Minnesinger; the Meistersinger; influence on Reformation and Renaissance. However slim the records of early church music they still suffice to give some clews to the origin and nature of the first religious songs. But, when we turn to the question of secular song at the beginning of our era, we are baffled by an utter lack of tangible material. For the same monks to whom we are indebted for the early examples of sacred music were religious fanatics who looked with hostile eyes upon the profane creations of their lay contemporaries. Yet we may be confident of the continued and uninterrupted existence not only of some sort of folk music, but also of the germs at least of an art music, however crude, throughout that period of confusion incident to, and following, the crumbling of the Roman empire. We need but point to our discourse upon the music of primitive peoples (Chap. I), the traces of musical culture left by the ancients (Chap. II), and especially the high achievements of the Greeks (Chap. IV), as evidence that, whatever the stage of a people’s intellectual development, music is a prime factor of individual and racial expression. Furthermore, at almost every period there is recognizable the distinction between folk music proper--the spontaneous collective expression of racial sentiment--and the more sophisticated creations which we may designate as art. Thus the music transmitted by the Greeks to the Romans, if added to ever so slightly, no doubt was continued with the other forms of Greek culture. The symposias, scolia, and lyrics of Hellas had their progeny in the odes of Horace and Catullus; the bards, the _aœds_, and rhapsodists had their counterpart--degenerate, if you will--in the _histriones_, the gladiators, and performers in the arena of declining Rome. Turning to the 'Barbarians’ who caused the empire’s fall, we learn that already Tacitus recorded the activities of the German _bardit_ who intoned war songs before their chiefs and inspired them to new victories; while Athenæus and Diodorus Siculus both tell of the Celtic bards who had an organization in the earliest Middle Ages and were regularly educated for their profession. I