In their roving life, the minstrels tended to become wretchedly immoral. They sometimes formed themselves into bands for the acting of plays, taking women along with them, and these bands became the synonym for dissolute living. Sometimes they were beggars pure and simple, willing to get money by any means except working, and purchasable equally to spread a scandal or commit a murder. They had no home and no citizenship. In 554 A. D. Childebert promulgated very stringent laws for the suppression of their licentiousness. Philip Augustus, King of France, caused them to be expelled from his domains. They were outside the law and its protection. For centuries they were regarded as the evil children of another race. A citizen might attack or insult a minstrel and the latter had no recourse in law, except the privilege of striking his opponent’s _shadow_. This outlawing of musicians continued (in the statute books, at least) for many years. There are traces of it still in certain lands. Even New York state, it is said, has an unrepealed statute somewhere in its dusty books authorizing the arrest of ‘common showmen.’ This prejudice, in the early years, seems to have been generally justified. The lives of the minstrels were certainly dissolute. Their personal characters had all the unattractive qualities of an inferior race--to dying for money or favor, fickleness and vindictiveness. They had to truckle to the great, and flatter the prejudices of the masses. They had, moreover, the means of making themselves feared by the knights and barons of whom they demanded money in return for their music. For if they were allowed to leave the castle disgruntled, nothing was easier for them than to spread abroad among the people scandals concerning the great men and ladies, the tale that Sir Knight was a wife-beater and that his lady was having an affair with her page. A certain jongleur, Colin Muset, who plied his trade in Lorraine and Champagne in the thirteenth century, once had occasion to sing the following ditty to the noble of whom he had asked largess: ‘Lord Count, I have the viol played Before yourself, within your hall, And you my service never paid Nor gave me any wage at all; ’Twas villainy.’ It is not difficult to catch the implied threat in these lines.