The fall of the theatres by no means implied the complete extinction of the _scenici_. They had outlived tragedy and comedy: they were destined to outlive the stage itself. Private performances, especially of _pantomimi_ and other dancers, had enjoyed great popularity under the Empire, and had become an invariable adjunct of all banquets and other festivities. At such revels, as at the decadence of the theatre and of public morals generally, the graver pagans had looked askance[89]: the Church naturally included them in its universal condemnation of _spectacula_. Chrysostom in the East[90], Jerome in the West[91], are hostile to them, and a canon of the fourth-century council of Laodicea, requiring the clergy who might be present at weddings and similar rejoicings to rise and leave the room before the actors were introduced, was adopted by council after council and took its place as part of the ecclesiastical law[92]. The permanence of the regulation proves the strength of the habit, which indeed the Church might ban, but was not able to subdue, and which seems to have commended itself, far more than the theatre, to Teutonic manners. Such irregular performances proved a refuge for the dispossessed _scenici_. Driven from their theatres, they had still a vogue, not only at banquets, but at popular merry-makings or wherever in street or country they could gather together the remnant of their old audiences. Adversity and change of masters modified many of their characteristics. The _pantomimi_, in particular, fell upon evil times. Their subtle art had had its origin in an exquisite if corrupt taste, and adapted itself with difficulty to the ruder conditions of the new civilizations[93]. The _mimi_ had always appealed to a common and gross humanity. But even they must now rub shoulders and contend for _denarii_ with jugglers and with rope-dancers, with out-at-elbows gladiators and beast-tamers. More than ever they learnt to turn their hand to anything that might amuse; learnt to tumble, for instance; learnt to tell the long stories which the Teutons loved. Nevertheless, in essentials they remained the same; still jesters and buffoons, still irrepressible, still obscene. In little companies of two or three, they padded the hoof along the roads, travelling from gathering to gathering, making their own welcome in castle or tavern, or, if need were, sleeping in some grange or beneath a wayside hedge in the white moonlight. They were, in fact, absorbed into that vast body of nomad entertainers on whom so much of the gaiety of the Middle Ages depended. They became _ioculatores_, _jongleurs_, minstrels[94].