The ill-will of a Louis the Pious could hardly affect the hold which the minstrels had established on society. For good or for bad, they were part of the mediaeval order of things. But their popularity had to maintain itself against an undying ecclesiastical prejudice. They had succeeded irrevocably to the heritage of hate handed down from the _scenici infames_. To be present at their performances was a sin in a clerk, and merely tolerated in a layman. Largesse to them was declared tantamount to robbery of the poor[148]. It may be fairly said that until the eleventh century at least the history of minstrelsy is written in the attacks of ecclesiastical legislators, and in the exultant notices of monkish chroniclers when this or that monarch was austere enough to follow the example of Louis the Pious, and let the men of sin go empty away[149]. Throughout the Middle Ages proper the same standpoint was officially maintained[150]. The canon law, as codified by Gratian, treats as applicable to minstrels the pronouncements of fathers and councils against the _scenici_, and adds to them others more recent, in which clergy who attend _spectacula_, or in any way by word or deed play the _ioculator_, are uncompromisingly condemned[151]. This temper of the Church did not fail to find its expression in post-Conquest England. The council of Oxford in 1222 adopted for this country the restatement of the traditional rule by the Lateran council of 1215[152]; and the stricter disciplinary authorities at least attempted to enforce the decision. Bishop Grosseteste of Lincoln, for instance, pressed it upon his clergy in or about 1238[153]. The reforming provisions of Oxford in 1259 laid down that, although minstrels might receive charitable doles in monasteries, their _spectacula_ must not be given[154]; and a similar prohibition, couched in very uncomplimentary terms, finds a place in the new statutes drawn up in 1319 for the cathedral church of Sarum by Roger de Mortival[155]. A few years later the statutes of St. Albans follow suit[156], while in 1312 a charge of breaking the canons in this respect brought against the minor clergy of Ripon minster had formed the subject of an inquiry by Archbishop Greenfield[157]. Such notices might be multiplied[158]; and the tenor of them is echoed in the treatises of the more strait-laced amongst monkish writers. John of Salisbury[159], William Fitz Stephen[160], Robert Mannyng of Brunne[161], are at one in their disapproval of _ioculatores_. As the fourteenth century draws to its close, and the Wyclifite spirit gets abroad, the freer critics of church and state, such as William Langland[162] or the imagined author of Chaucer’s _Parson’s Tale_[163], take up the same argument. And they in their turn hand it on to the interminable pamphleteering of the Calvinistic Puritans[164]. CHAPTER III THE MINSTREL LIFE