The perpetual _infamia_ of the minstrels is variously reflected in the literature of their production. Sometimes they take their condemnation lightly enough, dismissing it with a jest or a touch of bravado. In _Aucassin et Nicolete_, that marvellous romance of the _viel caitif_, when the hero is warned that if he takes a mistress he must go to hell, he replies that, to hell will he go, for thither go all the goodly things of the world. ‘Thither go the gold and the silver, and the vair and the grey, and thither too go harpers and minstrels and the kings of the world. With these will I go, so that I have Nicolete, my most sweet friend, with me’[165]. At other times they show a wistful sense of the pathos of their secular lot. They tell little stories in which heaven proves more merciful than the vice-gerents of heaven upon earth, and Virgin or saint bestows upon a minstrel the sign of grace which the priest denies[166]. But often, again, they turn upon their persecutors and rend them with the merciless satire of the _fabliaux_, wherein it is the clerk, the theologian, who is eternally called upon to play the indecent or ridiculous part[167]. Under spiritual disabilities the minstrels may have been, but so far as substantial popularity amongst all classes went, they had no cause from the eleventh to the fourteenth century to envy the monks. As a social and literary force they figure largely both on the continent and in England. The distinctively Anglo-Saxon types of _scôp_ and _gleómon_ of course disappear at the Conquest. They do not cease to exist; but they go under ground, singing their defiant lays of Hereward[168]; and they pursue a more or less subterranean career until the fourteenth century brings the English tongue to its own again. But minstrelsy was no less popular with the invaders than with the invaded. Whether the _skald_ had yet developed amongst the Scandinavian pirates who landed with Rollo on the coasts of France may perhaps be left undetermined[169]: for a century and a half had sufficed to turn the Northmen into Norman French, and with the other elements of the borrowed civilization had certainly come the _ioculator_. In the very van of William’s army at Senlac strutted the minstrel Taillefer, and went to his death exercising the double arts of his hybrid profession, juggling with his sword, and chanting an heroic lay of Roncesvalles[170]. Twenty years later, Domesday Book records how Berdic the _ioculator regis_ held three vills and five carucates of land in Gloucestershire, and how in Hampshire Adelinda, a _ioculatrix_, held a virgate, which Earl Roger had given her[171]. During the reigns of the Angevin and Plantagenet kings the minstrels were ubiquitous. They wandered at their will from castle to castle, and in time from borough to borough, sure of their ready welcome alike in the village tavern, the guildhall, and the baron’s keep[172]. They sang and jested in the market-places,