From the fourteenth century it is possible to trace the growth of the household minstrels as a privileged class at the expense of their less fortunate rivals. The freedom of access enjoyed by the entertainers of earlier days was obviously open to abuse. We have seen that in 1317 it led to the offering of an insult to Edward II by an emissary clad as a minstrel at his own table. It was only two years before that a royal proclamation had considerably restrained the liberty of the minstrels. In view of the number of idle persons who ‘under colour of mynstrelsie’ claimed food, drink, and gifts in private houses, it was ordered ‘that to the houses of prelates earls and barons none resort to meate and drynke, unless he be a mynstrel, and of these mynstrels that there come none except it be three or four minstrels of honour at the most in one day, unlesse he be desired of the lorde of the house.’ The houses of meaner men are to be altogether exempt, except at their desire[232]. I think it is probable that by ‘minstrels of honour’ we must here understand ‘household minstrels[233]’; and that the severity of the ordinance must have come upon those irresponsible vagrants who had not the shelter of a great man’s name. With the Statutes of Labourers in the middle of the fourteenth century begins a history of legislation against ‘vacabonds and valiant beggars,’ which put further and serious difficulties in the way of the free movement of the migratory classes through the country[234]. Minstrels, indeed, are not specifically declared to be ‘vacabonds’ until this legislation was codified by William Cecil in 1572[235]; but there is evidence that they were none the less liable to be treated as such, unless they had some protection in the shape of livery or licence. At Chester from the early thirteenth century, and at Tutbury in Staffordshire from 1380, there existed courts of minstrelsy which claimed to issue licences to all performers within their purview. It is not probable that this jurisdiction was very effective. But a step taken by Edward IV in 1469 had for its avowed object to strengthen the hands of what may be called official minstrelsy. Representation had been made to the king that certain rude husbandmen and artificers had usurped the title and livery of his minstrels, and had thus been enabled to gather an illegitimate harvest of fees. He therefore created or revived a regular guild or fraternity of minstrels, putting his own household performers with their _marescallus_ at the head of it, and giving its officers a disciplinary authority over the profession throughout the country, with the exception of Chester. It is not improbable, although it is not distinctly stated, that admission into the guild was practically confined to ‘minstrels of honour.’ Certainly one of the later local guilds which grew up in the sixteenth century, that of Beverley, limited its membership to such as could claim to be ‘mynstrell to some