man of honour or worship or waite of some towne corporate or other ancient town, or else of such honestye and conyng as shalbe thought laudable and pleasant to the hearers[236].’ In any case the whole drift of social development was to make things difficult for the independent minstrels and to restrict the area of their wanderings. The widespread popularity of the minstrels amongst the mediaeval laity, whether courtiers, burghers, or peasants, needs no further labouring. It is more curious to find that in spite of the formal anathemas of the Church upon their art, they were not, as a matter of fact, rigorously held at arm’s length by the clergy. We find them taking a prominent part in the holyday festivities of religious guilds[237]; we find them solacing the slow progress of the pilgrimages with their ready wit and copious narrative or song[238]; we find them received with favour by bishops, even upon their visitations[239], and not excluded from a welcome in the hall of many a monastery. As early as 1180, one Galfridus, a _citharoedus_, held a ‘corrody,’ or right to a daily commons of food and drink in the abbey of Hyde at Winchester[240]. And payments for performances are frequent in the accounts of the Augustinian priories at Canterbury[241], Bicester, and Maxtoke, and the great Benedictine houses of Durham, Norwich, Thetford, and St. Swithin’s, Winchester[242], and doubtless in those of many another cloistered retreat. The Minorite chroniclers relate, how at the time of the coming of the friars in 1224 two of them were mistaken for minstrels by the porter of a Benedictine grange near Abingdon, received by the prior and brethren with unbecoming glee, and when the error was discovered, turned out with contumely[243]. At such semi-religious foundations also, as the college of St. Mary at Winchester, or Waynflete’s great house of St. Mary Magdalen in Oxford, minstrels of all degrees found, at least by the fifteenth century, ready and liberal entertainment[244]. How, then, is one to reconcile this discrepancy between the actual practice of the monasteries and the strict, the uncompromising prohibition of minstrelsy in rule and canon? An incomplete answer readily presents itself. The monks being merely human, fell short of the ideal prescribed for them. We do not now learn for the first time, that the ambitions of the pious founder, the ecclesiastical law-giver, the patristic preacher, were one thing; the effective daily life of churchmen in many respects quite another. Here, as in matters of even more moment, did mediaeval monasticism ‘dream from deed dissever’-- ‘The reule of Seint Maure or of Seint Beneit, By-cause that it was old and som-del streit This ilke monk leet olde thinges pace, And held after the newe world the space.’