The effective conscience of the thirteenth-century Church had clearly come to recognize degrees in the ethical status of the minstrels. No more authoritative exponent of the official morals of his day can be desired than St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Thomas Aquinas is very far from pronouncing an unqualified condemnation of all secular entertainment. The profession of an _histrio_, he declares, is by no means in itself unlawful. It was ordained for the reasonable solace of humanity, and the _histrio_ who exercises it at a fitting time and in a fitting manner is not on that account to be regarded as a sinner[245]. Another contemporary document is still more explicit. This is the _Penitential_ written at the close of the thirteenth century by Thomas de Cabham, sub-dean of Salisbury and subsequently archbishop of Canterbury[246]. In the course of his analysis of human frailty, Thomas de Cabham makes a careful classification from the ethical point of view, of minstrels. There are those who wear horrible masks, or entertain by indecent dance and gesture. There are those again who follow the courts of the great, and amuse by satire and by raillery. Both these classes are altogether damnable. Those that remain are distinguished by their use of musical instruments. Some sing wanton songs at banquets. These too are damnable, no less than the satirists and posture-mongers. Others, however, sing of the deeds of princes, and the lives of the saints. To these it is that the name _ioculatores_ more strictly belongs, and they, on no less an authority than that of Pope Alexander himself[247], may be tolerated.