Books › The story of the violin, 1904 › scan 63
Scan 63
The story of the violin, 1904
6 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1Story of the Violin
3by the irresistible centrifugal force of prejudicial Church influence driven, together with the instrument-alists, to the periphery of social life. Here lived, and indeed was very much alive, the large community of gladiators, histrions, jongleurs, buffoons, showmen, rope-walkers, dancers, and all such as catered to man's worldly lusts and appetites, and fed on the rough lawlessness of the times. They were a remnant of ancient Roman corporations, swelled by new promiscuous elements: a motley, homeless, wretched crowd of semi-vagabonds, who had preserved their identity through centuries of barbarian invasions and devastations, and carried it from their former haunts of the devil, Rome, into the Roman provinces and among barbarian tribes. First in Gaul and Spain, they gradually spread north and east and west, beyond the Danube and the Rhine, and many a little band may have, on Norman vessels, reached the British Isles long before King Alfred went as minstrel¹ to the Danes. Cursed by the Church, despised and loathed and feared, and yet the not unwelcome guests at many a pagan and Christian court or camp, with the great and small, with good and bad, they roamed about the land in large and in small bands, with women, children, dogs, and carts, in search of a hard-earned livelihood. There was nothing in the way of cheap amusement that these Barnums of the road
5¹ The designation minstrel in this connection is to be understood as singer or bard, a class quite distinct from the one here referred to.
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