Scan 32
The violin & its story : or the history & construction of the violin, 1905
4 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 18. See the scan on archive.org.
1when these people died, the authorities seized their property. Sought by many, yet pursued by the law, they led the life of vagabonds. These conditions lasted so long as the disorderly and unsettled lives of these people, and their mixing up of noble and base arts, endured; but the enlightenment of the age, and the constantly growing requirements of a generally improving taste, conduced in progress of time to a vast improvement in the condition of these banned wandering musicians. When their arts came to be looked upon with less favour, they found it absolutely necessary to seek more lasting dwelling places; a more settled state of life led to a more extended development of their musical powers; and this development led, in the long run, to a complete separation of such of their arts as were capable of nobler things from the jugglery and other tricks which had, from the very nature of their former mode of life, been mixed up with music, but with which those tricks had no natural connection. From these hitherto despised wandering minstrels, who had in past times been universally condemned by the law, players upon all sorts of instruments were selected for public processions, dances, and festivals, and finally they were employed even in the services of the Church. Thus did these "wandering musicians," who had once been despised and condemned by the public authorities, became at length orderly and useful members of the body politic.
3In the meantime we find that the handling of musical instruments was not entirely confined to the class known as "vagrant minstrels." The playing of musical instruments had been adopted by some who were under no necessity whatever to play them as a means of livelihood. As early as the beginning of the thirteenth century, it was regarded as no dishonourable thing to play an instrument for people to dance to. This is shown by a passage in the Brunswick chronicles for the year 1203, which relate that at Whitsuntide in that year, at Ossemer near Stendal, while the parish priest was "fiddling at a dance," a fearful storm came on, the right arm of the reverend "fiddler"
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