Note 43 — Chapter III

The discussion centered upon the social and literary position of minstrels. The first edition of the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, published in 1765, contained an essay on the History of Minstrelsy, and one on the Origin of the Metrical Romances, which, taken together, says Mr. Courthope, "may be said to furnish the first generalized theory of the nature of mediaeval poetry." (History of English Poetry, Vol. I, p. 426.) Percy considered the minstrels as the authors of the compositions which they sang to the harp, and as holding a dignified social position similar to that of the Anglo-Saxon scôp or the old Norse scald. This theory was vigorously attacked by Joseph Ritson in the preface of his Select Collection of English Songs in 1783, and again in his Ancient English Metrical Romances in 1802, and in his essay On the Ancient English Minstrels in Ancient Songs and Ballads (1792). Ritson contended that minstrels were musical performers of a low class, or even acrobats, and that they were not literary composers. Scott used his knowledge of ballads and romances and the customs depicted in them to reinforce his own decision that the truth lay somewhere between the two extremes. He pointed out that the word may have covered a wide variety of professional entertainers. A modern comment (by E.K. Chambers, in The Mediaeval Stage, Vol. I, p. 66) seems like an echo of Scott: "This general antithesis between the higher and lower minstrelsy may now, perhaps, be regarded as established. It was the neglect of it, surely, that led to that curious and barren logomachy between Percy and Ritson, in which neither of the disputants can be said to have had hold of more than a bare half of the truth."