Note 177 — Chapter III · THE MINSTREL LIFE
Reading edition
Strutt, 189, has a fourteenth-century story of a youth rebuked for coming to a feast in a coat bardy, cut German fashion like a minstrel’s; cf. the complaint against knights in A Poem on the times of Edward II (Percy Soc. lxxxii), 23:
‘Now thei beth disgysed, So diverselych i-diȝt, That no man may knowe A mynstrel from a knyȝt Wel ny.’
The miniatures show minstrels in short coats to the knees and sometimes short capes with hoods. The Act of Apparel (1463, 3 Edw. IV, c. 5) excepts minstrels and ‘players in their interludes.’ The Franciscan story (p. 57) shows that some of the humbler minstrels went shabby enough.