_Quar s’uns bergiers de chans tabore et chalemele,_ _Plus tost est apelé que cil qui bien viele._
Everybody followed the tabor, he says, and the good minstrels were no longer in vogue, though their fiddles were so much superior to the flutes, and flajolets (_flajols_), and tabors of the others. He consoles himself, however, with the reflection that the holy Virgin Mary never loved the tabor, and that no such vulgar instrument was admitted at her wedding; while she had in various ways shown her favour to the jougleurs. “I pray God,” our minstrel continues, “that he will send mischief to him who first made a tabor, for it is an instrument which ought to please nobody. No rich man ought to love the sound of a tabor, which is bad for people’s heads; for, if stretched tight, and struck hard, it may be heard at half a league’s distance:”--
_Qui primes sist tabor. Diex li envoit contraire!_ _Que c’estrument i est qu’ à nului ne doit plaire._
_Nus riches hom ne doit son de tabour amer._ _Quant il est bien tendu et on le vent hurter,_ _De demie grant lieue le puet-on escouter;_ _Ci a trop mauvès son por son chief conforter._
[Illustration: _No. 124. An Organ Player._]
The musical instruments used by the mediæval gleemen and minstrels form in themselves a not uninteresting subject. Those enumerated in the Anglo-Saxon vocabularies are the harp (_hearpe_, _cithara_), the _byme_, or trumpet, the pipe, “or whistle,” the _fithele_, viol, or fiddle, the horn, and the trumpet, the latter of which was called in Anglo-Saxon _truth_ and _særga_. To these we must certainly add a few others, for the drum or tabor seems to have been in use among them under some form, as well as the cymbal, hand-bells, lyre struck by a plectrum, and the organ, which latter was already the favourite church instrument. A portable organ was in use in the middle ages, of which we give a figure (No. 124), from a manuscript in the British Museum of the earlier part of the fourteenth century (MS. Reg. 14 E. iii.). This hand-organ was known also by the name of the dulcimer. It occurs again in the following group (No. 125), taken from a manuscript of the fourteenth century in the British Museum (MS. Addit. No. 10,293), where the performer on the dulcimer is accompanied by two other minstrels, one playing on the bagpipe, the other on the viol or fiddle.