Wandering Minstrels: Outcast Entertainers, Medieval Media, and Secret Messengers
The paradoxical lives of Europe's legally dead yet essential musicians
When American singer-songwriter Chappell Roan used her platform at the 2025 Grammys to demand that record labels offer liveable wages to developing artists, she highlighted a persistent crisis in professional music-making. Despite the UK music industry hitting a record £7.6 billion valuation, over 125 grassroots venues closed in 2023 alone. Rising operational costs and lack of government support are threatening the ecosystem that nurtures emerging talent. From Brazilian samba masters to folk musicians across Eastern Europe, countless talented artists worldwide struggle to sustain themselves through music alone, forced to maintain day jobs whilst creating sophisticated art. The same institutions that depend on musicians for cultural vitality seem reluctant to support their survival.
Although professionalism in music has existed as far back as ancient Mesopotamia, with court musicians serving as well-respected members of society, music outside elite circles has always faced particular challenges. This tension between institutional dependence and institutional neglect has deep historical roots. Medieval minstrels experienced an even stranger version of this paradox than today's independent artists: legally classified as "civilly dead" whilst simultaneously serving as indispensable conduits for court politics and information networks.
Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, European minstrels occupied one of the most contradictory positions in society. They existed in a legal grey area that scholars have compared to a form of civil death; alive and present, but lacking the full rights and protections of ordinary citizens.
Medieval European law recognised a concept known as “civil death” (civiliter mortuus), which rendered certain individuals legally dead whilst physically alive. Originally applied to those who had been banished or had withdrawn from secular life into monasteries, the doctrine gradually expanded to encompass criminals and, in some interpretations, itinerant entertainers.
Minstrels often found themselves lumped together with vagrants and outlaws in legal texts. German law codes classified wandering minstrels as (“rechtlose lewte”), placing them alongside criminals and those of illegitimate birth. This classification implied they had “given up their personhood for money”.
In France, jongleurs (minstrels) were frequently seen as “itinerant social outcasts without basic rights of citizenship.” Some theologians even denied them access to the Eucharist or the right to pursue legal action in courts.
The Church played a particularly significant role in this marginalisation. Bishop John of Salisbury, writing in the twelfth century, wished for the "extermination" and "total banishment" of all minstrels from society. He grouped them with "actors and mimes, buffoons and harlots," arguing that they promoted the pleasures of the senses and the sin of lust. Charlemagne's Admonitio generalis in 789 had already forbidden bishops and abbots from admitting jongleurs onto church grounds.
Despite their marginalised legal status, minstrels served crucial functions in medieval society's information economy. There were no newspapers or radio broadcasts. Books were scarce. Minstrels served to entertain the public whilst also functioning as a vital source of news.
Travelling from town to town, they became informal news-carriers and even political agitators in an age before mass media. This created a fundamental contradiction: the very authorities who condemned minstrels also depended on them for intelligence gathering and communication.
Medieval courts regularly employed minstrels for both entertainment and intelligence purposes. Crowds of courtiers and petitioners gathered in the open halls of royal palaces, where there was very little control over entry or exit. Military encampments were no more secure, easily penetrated by strangers including travelling entertainers.
Minstrels' mobility and access to diverse social circles made them valuable intelligence assets. Their marginalised status paradoxically enabled them to cross social boundaries that formal messengers could not. Unlike official spies drawn from trusted circles, minstrels as travelling entertainers had legitimate reasons to appear in diverse locations and social settings without arousing suspicion.
In times when poetry was not committed to writing but merely handed down by memory from one generation to the next, the minstrel was the keeper of national literature and songs. The "Tales of a Minstrel of Reims" from around 1260 compiled popular stories of recent wars, crusades, and court intrigues, reflecting the gossip that circulated at courts and within church and city circles.
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Minstrels served as unofficial propagandists, shaping public opinion through their performances. They were known for their involvement in political commentary, often reporting news with bias to sway opinion and revising works to encourage action.
During the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381, the rebel priest John Ball famously quoted a rhyming couplet from a popular song: "When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?" This verse, likely disseminated by minstrels, encapsulated a radical levelling ideology that inspired egalitarian fervor.
Recent scholarship has uncovered evidence of sophisticated female spy networks that often included entertainers and performers during medieval conflicts. The city accounts of Ypres detail payments made to individuals for services rendered during wartime, including dozens of women paid for delivering messages or collecting military information. This suggests a semi-professional network of female messengers and spies working during the Flemish revolt, with female minstrels likely participating in these networks using their performances as cover for intelligence gathering.
Medieval authorities faced a fundamental challenge: how to control information flow whilst benefiting from it. Minstrels represented both a solution and a problem. Their networks could disseminate royal propaganda but also spread seditious ideas. This tension led to increasingly sophisticated attempts at regulation rather than elimination. King Edward IV eventually ordered all minstrels to join the Guild of Royal Minstrels, recognising the need to regulate rather than eliminate them.
By the late medieval period, wandering minstrels declined, and many hooligans and bandits started posing as minstrels to deceive people. The tension between their usefulness and their threat to social order influenced legal frameworks that persisted well beyond the medieval period. The legacy of these medieval information networks can be traced through subsequent centuries, influencing the development of intelligence services, diplomatic communications, and popular media.
The fundamental contradiction they embodied, being simultaneously essential and condemned, continues to characterise entertainers in contemporary society. Today's musicians who create cultural value whilst struggling for economic survival, who shape public discourse yet face industry precarity, are inheritors of this ancient tension between artistic necessity and institutional neglect. Just as medieval minstrels were valued by courts yet denied basic legal protections, modern artists find themselves celebrated by billion-pound industries whilst grassroots venues (the very spaces that nurture new talent) close at an alarming rate. The medieval minstrel's paradox of being indispensable yet disposable echoes in every contemporary musician forced to choose between rent and recording, between artistic integrity and commercial viability. Whether travelling between medieval villages or streaming across digital platforms, musicians outside the protective umbrella of major patronage continue to navigate the same treacherous landscape: essential to society's cultural fabric, yet perpetually on the margins of economic security.
Fascinating post, many thanks!