The Minstrel's Craft and the Immediacy of Audience

Mylsone the harper, trying to ignore the smell of roasting meat at an Easter feast, squeezes between two trumpeters, shoving the fiddler Adam Boyd in front of him. Mylsone jokes with the feasters about their rich basins and platters and goblets, and then he and Adam sing how Floripas flung feasting vessels made of gold and silver over the wall to distract attackers. A very young lady throws her goblet across the table, giggling with a friend as it clatters on the floor.

A ‘brokin bakkit’ (broken backed) fiddler in the Church of St Andrew plays a brief melody for seven young soldiers hurrying past, but they ignore her.

On the long road to Bury St Edmunds, in the mid-May drizzle (too wet for a harp), Nicholas le Blund rides beside the king, stretching out the story of Sir Bevis. He adds a fight with a griffin, and allows Ascopard to roar for a long time about the strange land of giants because the king is laughing so hard. He carefully leaves out that awkward episode about the fictional king's corrupt son, but he keeps in the horse race. When he mentions Arundel, he describes the horse the king is riding, and he lets Arundel be the horse who carries Bevis away from Damascus and swims in the sea. When John Forster rides closer, the minstrel elaborates the story of the fisher and the forester who raise the infant twins.