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14 MILITARY MUSIC AND ITS STORY. |
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naker, and are frequently mentioned in the accounts of the Crusades. Thus it became the custom to employ bands of minstrels for the army, in addition to the trumpeters and others attached to the suites of the king and the nobility.
About this time the break-up of the roving minstrel class was in full progress. Among these poor Eohemians, pestered on one hand by the anathema of the Church and hounded on the other by the stern arm of the law, we find the more staid of them settling dowr/ in the large towns and forming themselves in " guilds," to become vested later with the respectable office of corporation minstrels6 known in those days as "waits."7 Others of more robust type joined the military bands,8 for although, like their confreres who settled in the towns, they were anxious to receive the rights of the Church and the protection of the law by assuming a "respectable" vocation, they still hankered after the free and adventurous life they had been used to, and in those days of almost incessant wars and campaigning, the military service held out splendid inducements. Whatever they received by way of regular payment, sundry "rewards" were |
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'Kappey, "Grove's Dictionary of Music" (article, Wind Band).
' These waits were sometimes called upon for warlike services as in the case of the ' waits' of Norwich who accompanied Sir Francis Drake on board his ship in the days of the Spanish Armada.—" Mitsical Times," June, 1907.
'Naumann, "History of Music." |
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