the pleasure palace came a
plentiful sprinkling of wayside minstrels, jugglers, mountebanks,
dulcimer and lute players, street poets who sang the praises of some
fair cobbleress or pretty sausage girl; scamps of students from the
Paris haunts of vice, loose fellows who conned the classical poets by
day and took a purse by night; dancers, dwarfs, and merry men all, not
averse to--

"Haunch and ham, and cheek and chine
While they gurgled their throats with right good wine."

Here sauntered a wit-cracker, a peacock feather in his hand, arm-in-arm
with an impoverished "banquet beagle," or "feast hound;" there passed a
jack in green, a bladder under his arm and a tankard at his belt, with
which latter he begged that sort of alms that flows from a spigot. As
vagrant followers hover on the verge of a camp, or watchful vultures
circle around their prey, so these lower parasites (distinct from the
other well-born, more aristocratic genus of smell-feast) prowled
vigilantly without the castle walls and beyond the limits of the royal
pleasure grounds, finding occasional employment from lackey, valet or
equerry, who, imitating their betters, amused themselves betimes with
some low buffoon or vulgar clown and rewarded him for his gross stories
and antics with a crust and a cup.

Faith, in those thrice happy days, every henchman could whistle to him
his shabby poet, and every ostler hold court in the stable, with a
_visdase_, or ass face, to keep the audience in a roar, and a
nimble-footed trull to set them into ecstasies. But woe betide the
honest wayfarer who strolled beyond the orderly precincts of the king's
walls after dusk; for if some street coxcomb was too drunk to rob him,
or a ribald Latin scholar saw him not, he surely ran into a nest of
pavement tumblers or cellar poets who forthwith stripped him and turned
him loose in the all-insufficient garb of nature.

A fantastic, waggish crew--yet Francis minded them not, so long as they
observed sufficient etiquette to keep their distance from his royal
person and immediate following. This nice decorum, however, be it
said, was an unwritten law with these waifs and scatterlings, knowing
the merry monarch who tolerated them afar would feel no compunction at
hanging them severally, or in squads, from the convenient branches of
the trees surrounding the castle, should the humor seize him that such
summary chastisement were best for their morals and the welfare of the
com