shoes of the Latin mimes, and had a shaven face and close-cut hair. Jogleurs were admitted everywhere, and enjoyed the freedom of speech accorded to the professional jester. Their impunity, however, was not always maintained, for Henry I. is said to have put out the eyes of Luc de la Barre for lampooning him. A fairly defined class distinction soon arose. Those minstrels who were attached to royal or noble households had a status very different from that of the motley entertainers, who soon came under the restrictions imposed on vagabonds generally. A joculator regis, Berdic by name, is mentioned in Domesday Book. The king’s minstrels formed part of the royal household, and were placed under a rex, a fairly common term of honour in the craft (cf. Adenès li rois). Edward III. had nineteen minstrels in his pay, including three who bore the title of waits. The large towns had in their pay bodies of waits, generally designated in the civic accounts as histriones. A wait under Edward III. had to “pipe the watch” four times nightly between Michaelmas and Shere Tuesday, and three times nightly during the remainder of the year. In spite of the repeated prohibitions of the Church, the matter was compromised in practice. Even religious houses had their minstrels, and so pious a prelate as Robert Grosseteste had his private harper, whose chamber adjoined the bishop’s. St Thomas Aquinas (Summa theologia) said that there was no sin in the minstrel’s art if it were kept within the bounds of decency. Thomas de Cabham, bishop of Salisbury (d. 1313), in a Penitential distinguished three kinds of minstrels (histriones)—buffoons or tumblers; the wandering scurrae, by whom he probably meant the goliardi (see Goliard); and the singers and players of instruments. In the third class he discriminated between the singers of lewd songs and those joculatores who took their songs from the deeds of princes and the lives of saints. The performances of these joculatores were permissible, and they themselves were not to be excluded from the consolations of the Church. The Parisian minstrels were formed into a gild in 1321, and in England a charter of Edward IV. (1469) formed the royal minstrels into a gild, which minstrels throughout the country were compelled to join if they wished to exercise their trade. A new charter was conferred in 1604, when its jurisdiction was limited to the city of London and 3 m. round it. This corporation still exists, under the style of the Corporation of the Master, Wardens and Commonalty of the Art or Science of the Musicians of London.
During the best time of minstrelsy—the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries—the minstrel, especially when he composed his own songs, was held in high honour. He was probably of noble or good bourgeois birth, and was treated by his hosts more or less as an equal. The distinction between the troubadour and the jogleur which was established in Provence probably soon spread to France and England. In any case it is probable that the poverty which forms the staple topic of the poems of Rutebeuf (q.v.) was the commonest lot of the minstrel.
Entries of payments to minstrels occur in the accounts of corporations and religious houses throughout the 16th century; but the art of minstrelsy, already in its decline, was destroyed in England by the introduction of printing, and the minstrel of the entertainments given to Elizabeth at Kenilworth was little more than a survival.
The best account of the subject is to be found in. E. K. Chambers’s Medieval Stage (1903), i. 23–86 and ii. 230–266. See also L. Gautier in Épopées françaises (vol. ii., 2nd ed., 1892); A. Schultz, Das höfische Leben zur Zeit der Minnesinger (2nd ed., 1889); T. Percy, Reliques of English Poetry (ed. H. B. Wheatley, 1876); J. Ritson, Ancient English Metrical Romances (1802); J. J. Jusserand, English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages (4th ed., 1892).
MINT, botanically Mentha, a genus of labiate plants, comprising about twenty species of perennial herbs, widely distributed throughout the temperate and sub-tropical portions of the globe, but chiefly in the temperate regions of the Old World. The species have square stems, opposite, aromatic leaves, and a stoloniferous creeping rootstock. The flowers are arranged in axillary clusters (cymes), which either form separate whorls or are crowded together into a terminal spike. The corolla is usually small and of a pale purple or pinkish colour; it has four nearly equal lobes, and encloses two long and two short stamens. Nearly three hundred intermediate forms have been named and described. Many of these varieties are permanent, in consequence of being propagated by stolons.
In Britain ten species are indigenous or naturalized. Mentha viridis, or spearmint, grows in marshy meadows, and is the species commonly used for culinary purposes; it is distinguished by its smooth, sessile leaves and lax tapering flower-spikes. It is probably a cultivated race of the next species, Mentha sylvestris, or horsemint, which chiefly differs from the above in its coarser habit and hairy leaves, which are silky beneath, and in its denser flower-spikes. This plant is supposed to be the mint of Scripture, as it is extensively cultivated in the East; it was one of the bitter herbs with which the paschal lamb was eaten. M. rotundifolia resembles the last in size and habit, but is distinguished by its rounded wrinkled leaves, which are shaggy beneath and by its lanceolate bracts. The last two species usually grow on damp waste ground. M. aquatica grows in ditches, and is easily recognized by its rounded flower-spikes and stalked hairy leaves. M. piperita, or peppermint (q.v.), has stalked smooth leaves and an oblong obtuse terminal spike of flowers; it is cultivated for its volatile oil. M. pratensis belongs to a group which have the flowers arranged in axillary whorls and never in terminal spikes; it otherwise bears some resemblance to M. viridis. M sativa grows by damp roadsides, and M. arvensis in cornfields; they are distinguished from M. pratensis by their hairy stalked leaves, which in M. arvensis are all equally large, but in M. sativa are much smaller towards the apex of the stem. M. Pulegium, commonly known as pennyroyal, more rarely as fleamint, has small oval obtuse leaves and flowers in axillary whorls, and is remarkable for its creeping habit and peculiar odour. It differs from all the mints above described in the throat of the calyx being closed with hairs. It is met with in damp places on grassy commons, and was formerly popular for medicinal purposes.
All the genus Mentha abound in a volatile oil, contained in resinous dots in the leaves and stems. The odour of the oil is similar in several species, but is not distinctive, the same odour occurring in varieties of distinct species. Thus the peppermint flavour is found in M. piperita, in M. incana, and in Chinese and Japanese varieties of M. arvensis. Other forms of the last-named species growing in Ceylon and Java have the flavour of the common garden mint, M. viridis, and the odour is found in M. sylvestris, M. rotundifolia and M. canadensis. A bergamot scent is met with in a variety of M. aquatica and in forms of other species. Most mints blossom in August.
The name mint is also applied to plants of other genera, Monarda punctata being called horsemint, Pycnanthemum linifolium mountain mint, and Nepeta cataria catmint.
MINT (Lat. moneta; Mid. Eng. mynt) a place where coins are manufactured with the authority of the state. Coins are pieces of metal, of weight and composition fixed by law, with a design upon them, also fixed by law, by which they are identified, their value made known and their genuineness certified. The origin of the word “mint” is ascribed to the manufacture of silver coin at Rome in 269 B.C. at the temple of Juno Moneta.[1] This goddess became the personification of money, and her name was applied both to money and to its place of manufacture. Metals were used for money at an early stage of civilization, and are well suited to the purpose, owing to their great intrinsic value and their durability, indestructibility, divisibility, and rarity. The best metals for coinage are gold, silver, platinum, copper, tin, nickel, aluminium, zinc, iron, and their alloys; certain alloys of gold, silver, copper and nickel have the best combination of the required qualities.
History of Minting.—The earliest metallic money did not consist of coins, but of unminted metal in the form of rings and other ornaments or of weapons, which were used for thousands of years by the Egyptian, Chaldean, and Assyrian Empires (see Numismatics). According to Herodotus, the first mint was probably that established by Gyges in Lydia towards the end of the 8th century B.C. for the coining of gold, silver, and electrum, an
- ↑ Lenormant, La Monnaie dans l’antiquité, i. 82.
