ates, and they walked on their
hands with their feet in the air or with their heads turned downwards so
as to look through their legs backwards. These acrobatic feats were even
practised by women. According to a legend, the daughter of Herodias was a
renowned acrobat, and on a bas-relief in the Cathedral of Rouen we find
this Jewish dancer turning somersaults before Herod, so as to fascinate
him, and thus obtain the decapitation of John the Baptist.

[Illustration: Fig. 170.--Sword-dance to the sound of the Bagpipe.--Fac-simile of a
Manuscript in the British Museum (Fourteenth Century).]

"The jugglers," adds M. de Labedolliere, in his clever work on "The
Private Life of the French," "often led about bears, monkeys, and other
animals, which they taught to dance or to fight (Figs. 171 and 172). A
manuscript in the National Library represents a banquet, and around the
table, so as to amuse the guests, performances of animals are going on,
such as monkeys riding on horseback, a bear feigning to be dead, a goat
playing the harp, and dogs walking on their hind legs." We find the same
grotesque figures on sculptures, on the capitals of churches, on the
illuminated margins of manuscripts of theology, and on prayer-books, which
seems to indicate that jugglers were the associates of painters and
illuminators, even if they themselves were not the writers and
illuminators of the manuscripts. "Jugglery," M. de Labedolliere goes on to
say, "at that time embraced poetry, music, dancing, sleight of hand,
conjuring, wrestling, boxing, and the training of animals. Its humblest
practitioners were the mimics or grimacers, in many-coloured garments, and
brazen-faced mountebanks, who provoked laughter at the expense of
decency."

[Illustration: Fig. 171.--Jugglers exhibiting Monkeys and
Bears.--Fac-simile of a Manuscript in the British Museum (Thirteenth
Century).]

At first, and down to the thirteenth century, the profession of a juggler
was a most lucrative one. There was no public or private feast of any
importance without the profession being represented. Their mimicry and
acrobatic feats were less thought of than their long poems or lays of wars
and adventures, which they recited in doggerel rhyme to the accompaniment
of a stringed instrument. The doors of the chateaux were always open to
them, and they had a place assigned to them at all feasts. They were the
principal attraction at the _Cours Plenieres_, and, according to the
tes