Abstract: The article examines how, late in King John's reign, the constable of Chester led a hastily assembled army, which included minstrels ( histriones ) and cobblers, to rescue Earl Ranulf III (whose legendary exploits were to entertain Langland's Sloth) from a superior Welsh force. This episode was seriously misrepresented by the seventeenth-century antiquarian Peter Leycester, who was working from early-modern descendants of a thirteenth-century original (perhaps from Stanlow Abbey). Despite the survival of a much older version, copied into The Coucher Book of Kirkstall Abbey , Leycester's account, via Bishop Percy, has become the standard one down to the present day (it appears for instance in the REED volumes on Cheshire). This article attempts to set the record straight and also throw new light on the status of minstrelsy in medieval Chester.
Richard Firth Green (Wed,) studied this question.