Jongleur
Medieval minstrel.
What it means
Jongleur is the French designation for the itinerant minstrel of the Middle Ages. What is meant are professional musicians and entertainers who travelled from place to place and, alongside music, often also offered acrobatics, storytelling, and farce. The present-day meaning of the word — the artist who throws balls — developed out of this broader field of activity.
The jongleur is to be distinguished from the troubadour and trouvère, who counted as poet-composers and often belonged to a higher class. The jongleurs performed their songs, carried them on, and supplemented them with music of their own. The boundary between the groups is, however, not settled in all details in scholarship, and the designations were not used uniformly.
The term is not a performance instruction but a designation of persons from music history.
Musical use
The music of the minstrels was largely transmitted orally and survives notated only to a small part. From the few sources it can be concluded that dance music, song accompaniment, and improvisation belonged to their repertoire; instrumental dance forms such as the estampie are placed in this context. How exactly this music sounded is in many respects reconstruction.
The minstrels formed an estate of their own with rights and duties of their own, which in the course of time organized itself in urban musicians' guilds.
Jongleurs travelled in the Middle Ages from place to place and performed at markets, festivals, and courts. They delivered songs, played instruments, told stories, and showed feats. They often spread the songs of the troubadours. In German they correspond to the Spielmann. They were mostly professional musicians.
Performance practice
Whoever performs music of this milieu works almost always with reconstructions. Inform yourself about the state of the sources of the respective pieces and about which parts are transmitted and which supplied. Improvisation belongs to the style; the surviving melodies are more a framework than a complete text. And choose instruments and scoring with an eye to what is attested for the time.