Your are indeed correct, nerd, but if I was "not quite right," it is more because I was not quite complete in my brief dissertation. Had I been complete, it would have had to run several thousand words, as did the research paper I did on the subject a few years back. There were many classes of such poet-musicians. They were from almost all levels of society back then, and some traveled and some did not. Also the list of various names they were called (minstrel, troubadour, trouvère, jongleur, and on and on) is about as long as your leg, and the distinctions of any major significance between the designations were often minuscule.

Some of the earliest wandering poet-musicians (whatever one might want to call them) were young monks who decided to leave the monasteries and see some of the world before (or instead of) settling into a life of prayer and contemplation. This defection from the monasteries began around the ninth century and gradually accelerated. Some were "goliards" (often writing bawdy songs and peotry and mocking church rituals), others were one form or another of wandering poet-musicians.

Fascinating history. Too long to go into here. But one of several interesting books on the subject is Helen Waddell's The Wandering Scholars.

Don Firth