jongleur

As a modern troubadour, mining the social perspective of the chansons réalistes, Aznavour was the inheritor of a French tradition that can be traced back to the entertainment of the medieval jongleur.

From The New Yorker ● Oct. 23, 2018

The other difference is that Tagore wasn’t a jongleur, that is, a singer of his own songs, though he might well have wanted such a career among his several.

From The Guardian ● Oct. 21, 2016

Once, at least, has this jongleur been more than little or impudent.

From Time Magazine Archive

He has been mad through the mountains of Cabaret with Peire Vidal, maddest jongleur of the old time.

From Time Magazine Archive

"I'm no cheap jongleur, either, you know. I sing for lords and ladies! One day I'll sing for the king himself!"

From "The Inquisitor's Tale" by Adam Gidwitz

Not lyric poets then, or even jongleurs, but bricoleurs, who occupy a separate category because they work across genres.

From The Guardian ● Oct. 21, 2016

Medieval France had its jongleurs; Elizabethan London, its ballad singers and costermongers.

From Time Magazine Archive

As they crossed the vineyard, the cardinal stretched out his long arm and said, "I have brought musicians, jongleurs, senators of Orvieto, men-at-arms, two archbishops, six bishops, an abbot, and many monsignors and priests."

From The Saracen: Land of the Infidel by Robert Shea

Preachers vie with jongleurs in illustrating their sermons by stories, “examples” they call them.

From Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535 by Eileen Power

And it is also a fact that in the fabliaux and other light verse of the time we find jongleurs presented as boasting of the particular chansons they can sing.

From The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) by George Saintsbury