Gone Medieval - Medieval Comedy: Minstrels

Episode Date: June 30, 2023

Every historian dreams of hitting gold in the archives. Matt Lewis’s guest Dr. James Wade of Girton College, Cambridge has done just that.James has uncovered a manuscript by cleric and tutor Richard Heege, which reports the routines of a medieval minstrel. It reads like a mixture of stand-up script and satirical panel show. The text mocks kings, priests and peasants, encourages audiences to get drunk and shocks them with slapstick as well as a killer rabbit worthy of Monty Python. It all sheds new light on the English sense of humour, and the role played by minstrels in medieval society.This episode was edited by Joseph Knight and produced by Rob Weinberg.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians including Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code MEDIEVAL. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here > You can take part in our listener survey here. If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here: https://insights.historyhit.com/signup-form Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. Today's guest has hit gold in the archives, something every historian dreams of in those hallowed spaces. Dr James Wade is a fellow at Gerton College, Cambridge and is working on a book about folklore collecting that spans the venerable bead to Bob Dylan. One of his subjects is an East Midlands man in the second half of the 15th century named Richard Heage.

The manuscript, James has uncovered, comes across as a mixture of stand-up act script and satirical panel show, and it offers an unprecedented insight into the world of medieval comedy and fun. It's great to have you on Gone Medieval, James. Thanks for joining us. Hi, Matt. Yeah, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. So to start off with, what is this manuscript? What has Richard Hedg compiled? It's a manuscript that was produced in the third quarter of the 15th century, and it's slightly misleading to call it a manuscript in some ways because it was only compiled as a single book in the 18th century after it was discovered by several people leading through Robert Southie and then Walter

Scott. And that's a whole other fascinating story. But it existed in its medieval life as a kind of booklet library. There are nine booklets that were independently produced by this scribe Richard Hage and then other scribes were involved as well. And so it was effectively a gentry country house library in the 15th century. And it contains 51 what we might call major texts, along with other what we might call filler texts or little couplets or bits of Latin or things that fill up the available space on the page. It's a big compendium which would have served as a whole library for a gentry family in the 15th century.

And what do we know about who Richard Hage was? Our only source of information about Richard Hedge comes from this manuscript. There are no other records about his life, his birth, his baptism. Nothing survives other than the book itself. But what is remarkable about this manuscript is how this scribe shows us as able to or willing to reveal something about his character in his annotations and his sort of signature lines in the manuscript. And how rare is it for something like, particularly the part of the manuscript that we're going to talk about today? How rare is it for something like that to survive?

It's incredibly rare. One of the most interesting things about minstrelsy in the Middle Ages. We know that there were menstruals in the Middle Ages and that they were a major constituency of the dissemination of text, of songs, storytelling of lore in the Middle Ages. And we have accounts of minstrels being paid. We have names of minstrels. We know what instruments, some of them played. We even know some of the locations where they performed, but what we don't have is a single manuscript that we can confidently attribute or connect with an actual menstrual, either as a manuscript that was

produced by a menstrual or owned by a menstrual or used by a menstrual in any way. And that's a major category of lost literature. So we know that menstrual's were out there performing every night, but nothing of what they performed survives in manuscript. And so what the huge manuscript offers is not a menstrual manuscript, right? It is not a record of something of menstrual owned. Rather, it is a record of a scribe who is there, who is present at a menstrual show, and recorded that performance, who wrote down the text. Fascinating. It's amazing how something like that can find its way to us. This guy's obviously gone and enjoyed a show and felt the need to write it all down. And fortunately, we now have a window into that kind of thing. There are three routines, I guess,

in the manuscript that we're going to talk about a little bit. So the first of them is called The Hunting of the Hair. What's all of that about, please? Yes. So the Hunting of the Hair is what has been described in scholarship as a burlesque romance, meaning it's a story of adventure, but it's topsy-turvy. It's adventure turned upside down. And the basic plot goes like this. There are a bunch of peasants in a village who think it might be fun to act like an aristocrat and go out doing this refined pursuit, which is coursing or chasing a hair. And so they tool up with their pitchforks and their shovels and their brakes and all their kind of mongrel dogs who are not trained in hunting. They're just sort of pets. And they go out and try to catch a hair. And predictably, what happens

is it all goes wrong and it ends up in this huge, absurd brawl where they end up beating each other up. And in the end, the wives have to come out and bring everyone back home and wheelbarrows. That's the basic kind of plot of hunting their hair. Is it almost like a slapstick comedy? Exactly, yeah. There's a lot of bodily humor, situational humor, crude, scatological humor. The basic premise is nothing's off limits in terms of the crude bodily things that can happen. Are there any examples you can give us of the kind of humor that's in there that audiences were

enjoying in the 15th century? Well, if you will indulge me, I might read just a couple of lines of the Middle English and then give a translation. This is a passage that when I was reading it in the National Library of Scotland, you can imagine the kind of hushed conditions of the special collections reading room. I was laughing out loud because one of the characters in the hunting of the hair is named Jack Wade. And my surname is Wade. And actually I have an older brother named Jack Wade that has a special resonance with me. So this is a moment in the middle of the brawl with all these peasants in which the hair is trying to get away from everybody, but is feared as this horrid creature. So here's nine lines of tail rhyme in Middle English. The hare thought she would out wean and hit Jack Wade upon the sheen that he fell upon the back. Out, out put Jack, and alas, that ever this battle begun was, this is a sorry note. Jack Wade was never so feared as when the hair tread on his beard, lest she pulled out his throat.

And so a translation of that is the hair thought that she would get away and she hit Jack, Wade upon the shin so that he fell on his back. Get out, said Jack, and alas, that ever this battle was begun, this is a sorry state. Jack Wade was never so afraid as when the hair stepped on his head, lest the hair would pull out his throat. This guy's basically terrified that this hair is going to, having tried to attack the hair, he thinks the hair is getting revenge and is going to get one over on it. Exactly. And that's the conceit or the comedy of this tale, is that it pokes fun at the naivete or the simplicity of the peasants. I was wondering when we started this, does that kind of humor still translate? Would it still be funny today or is it kind of one of those you have to be

there at the time? But you can't imagine that as part of a slapstick routine that this guy is trying to kill a head. I mean, we've not that long ago had kind of Rowan Atkinson versus a bee trapped in a house, you know, similar kind of premise. To me, it sounds like that humor still translates to today. Yes, absolutely. It is very funny. And it's playing with a couple of ideas. One is you take someone or a group of people who have pretensions to being more intelligent or more able than they are and you put them in a situation where they act out their buffoonery. Another is, and this is, I suppose, a broader strategy for telling jokes or for making people laugh, is that you turn the world upside down, right? You take an ordinary activity in the Middle Ages hunting and you flip it upside down and you make it seem absurd rather than humans and dogs hunting. hunting rabbits, rabbits hunt humans.

And the second piece in this section is terms as a mock sermon. So what was a mock sermon and how common do we think that kind of thing was? We have no other full example of a mock sermon in Middle English. So this is the only surviving example. And I think that rarity suggests something about just how edgy it was. There are many mock sermons in French that survive, but in English, this is the only one. The only other sort of plausible comparative examples are the wife of Bath's prologue in the Canterbury Tales and the partner's tale in the Canterbury Tales. It's telling, I think, that Chaucer gives his most

edgy literature to his most unreliable narrators, right? The wife of Bath and the partner are characters that Chaucer is probably using to distance himself from the material. I guess we tend to think that in the medieval mind, religion was an incredibly serious matter, but clearly they are willing to poke fun, at least at the medium of a sermon. Yes. One thing that I think about in relation to this mock sermon, is how the sermon genre, the sermon format would be the most common sort of live performance experience for someone in the Middle Ages. Everyone in medieval England went to church on Sundays. They were involved in the liturgy, and they listened to a sermon. And So they would be very familiar with the conventions, the expectations of what a sermon holds.

It involves some doctrine, some message, exempla or examples that illustrate that doctrine and have some kind of application for living in the real world in the 15th century. So sermons are genres like any other form of literature, in the performance genres, right? They are spoken out loud to an audience. And so it's a very kind of natural instinct, I think, to make fun of that. In a kind of upside-down world where, rather than being in a church, you're in a tavern or an alehouse or a pub to invert that experience of live performance and make it funny. And I think it's interesting as well that great comedy today is really good at taking the everyday, the mundane stuff that we do all the time that we're really familiar with and turning it around, making it funny, making it a little bit absurd.

And it sounds like that's what a mock sermon is. So this is something everybody is familiar with all of the time. Let's make it into a comedy routine. But not that dissimilar to what we do today. Precisely. And the other thing we do today, which we find in this mock sermon, is you take something that's reverent, right? That's something that ought to be taken seriously and you make fun of it. So you take the furthest extreme, the thing that you would least likely expect to be made fun of,

which is religious ritual. And that's sort of comedy gold, isn't it? What kind of things does this mock sermon send up? What kind of jokes are in there? I wonder if I could read just a couple of sentences of Middle English and then give you a translation as an example. So this sermon is very aware, familiar with the conventions of delivering sermons in Middle English. It includes an invocation to the Trinity. It includes a lesson or a bit of doctrine.

It includes segments or snippets of verse. And this is something that actually we find in prose sermons from the Middle Ages, is that they incorporate poetry as a way of catching the ear or as a kind of memory aid. poetry is really useful in the sermon because it helps the audience, the parishioners, connect with ideas or remember something that will help them understand doctrine. And then it also includes exempla, right? Examples, so stories, narrative accounts that help illustrate the doctrine or lesson in the sermon. And so this passage is from the argument of the sermon, and the argument goes like this. If thou have a greater black ball in thy honda, and it be full of good al-a-old.

and thou leave anything therein, thou putst thy soul into great a painer. And thereto accorded two worthy platures, Jackathrum, and John Brestbaal. There is the men said in the bibble that an ill drinker is impossible heaven for to winna. But God loves us not a horse, no mere, but merry men that in a cop-constead. And here's a translation of that. If you have a big tankard in your hand and it's full of good ale, you put your soul at great risk if you do not drink all of it. This, of course, with two worthy preachers, Jack Othrom and John Brestbale,

these men said in the Bible that it is impossible for a bad drinker to go to heaven because God loves neither horse nor mare but marry men who will in the cup stare. So essentially you shouldn't be a bad drink, you should make sure you finish all of your ale. Yes, exactly. And this is looking across the material, the menstrual material in this manuscript. This is a kind of ongoing joke and probably strategy on part of the menstrual to encourage audiences to drink up. And I think there are two reasons. Well, so it tells us two things. One is that the occasions for performance are probably in some arena where people might be drinking,

like a tavern or a pub or an alehouse or a fair or a baronial hall, right, where there's some kind of feast going on. And then the other thing it suggests to us is that there are good reasons why minstrels might want an intoxicated audience. One is because jokes are funnier when people have had a bit to drink. And two, that when people have had a bit to drink, they might be more willing to open their purse and put some coins into the hat or the cup that's passing around. Yeah, it's almost tempting to wonder whether there's drinking games going on that, you know, every time the minstrel talks about emptying your cup is encouraging the audience to drain their drinks and get some more. Yes, exactly, Matt. I think that's pretty explicit at several moments in this manuscript.

And you can hear the end of that passage. There's a little kind of snippet of a drinking song. God loves neither horse nor mare, but Mary Men, who in the couple stare at that sort of rhymes, and it has a kind of a metrical pattern, which suggests that this is invoking a known drinking song. Yeah, something the audience might have recognized and realized was a cue to take a swig.

Exactly. I'm James Patton Rogers, a war historian, advisor to the UN and NATO, and host of the Warfare podcast from History Hit. Join me twice a week every week as we look at the conflicts that have defined our past and the one shaping our future. We talk to award-winning journalists. ISIS, this peculiar strain that we all came to know very well in the mid-2010s, really got it start because of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. We hear from the people who were actually there.

The Sudanese have been incredible. They have managed to get supplies to people, to individual. who are suffering. And we learn from the remarkable historians shining a light on forgotten histories. For the most part, the millions of people who were taken to those camps were immediately murdered. Auschwitz combined the functions of death camp and concentration camp and slave labor. Join us on the warfare podcast from a history hit twice a week, every week, wherever you get your podcasts. And does the mock sermon contain some kind of semi-serious socio-political or religious meaning, or is it really just about poking fun at things? Well, it's a good question,

and it's so hard to judge tone when you're not there. But my general impression of thinking about the text in this manuscript is that they are fundamentally like-hearted. They poke fun at the audience, they poke fun at the villagers and the neighboring village. The menstrual, the performer himself, is also a target of derision. And so everyone gets made fun of, and that suggests to me that it's not meant to be taken too seriously. It's not really a political comment. or some kind of edgy social commentary. It's really just fun. And you came across in this manuscript

what is now the earliest reference to the term red herring in the English language. How does that appear? Yeah, it's a really interesting moment in the mock sermon. And of course, when one tries to identify the earliest version of everything, you know you're on thin ice because, of course, what manuscripts preserve

and what was existing in oral culture or commonplace in discourses, Those are two separate things. But the red herring reference is in another example in the mock sermon, and it's a story about three kings who have a feast. And at this feast, they eat so much and they drink so much that their bellies burst open. And when their bellies burst, 24 oxen come out and they start sword fighting. And in the course of this sword fight, these oxen chop themselves up or chop each other up into three red herring.

And first of all, this is absurdist and bizarre, right? There's no sort of logic to that narrative sequence. But if there is any logic to that sequence, it's that what we get when you put kings together is gluttony, and the result of gluttony is absurdist fantasy, and the result of absurdist fantasy is distraction. And so the willingness of this scribe to kind of mock kings is tethered to the absurdist imagery,

which I think helps to insulate or isolate the edgy. of it a bit. But the red herring reference is really a joke about the ineffectual nature of kingship. And I guess it's interesting to wonder whether this minstrel could have been performing this at some kind of baronial feast in a great hall. And what he's saying is the very thing that we're engaged in here is a massive distraction. It's sort of pointless. What you're doing is taking our attention away from the things that really matter. Yes, I think that's a really interesting thought. There is clearly meta-comedy in this material, right? Because there There are so many jokes about feasting, about drinking, about frivolity and social occasion.

And in the context of a baronial hall or an alehouse or a tavern, this would be meta, right? People who are themselves eating and drinking, listening to absurdist jokes about eating and drinking. The other thing, Matt, I think, is worth thinking about is we do have other evidence for mixed audiences in the 15th century. So where landlords or the gentry or the aristocracy would put on feasts on special occasions, on feast days, in which everyone was invited. The palmen and the bakers and the brewers, everyone involved on the estate would be invited to a feast. And so we get this sense, really, of all different sort of estates or categories of people rubbing shoulders with each other on these occasions. And that's a kind of interesting and rare insight into an experience of late feudalism, which is in the case.

so stratified in its social relations. It's interesting how this can remind us that people weren't necessarily as completely separate as we sometimes imagine that they were. The third element in the document is entitled The Battle of Brackenvet. What is that section about? So the Battle of Brackenwet, it's a nonsense poem. It's a poem which turns the world upside down. It takes familiar conceits in poetry and in daily life, sort of agricultural life in the Middle Ages, and makes it ridiculous. And the basic plot, if there is a plot, is that there's a fair or a festival going on, and the attendance of this fair are animals and insects and humans mixed in. And there are songs,

they're singing, there's minstrelsy, there's a bumblebee playing the hornpipe, that kind of thing. And then there's sport as well. What nowadays we might call a nonsense, So it's a pastoral scene of agrarian life, agricultural life in the Middle Ages, but it's absurd. And there's references to kind of other local villages around where this was being performed. And I guess that's a parallel to modern stand-up routines where they tend to play to a local town and to rivalries with other locals and preconceptions about the area, perhaps. So do we see that happening in this work as well? Yes, absolutely.

Brackenwet is the medieval version of Rackenfield, which is a short walk from the village of Hage and Derbyshire. And there are other place names in this poem, which suggests a kind of knowledge of a local area. And what this also suggests, really interestingly, is that it gives a picture of a minstrel who is probably not traveling up and down the country from Dover to Edinburgh or something. They're probably working a local beat, applying their trade on a circuit, would have been known in the area, would have returned to these locations where he was performing. And also, as you say, taking that situation and making the most of the comedy value of poking fun at the particular audience in front of you or at playing off of village rivalries. Yes, you have to wonder whether when he goes to Brackenfield, it becomes the Battle of Hage is the joke. Yes, precisely. And we might assume that Richard Hedge is recording this performance at, or at least near the village of Hedge.

So, yes, you might expect variance based on location. Yeah, which is something stand-up comedians do today. So it's still part of a comedian's locker in the 21st century, as much as it was in the 15th century, to play to those kind of real local rivalries and local knowledge and all of that kind of thing. It's fascinating to see it still there. What does this manuscript then as a whole tell us about medieval humor? Has our sense of humor really changed? Because it sounds like it's a lot of slapstick,

taking the Mickey out of serious things, and fairly nonsensical, local comedy, which is completely recognizable. Yes, that's right. My thinking about the material in this manuscript predominantly makes me think about similarities rather than differences in comic culture. And we see comparable strategies

for making people laugh or for telling jokes. As you've identified, you know, one is turning the world upside down. One is taking the high, in bringing them low, taking people in authority, politicians, celebrities, people of learning or in some elevated position, and bringing them down. That's an easy way to make a joke. The other thing that we see is taking private things and making them public. And by private, I generally mean things that happen either in the bedroom or the bathroom. Right. And so you see

crude bodily humor, scatological humor, and just the willingness of the performer to say those words out loud to make things public, that's a good strategy for making people laugh. And also humour that still makes people laugh today, for no good reason, really. Toilet jokes are always funny. And I guess it's great for us now to have this window into a kind of a minstrels routine that, as you said, we've never had before. It's not been recorded or found anywhere else before. Does this material affect our view of medieval minstrels and of their audiences and how we might imagine those fun nights playing out? Yeah, it does in a couple of ways. The representations of minstrels in other literature might lead us to the assumption that the material

a minstrel would perform would be romances, tales of chivalry and adventure, knights and ladies and quests and that sort of thing, or accounts of great battles, sort of historic accounts of great feats by the English, or, you know, Robin Hood ballads. This is the kind of material that from other literature we are led to assume was performed by minstrels. And this material is different. It is fundamentally comic and it's absurdist, it involves nonsense and it's far more crude than what otherwise survives. So that's a real paradigm shift for me to starting to think about menstrual performance as something closer to stand-up comedy rather than the recitation of great literature. Yeah, yeah. It's fascinating to think about that and to think about how little it's changed.

I'm sure there must be comedians today who would recognize that as kind of the working men's club circuit that you go on to try and build up your profile and all that kind of thing. It's exactly the same thing happening five, six hundred years ago? The image of this menstrual that emerges is probably someone who is not a big celebrity, someone who was more likely a kind of semi-professional, someone who had a day job working in some agricultural craft or trade, and then went gigging at night. We have external evidence later in the 16th century for local menstruals working that way. And I think this manuscript offers a glimpse of possibility,

that was happening much earlier than we have otherwise evidence for. Yeah, that's absolutely fascinating. Well, thank you so much for joining us, James, and for explaining a bit more about the Hage manuscript and what an incredible find it's been. It must have been great to have sat in the archives and suddenly realized what you were looking at. Obviously, going into the archives is the best part about my job.

There was a great moment when looking at this manuscript and I came to the end of one of the nonsense poems, and there was this colophon, this sort of signature line by the scribe, that said, by me, Richard Hage, because I was at that feast and did not have a drink, which made me laugh. It's a really kind of playful, teasing signature. And it suggested, one, that maybe the origins of this material wasn't from an exemplar, a previous copy script.

And so maybe there's an opportunity for thinking about live performance here. But then the other is that this is a scribe who's willing to reveal something about their character or to be funny on the page. And that's rare as well. It was a really interesting and enjoyable and surprising moment. Yeah. I love as well that he felt the need to point out that he hadn't had a drink. Like, that's obviously something unusual.

Everyone else there was clearly drunk. That's the joke, isn't it, right? He went to this feast. There was a menstrual performing, and he happened to be the only one there who was sober enough to remember it the next morning. And so it was able to write it down. Well, thank you so much for joining us and explaining all of that, James. It's been great to talk to you.

Yeah, thanks, Matt. Appreciate it. Yeah, that's fun. There are brand new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please join us next time for more on the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcasts from and to tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcast. It really does help new listeners to find us. And if you're enjoying this and looking for a bit more medieval goodness in your life, you can subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter by following the links in the show notes below.

Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hits.