The Mediaeval Stage, Volume 1 (of 2)

by E. K. Chambers

Là verras tu des gens dix mille,

Plus qu’en la forest de Torfolz,

Qui servent par sales, par viles,

A ton dieu, le prince des folz[1332].’

The term Roi or Prince des Sots is perhaps the most common one for the new dominus festi, and, like sots or folz themselves, is generic. But there are many local variants, as the Prévôt des Étourdis at Bouchain[1333], the Roi des Braies at Laon, the Roi de l’Epinette at Lille, and the Prince de la Jeunesse at St. Quentin[1334]. The dominus festi was as a rule chosen by one or more local guilds or confréries into which the jeunesse were organized for the purpose of maintaining the feast. The fifteenth century was an age of guilds in every department of social life, and the compagnies des fous or sociétés joyeuses are but the frivolous counterparts of religious confréries or literary puys. The most famous of all such sociétés, that of l’Infanterie Dijonnaise at Dijon, seems directly traceable to the fall of an ecclesiastical Feast of Fools. Such a feast was held, as we have seen, in the ducal, afterwards royal, chapel, and was abolished by the Parlement of Dijon in 1552. Before this date nothing is heard of l’Infanterie. A quarter of a century later it is in full swing, and the character of its dignitaries and its badges point clearly to a derivation from the chapel feast[1335]. The Dijon example is but a late one of a development which had long taken place in many parts of northern France and Flanders. It would be difficult to assert that a société joyeuse never made its appearance in any town before the ecclesiastical Feast of Fools had died out therein. Occasionally the two institutions overlap[1336]. But, roughly speaking, the one is the inheritor of the other; ‘La confrérie des sots, c’est la Fête des Fous sécularisée[1337].’ Amongst the chief of these sociétés are the Enfants-sans-Souci of Paris, the Cornards or Connards of Rouen and Evreux[1338], the Suppôts du Seigneur de la Coquille of Lyons[1339]. The history of these has been written excellently well by M. Petit de Julleville, and I do not propose to repeat it. A few general points, however, deserve attention.

The ecclesiastical Feast of Fools flourished rather in cathedrals than in monasteries. The sociétés however, like some more serious confréries[1340], seem to have preferred a conventual to a capitular model for their organization[1341]. The Cornards, both at Rouen and Evreux, were under an Abbé. Cambrai had its Abbaye joyeuse de Lescache-Profit, Chalons-sur-Saône its Abbé de la Grande Abbaye, Arras its Abbé de Liesse, Poitiers its Abbé de Mau Gouverne[1342]. The literary adaptation of this idea by Rabelais in the Abbaye de Thélème is familiar. This term abbaye is common to the sociétés, with some at least of the Basoches or associations of law-clerks to the Parlements of Paris and the greater provincial towns. The Basoches existed for mutual protection, but for mutual amusement also, and on one side at least of their activity they were much of the nature of sociétés joyeuses[1343]. At Rheims in 1490 a Basoche entered into rivalry of dramatic invective with the celebrants of the ecclesiastical Feast of Fools[1344]. The Basoche of Paris was in the closest relations to, if not actually identical with, the société of the Enfants-sans-Souci[1345]. Just as the law-clerks of Paris were banded together in their Basoche, so were the students of Paris in their ‘university,’ ‘faculties,’ ‘nations,’ and other groups; and in 1470, long after the regular Feast of Fools had disappeared from the city, the students were still wont to put on the fool habit and elect their rex fatuorum on Twelfth night[1346]. Yet other guilds of a more serious character, generally speaking, than the sociétés joyeuses, none the less occasionally gave themselves over to joyeuseté. The Deposuit brought rebuke upon religious confréries up to a quite late date[1347]; and traces of the fous are to be found amongst the recreations of no less a body than the famous and highly literary puy of Arras. The sociétés joyeuses, like the puys, were primarily associations of amateur, rather than professional merry-makers, a fact which distinguishes them from the corporations of minstrels described in a previous chapter[1348]. But minstrels and trouvères were by no means excluded. The poet Gringoire was Mère-Sotte of the Paris Enfants-sans-Souci. Clément Marot was a member of the same body. In the puy of Arras the minstrels traditionally held an important place; and as the literary and dramatic side of the sociétés grew, it is evident that the men who were professionally ready with their pens must everywhere have been in demand.

The primary function of the sociétés joyeuses and their congeners was the celebration of the traditional Feast of Fools at or about the New Year. In Paris, Twelfth night was a day of festival for the Basoche as well as for the minor association of exchequer clerks known as the Empire de Galilée. In mid-January came the fête des Braies at Laon, and the fête of the Abbaye de Lescache-Profit at Cambrai. That of the Prince des Sots at Amiens was on the first of January itself[1349]. On the same day three sociétés joyeuses united in a fête de l’âne at Douai[1350]. But January was no clement month for the elaborated revels of increasingly luxurious burghers; and it is not surprising to find that many of the sociétés transferred their attention to other popular feasts which happened to fall at more genial seasons of the year. To the celebration of these, the spring feast of the carnival or Shrovetide, the summer feasts of May-day or Midsummer, they brought all the wantonness of the Feast of Fools. The Infanterie Dijonnaise, the Cornards of Rouen and Evreux, the third Parisian law association, that of the Châtelet, especially cultivated the carnival. The three obligatory feasts of the Basoche included, besides that of Twelfth night, one on May-day and one at the beginning of July[1351]. On May-day, too, a guild in the parish of St. Germain at Amiens held its fête des fous[1352]. It may be noted that these summer extensions of the reign of folly are not without parallels of a strictly ecclesiastical type. At Châlons-sur-Marne, as late as 1648, a chapter procession went to the woods on St. John’s eve to cut boughs for the decking of the church[1353]. At Evreux a similar custom grew into a very famous revel[1354]. This was the procession noire, otherwise known as the cérémonie de la Saint-Vital, because the proceedings began on the day of St. Vitalis (April 28) and lasted to the second Vespers on May 1. Originally the canons, afterwards the choir-clerks, chaplains, and vicars, went at day-break on May morning to gather branches in the bishop’s woods. Their return was the signal for riotous proceedings. The bells were violently rung. Masks were worn. Bran was thrown in the eyes of passers-by, and they were made to leap over broomsticks. The choir-clerks took the high stalls, and the choir-boys recited the office. In the intervals the canons played at skittles over the vaults; there were dancing and singing and the rest, ‘as at the time of the Nativity[1355].’ The abuses of this festival must have begun at an early date, for two canons of the cathedral, one of whom died in 1206, are recorded to have been hung out of the belfry windows in a vain attempt to stop the bell-ringing. Its extension to St. Vitalis’ day is ascribed to another canon, singularly named Bouteille, who is said to have founded about 1270 a very odd obit. He desired that a pall should lie on the pavement of the choir, and that on each corner and in the middle of this should stand a bottle of wine, to be drunk by the singing-men. The canon Bouteille may be legendary, but the wine-bottle figured largely in the festival ceremonies. While the branches were distributed in the bishop’s wood, which came to be known as the bois de la Bouteille, the company drank and ate cakes. Two bottle-shaped holes were dug in the earth and filled with sand. On the day of the obit an enormous leather bottle, painted with marmosets, serpents, and other grotesques, was placed in the choir. These rites were still extant at Evreux in 1462, when a fresh attempt to suppress the bell-jangling led to a fresh riot. No explanation is given of the term procession noire as used at Evreux, but a Vienne parallel suggests that, as in some other seasonal festivals, those who took part in the procession had their faces blacked. At Vienne, early on May 1, four men, naked and black, started from the archbishop’s palace and paraded the city. They were chosen respectively by the archbishop, the cathedral chapter, and the abbots of St. Peter’s and St. John’s. Subsequently they formed a cortège for a rex, also chosen by the archbishop, and a regina from the convent of St. Andrew’s. A St. Paul, from the hospital dedicated to that saint, also joined in the procession, and carried a cup of ashes which he sprinkled in the faces of those he met. This custom lasted to the seventeenth century[1356].

But the seasonal feasts did not exhaust the activities of the sociétés. Occasional events, a national triumph, a royal entry, not to speak of local faits divers, found them ready with appropriate celebrations[1357]. The Infanterie Dijonnaise made a solemn function of the admission of new members[1358]. And more than one société picked up from folk-custom the tradition of the charivari, constituting itself thus the somewhat arbitrary guardian of burgess morality[1359]. M. Petit de Julleville analyses a curious jeu filled with chaff against an unfortunate M. Du Tillet who underwent the penalty at Dijon in 1579 for the crime of beating his wife in the month of May[1360]. At Lyon, too, chevauchées of a similar type seem to have been much in vogue[1361].

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the entertainment of the sociétés joyeuses was largely dramatic. We find them, as indeed we find the participants in the strictly clerical feasts of Fools[1362] and of Boys[1363], during the same period, occupied with the performance both of miracles and of the various forms of contemporary comedy known as farces, moralities, sotties and sermons joyeux[1364]. Of their share in the miracles the next volume may speak[1365]: their relations to the development of comedy require a word or two here. That normal fifteenth-century comedy, that of the farce and the morality, in any way had its origin in the Feast of Fools, whether clerical or lay, can hardly be admitted. It almost certainly arose out of the minstrel tradition, and when already a full-blown art was adapted by the fous, as by other groups of amateur performers, from minstrelsy. With the special forms of the sottie and the sermon joyeux it is otherwise. These may reasonably be regarded as the definite contribution of the Feast of Fools to the types of comedy. The very name of the sermon joyeux, indeed, sufficiently declares its derivation. It is parody of a class, the humour of which would particularly appeal to revelling clerks: it finds its place in the general burlesque of divine worship, which is the special note of the feast[1366]. The character of the sotties, again, does not leave their origin doubtful; they are, on the face of them, farces in which the actors are sots or fous. Historically, we know that some at least of the extant sotties were played by sociétés joyeuses at Paris, Geneva and elsewhere; and the analysis of their contents lays bare the ruling idea as precisely that expressed in the motto of the Infanterie Dijonnaise—‘Stultorum numerus est infinitus.’ It is their humour and their mode of satire to represent the whole world, from king to clown, as wearing the cap and bells, and obeying the lordship of folly. French writers have aptly compared them to the modern dramatic type known as the revue[1367]. The germ of the sottie is to be found as early as the thirteenth century in the work of that Adan de la Hale, whose anticipation of at least one other form of fifteenth-century drama has called for comment[1368]. Adan’s Jeu de la Feuillée seems to have been played before the puy of Arras, perhaps, as the name suggests, in the tonnelle of a garden, on the eve of the first of May, 1262. It is composed of various elements: the later scenes are a féerie in which the author draws upon Hellequin and his mesnie and the three fées, Morgue, Maglore and Arsile, of peasant tradition. But there is an episode which is sheer sottie. The relics of St. Acaire, warranted to cure folly, are tried upon the good burgesses of Arras one by one; and there is a genuine fool or dervés, who, like his lineal descendant Touchstone, ‘uses his folly as a stalking-horse to shoot his wit’ in showers of arrowy satire upon mankind[1369]. Of the later and regular sotties, the most famous are those written by Pierre Gringoire for the Enfants-sans-Souci of Paris. In these, notably the Jeu du Prince des Sotz, and in others by less famous writers, the conception of the all-embracing reign of folly finds constant and various expression[1370]. Outside France some reflection of the sottie is to be found in the Fastnachtspiele or Shrovetide plays of Nuremberg and other German towns. These were performed mainly, but not invariably, at Shrovetide, by students or artisans, not necessarily organized into regular guilds. They are dramatically of the crudest, being little more than processions of figures, each of whom in turn sings his couplets. But in several examples these figures are a string of Narren, and the matter of the verses is in the satirical vein of the sotties[1371]. The Fastnachtspiele are probably to be traced, not so much to the Feast of Fools proper, as to the spring sword-dances in which, as we have seen, a Narr or ‘fool’ is de rigueur. They share, however, with the sotties their fundamental idea of the universal domination of folly.

The extension of this idea may indeed be traced somewhat widely in the satirical and didactic literature of the later Middle Ages and the Renascence. I cannot go at length into this question here, but must content myself with referring to Professor Herford’s valuable account of the cycle, which includes the Speculum Stultorum of Wireker, Lydgate’s Order of Fools, Sebastian Brandt’s Narrenschiff and its innumerable imitations, the Encomium Moriae of Erasmus, and Robert Armin the player’s Nest of Ninnies[1372].