Wireker was an Englishman, and the ‘Order’ founded in the Speculum by Brunellus, the Ass, was clearly suggested by the sociétés joyeuses. Traces of such sociétés in England are, however, rare. Some of the titles of local lords of misrule, such as the Abbot of Marrall at Shrewsbury or the Abbot of Bon-Accord at Aberdeen, so closely resemble the French nomenclature as to suggest their existence; but the only certain example I have come across is in a very curious record from Exeter. The register of Bishop Grandisson contains under the date July 11, 1348, a mandate to the archdeacon and dean of Exeter and the rector of St. Paul’s, requiring them to prohibit the proceedings of a certain ‘sect of malign men’ who call themselves the ‘Order of Brothelyngham.’ These men, says the bishop, wear a monkish habit, choose a lunatic fellow as abbot, set him up in the theatre, blow horns, and for day after day beset in a great company the streets and places of the city, capturing laity and clergy, and exacting ransom from them ‘in lieu of a sacrifice.’ This they call a ludus, but it is sheer rapine[1373]. Grandisson’s learned editor thinks that this secta was a sect of mediaeval dissenters, but the description clearly points to a société joyeuse. And the recognition of the droits exacted as being loco sacrificii is to a folk-lorist most interesting.
More than one of the records which I have had occasion to quote make mention of an habit des fous as of a recognized and familiar type of dress. These records are not of the earliest. The celebrants of the ecclesiastical Feast of Fools wore larvae or masks. Laity and clergy exchanged costumes: and the wearing of women’s garments by men probably represents one of the most primitive elements in the custom. But there can be little doubt as to the nature of the traditional ‘habit des fous’ from the fourteenth century onwards. Its most characteristic feature was that hood garnished with ears, the distribution of which to persons of importance gave such offence at Tournai in 1499. A similar hood, fitting closely over the head and cut in scollops upon the shoulders, reappears in the bâton, dated 1482, of the fools in the ducal chapel of Dijon. Besides two large asses’ ears, it also bears a central peak or crest[1374]. The eared hood became the regular badge of the sociétés joyeuses. It is found on most of the seals and other devices of the Infanterie Dijonnaise, variously modified, and often with bells hung upon the ears and the points of the scollops[1375]. It was used at Amiens[1376], and at Rouen and Evreux probably gave a name to the Cornards[1377]. Marot describes it as appropriate to a sot de la Basoche at Paris[1378]. It belongs also to the Narren of Nuremberg[1379], and is to be seen in innumerable figured representations of fools in miniatures, woodcuts, carvings, the Amiens monetae, and so forth, during the later Middle Ages and the Renascence[1380]. Such a close-fitting hood was of course common wear in the fourteenth century. It is said to be of Gaulish origin, and to be retained in the religious cowl. The differentiae of the hood of a ‘fool’ from another must be sought in the grotesque appendages of ears, crest and bells[1381]. Already an eared hood, exactly like that of the ‘fools,’ distinguishes a mask, perhaps Gaulish, of the Roman period[1382]. It may therefore have been adopted in the Kalendae at an early date. But it is not, I think, unfair to assume that it was originally a sophistication of a more primitive headdress, namely the actual head of a sacrificial animal worn by the worshipper at the New Year festival. That the ears are asses’ ears explains itself in view of the prominence of that animal at the Feast of Fools. It must be added that the central crest is developed in some of the examples figured by Douce into the head and neck, in others into the comb only, of a cock[1383]. With the hood, in most of the examples quoted above, goes the marotte. This is a kind of doll carried by the ‘fool,’ and presents a replica of his own head and shoulders with their hood upon the end of a short staff. In some of Douce’s figures the marotte is replaced or supplemented by some other form of bauble, such as a bladder on a stick, stuffed into various shapes, or hollow and containing peas[1384]. Naturally the colours of the ‘fools’ were gay and strikingly contrasted. Those of the Paris Enfants-sans-Souci were yellow and green[1385]. But it may be doubted whether these colours were invariable, or whether there is much in the symbolical significance attributed to them by certain writers[1386]. The Infanterie Dijonnaise in fact added red to their yellow and green[1387]. The colours of the Clèves Order of Fools were red and yellow[1388].
It will not have escaped notice that the costume just described, the parti-coloured garments, the hood with its ears, bells and coxcomb, and the marotte, is precisely that assigned by the custom of the stage to the fools who appear as dramatis personae in several of Shakespeare’s plays[1389]. Yet these fools have nothing to do with sociétés joyeuses or the Feast of Fools; they represent the ‘set,’ ‘allowed,’ or ‘all-licensed’ fool[1390], the domestic jester of royal courts and noble houses. The great have always found pleasure in that near neighbourhood of folly which meaner men vainly attempt to shun. Rome shared the stultus with her eastern subjects and her barbarian invaders alike; and the ‘natural,’ genuine or assumed, was, like his fellow the dwarf, an institution in every mediaeval and Renascence palace[1391]. The question arises how far the habit of the sociétés joyeuses was also that of the domestic fool. In France there is some evidence that from the end of the fourteenth century it was occasionally at least taken as such. The tomb in Saint Maurice’s at Senlis of Thévenin de St. Leger, fool to Charles V, who died in 1374, represents him in a crested hood with a marotte[1392]. Rabelais describes the fool Seigni Joan, apparently intended for a court fool, as having a marotte and ears to his hood. On the other hand, he makes Panurge present Triboulet, the fool of Louis XII, with a sword of gilt wood and a bladder[1393]. A little later Jean Passerat speaks of the hood, green and yellow, with bells, of another royal fool[1394]. In the seventeenth century the green and yellow and an eared hood formed part of the fool’s dress which the duke of Nevers imposed upon a peccant treasurer[1395]. But in France the influence of the sociétés joyeuses was directly present. I do not find that the data quoted by Douce quite bear out his transference of the regular French habit de fou to England. Hoods were certainly required as part of the costume for ‘fools,’ ‘disards,’ or ‘vices’ in the court revels of 1551-2, together with ‘longe’ coats of various gay colours[1396]; but these were for masks, and on ordinary occasions the fools of the king and the nobles seem to have worn the usual dress of a courtier or servant[1397]. Like Triboulet, they often bore, as part of this, a gilded wooden sword[1398]. A coxcomb, however, seems to have been a recognized fool ensign[1399], and once, in a tale, the complete habit is described[1400]. Other fool costumes include a long petticoat[1401], the more primitive calf-skin[1402], and a fox tail hanging from the back[1403]. The two latter seem to bring us back to the sacrificial exuviae, and form a link between the court fool and the grotesque ‘fool,’ or ‘Captain Cauf Tail’ of the morris dances and other village revels.
Whatever may have been the case with the domestic fool of history, it is not improbable that the tradition of the stage rightly interprets the intention of Shakespeare. The actual texts are not very decisive. The point that is most clear is that the fool wears a ‘motley’ or ‘patched’ coat[1404]. The fool in Lear has a ‘coxcomb[1405]’; Monsieur Lavache in All’s Well a ‘bauble,’ not of course necessarily a marotte[1406]; Touchstone, in As You Like It, is a courtier and has a sword[1407]. The sword may perhaps be inherited from the ‘vice’ of the later moralities[1408]; and, in other respects, it is possible that Shakespeare took his conception of the fool less from contemporary custom, for indeed we hear of no fool at Elizabeth’s court, than from the abundant fool-literature, continental and English, above described. The earliest of his fools, Feste in Twelfth Night, quotes Rabelais, in whose work, as we have just seen, the fool Triboulet figures[1409]. It is noticeable that the appearance of fools as important dramatis personae in the plays apparently coincides with the substitution for William Kempe as ‘comic lead’ in the Lord Chamberlain’s company of Robert Armin[1410], whose own Nest of Ninnies abounds in reminiscences of the fool-literature[1411]. But whatever outward appearance Shakespeare intended his fools to bear, there can be no doubt that in their dramatic use as vehicles of general social satire they very closely recall the manner of the sotties. Touchstone is the type: ‘He uses his folly like a stalking-horse, and under the presentation of that he shoots his wit[1412].’
CHAPTER XVII
MASKS AND MISRULE
[Bibliographical Note.—On the history of the English Masque A. Soergel, Die englischen Maskenspiele (1882); H. A. Evans, English Masques (1897); J. A. Symonds, Shakespeare’s Predecessors, ch. ix; A. W. Ward, English Dramatic Literature, passim; W. W. Greg, A List of Masques, Pageants, &c. (1902), may be consulted. Much of the material used by these writers is in Collier, H. E. D. P. vol. i, and P. Cunningham, Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court (Shakespeare Soc. 1842). For the early Tudor period E. Hall’s History of the Union of Lancaster and York (1548) and the Revels Accounts in J. S. Brewer and J. Gairdner, Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII, vols. ii, iii, are detailed and valuable. R. Brotanek’s very full Die englischen Maskenspiele (1902) only reached me when this chapter was in type.]
Already in Saxon England Christmas was becoming a season of secular merry-making as well as of religious devotion[1413]. Under the post-Conquest kings this tendency was stimulated by the fixed habit of the court. William the Bastard, like Charlemagne before him, chose the solemn day for his coronation; and from his reign Christmas takes rank, with Easter, Whitsuntide, and, at a much later date, St. George’s day, as one of the great courtly festivals of the year. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is at the pains to record the place of its celebration, twelvemonth after twelvemonth[1414]. Among the many forgotten Christmassings of mediaeval kings, history lays a finger on a few of special note: that at which Richard II, with characteristic extravagance and the consumption of ‘200 tunns of wine and 2,000 oxen with their appurtenances,’ entertained the papal legate in 1398; and that, more truly royal, at which Henry V, besieging Rouen in 1418, ‘refreshed all the poore people with vittels to their great comfort and his high praise[1415].’ The Tudors were not behindhand with any opportunity for pageantry and display, nor does the vogue of Christmas throughout the length and breadth of ‘merrie England’ need demonstration[1416]. The Puritans girded at it, as they did at May games, and the rest of the delightful circumstance of life, until in 1644 an ordinance of the Long Parliament required the festival to give place to a monthly fast with the day fixed for which it happened to coincide[1417].
The entertainment of a mediaeval Christmas was diverse. There was the banquet. The Boy Bishop came to court. Carols were sung. New Year gifts were exchanged. Hastiludia—jousts or tournaments—were popular and splendid. Minstrels and jugglers made music and mirth. A succession of gaieties filled the Twelve nights from the Nativity to the Epiphany, or even the wider space from St. Thomas’s day to Candlemas. It is, however, in the custom of masquing that I find the most direct legacy to Christmas of the Kalends celebrations in their bourgeois forms. Larvae or masks are prominent in the records and prohibitions of the Feast of Fools from the decretal of Innocent III in 1207 to the letter of the Paris theologians in 1445[1418]. I take them as being, like the characteristic hood of the ‘fool,’ sophistications of the capita pecudum, the sacrificial exuviae worn by the rout of worshippers at the Kalendae. Precisely such larvae, under another name, confront us in the detailed records of two fourteenth-century Christmasses. Amongst the documents of the Royal Wardrobe for the reign of Edward III are lists of stuffs issued for the ludi domini regis in 1347-8 and 1348-9[1419]. For the Christmas of 1347, held at Guildford, were required a number of ‘viseres’ in the likeness of men, women, and angels, curiously designed ‘crestes,’ and other costumes representing dragons, peacocks, and swans[1420]. The Christmas of 1348 held at Ottford and the following Epiphany at Merton yield similar entries[1421]. What were these ‘viseres’ used for? The term ludi must not be pressed. It appears to be distinct from hastiludia, which comes frequently in the same documents, although in the hastiludia also ‘viseres’ were used[1422]. But it does not necessarily imply anything dramatic, and the analogies suggest that it is a wide generic term, roughly equivalent to ‘disports,’ or to the ‘revels’ of the Tudor vocabulary[1423]. It recurs in 1388 when the Wardrobe provided linen coifs for twenty-one counterfeit men of the law in the ludus regis[1424]. The sets of costumes supplied for all these ludi would most naturally be used by groups of performers in something of the nature of a dance; and they point to some primitive form of masque, such as Froissart describes in contemporary France[1425], the precursor of the long line of development which, traceable from the end of the following century, culminates in the glories of Ben Jonson. The vernacular name for such a ludus in the fourteenth century was ‘mumming’ or ‘disguising[1426].’ Orders of the city of London in 1334, 1393, and 1405 forbid a practice of going about the streets at Christmas ove visere ne faux visage, and entering the houses of citizens to play at dice therein[1427]. In 1417 ‘mummyng’ is specifically included in a similar prohibition[1428]; and in a proclamation of the following year, ‘mommyng’ is classed with ‘playes’ and ‘enterludes’ as a variety of ‘disgisyng[1429].’ But the disport which they denied to less dignified folk the rulers of the city retained for themselves as the traditional way of paying a visit of compliment to a great personage. A fragmentary chronicle amongst Stowe’s manuscripts describes such a visit paid to Richard II at the Candlemas preceding his accession in 1377. The ‘mummers’ were disguised with ‘vizards’ to represent an emperor and a pope with their cortèges. They rode to Kennington, entered the hall on foot, invited the prince and the lords to dice and discreetly lost, drank and danced with the company, and so departed[1430]. This is the first of several such mummings upon record. Some chroniclers relate that it was at a mumming that the partisans of Richard II attempted to seize Henry IV on Twelfth night in 1400[1431]. In the following year, when the Emperor Manuel of Constantinople spent Christmas with Henry at Eltham, the ‘men of London maden a gret mommyng to hym of xij aldermen and there sons, for whiche they hadde gret thanke[1432].’ In 1414 Sir John Oldcastle and his Lollards were in their turn accused of using a mumming as a cloak of sedition[1433]. Thus the London distrust of false visages had its justification, and it is noteworthy that so late as 1511 an Act of Parliament forbade the visits of mummers disguised with visors to great houses on account of the disorders so caused. Even the sale of visors was made illegal[1434].
So far there is nothing to point to the use of any dialogue or speeches at mummings. The only detailed account is that of 1377, and the passage which describes how the mummers ‘saluted’ the lords, ‘shewing a pair of dice upon a table to play with the prince,’ reads rather as if the whole performance were in dumb show. This is confirmed by the explanation of the term ‘mummynge’ given in a contemporary glossary[1435]. The development of the mumming in a literary direction may very likely have been due to the multifarious activity of John Lydgate. Amongst his miscellaneous poems are preserved several which are stated by their collector Shirley to have been written for mummings or disguisings either before the king or before the lord mayor of London[1436]. They all seem to belong to the reign of Henry VI and probably to the years 1427-30. And they show pretty clearly the way in which verses got into the disguisings. Two of them are ‘lettres’ introducing mummings presented by the guilds of the mercers and the goldsmiths to lord mayor Eastfield[1437]. They were doubtless read aloud in the hall. A balade sent to Henry and the queen mother at Eltham is of the same type[1438]. Two ‘devyses’ for mummings at London and Windsor were probably recited by a ‘presenter.’ The Windsor one is of the nature of a prologue, describing a ‘myracle’ which the king is ‘to see[1439].’ The London one was meant to accompany the course of the performance, and describes the various personages as they enter[1440]. Still more elaborate is a set of verses used at Hertford. The first part of these is certainly spoken by a presenter who points out the ‘vpplandishe’ complainants to whom he refers. But the reply is in the first person, and apparently put in the mouths of the ‘wyues’ themselves, while the conclusion is a judgement delivered, again probably by the presenter, in the name of the king[1441].
Whether Lydgate was the author of an innovation or not, the introduction of speeches, songs, and dialogues was common enough in the fully-developed mummings. For these we must look to the sumptuous courts of the early Tudors. Lydgate died about 1451, and the Wars of the Roses did not encourage revelry. The Paston Letters tell how the Lady Morley forbade ‘dysguysyngs’ in her house at Christmas after her husband’s death in 1476[1442]. There were ludi in Scotland under James III[1443]. But those of his successor, James IV, although numerous and varied[1444], probably paled before the elaborate ‘plays’ and ‘disguisings’ which the contemporary account-books of Henry VII reveal[1445]. Of only one ‘disguising,’ however, of this period is a full account preserved. It took place in Westminster Hall after the wedding of Prince Arthur with Katharine of Spain on November 18, 1501, and was ‘convayed and showed in pageants proper and subtile.’ There was a castle, bearing singing children and eight disguised ladies, amongst whom was one ‘apparelled like unto the Princesse of Spaine,’ a Ship in which came Hope and Desire as Ambassadors, and a Mount of Love, from which issued eight knights, and assaulted the castle. This allegorical compliment, which was set forth by ‘countenance, speeches, and demeanor,’ ended, the knights and ladies danced together and presently ‘avoided.’ Thereupon the royal party themselves fell to dancing[1446]. ‘Pageants’ are mentioned in connexion with other disguisings of the reign, and on one occasion the disguising was ‘for a moryce[1447].’ Further light is thrown upon the nature of a disguising by the regulations contained in a contemporary book of ‘Orders concerning an Earl’s House.’ A disguising is to be introduced by torch-bearers and accompanied by minstrels. If there are women disguised, they are to dance first, and then the men. Then is to come the morris, ‘if any be ordeynid.’ Finally men and women are to dance together and depart in the ‘towre, or thing devised for theim.’ The whole performance is to be under the control of a ‘maister of the disguisinges’ or ‘revills[1448].’