The Mediaeval Stage, Volume 1 (of 2)

by E. K. Chambers

It is impossible exactly to parallel from the history of English literature this interaction of folk-song and minstrelsy at the French fête du mai. For unfortunately no body of English mediaeval lyric exists. Even ‘Sumer is icumen in’ only owes its preservation to the happy accident which led some priest to fit sacred words to the secular tune; while the few pieces recovered from a Harleian manuscript of the reign of Edward I, beautiful as they are, read like adaptations less of English folk-song, than of French lyric itself[568]. Nevertheless, the village summer festival of England seems to have closely resembled that of France, and to have likewise taken in the long run a dramatic turn. A short sketch of it will not be without interest.

I have quoted at the beginning of this discussion of folk-customs the thirteenth-century condemnations of the Inductio Maii by Bishop Grosseteste of Lincoln and of the ludi de Rege et Regina by Bishop Chanteloup of Worcester. The ludus de Rege et Regina is not indeed necessarily to be identified with the Inductio Maii, for the harvest feast or Inductio Autumni of Bishop Grosseteste had also its ‘king’ and ‘queen,’ and so too had some of the feasts in the winter cycle, notably Twelfth night[569]. It is, however, in the summer feast held usually on the first of May or at Whitsuntide[570], that these rustic dignitaries are more particularly prominent. Before the middle of the fifteenth century I have not come across many notices of them. That a summer king was familiar in Scotland is implied by the jest of Robert Bruce’s wife after his coronation at Scone in 1306[571]. In 1412 a ‘somerkyng’ received a reward from the bursar of Winchester College[572]. But from about 1450 onwards they begin to appear frequently in local records. The whole ludus is generally known as a ‘May-play’ or ‘May-game,’ or as a ‘king-play[573],’ ‘king’s revel[574],’ or ‘king-game[575].’ The leading personages are indifferently the ‘king’ and ‘queen,’ or ‘lord’ and ‘lady.’ But sometimes the king is more specifically the ‘somerkyng’ or rex aestivalis. At other times he is the ‘lord of misrule[576],’ or takes a local title, such as that of the ‘Abbot of Marham,’ ‘Mardall,’ ‘Marrall,’ ‘Marram,’ ‘Mayvole’ or ‘Mayvoll’ at Shrewsbury[577], and the ‘Abbot of Bon-Accord’ at Aberdeen[578]. The use of an ecclesiastical term will be explained in a later chapter[579]. The queen appears to have been sometimes known as a ‘whitepot’ queen[580]. And finally the king and queen receive, in many widely separated places, the names of Robin Hood and Maid Marian, and are accompanied in their revels by Little John, Friar Tuck, and the whole joyous fellowship of Sherwood Forest[581]. This affiliation of the ludus de Rege et Regina to the Robin Hood legend is so curious as to deserve a moment’s examination[582].

The earliest recorded mention of Robin Hood is in Langland’s Piers Plowman, written about 1377. Here he is coupled with another great popular hero of the north as a subject of current songs:

‘But I can rymes of Robyn hood, and Randolf erle of Chestre[583].’

In the following century his fame as a great outlaw spread far and wide, especially in the north and the midlands[584]. The Scottish chronicler Bower tells us in 1447 that whether for comedy or tragedy no other subject of romance and minstrelsy had such a hold upon the common folk[585]. The first of the extant ballads of the cycle, A Gest of Robyn Hode, was probably printed before 1500, and in composition may be at least a century earlier. A recent investigator of the legend, and a very able one, denies to Robin Hood any traceable historic origin. He is, says Dr. Child, ‘absolutely a creation of the ballad muse.’ However this may be, the version of the Elizabethan playwright Anthony Munday, who made him an earl of Huntingdon and the lover of Matilda the daughter of Lord Fitzwater, may be taken as merely a fabrication. And whether he is historical or not, it is difficult to see how he got, as by the sixteenth century he did get, into the May-game. One theory is that he was there from the beginning, and that he is in fact a mythological figure, whose name but faintly disguises either Woden in the aspect of a vegetation deity[586], or a minor wood-spirit Hode, who also survives in the Hodeken of German legend[587]. Against this it may be pointed out, firstly that Hood is not an uncommon English name, probably meaning nothing but ‘à-Wood’ or ‘of the wood[588],’ and secondly that we have seen no reason to suppose that the mock king, which is the part assigned to Robin Hood in the May-game, was ever regarded as an incarnation of the fertilization spirit at all. He is the priest of that spirit, slain at its festival, but nothing more. I venture to offer a more plausible explanation. It is noticeable that whereas in the May-game Robin Hood and Maid Marian are inseparable, in the early ballads Maid Marian has no part. She is barely mentioned in one or two of the latest ones[589]. Moreover Marian is not an English but a French name, and we have already seen that Robin and Marion are the typical shepherd and shepherdess of the French pastourelles and of Adan de la Hale’s dramatic jeu founded upon these. I suggest then, that the names were introduced by the minstrels into English and transferred from the French fêtes du mai to the ‘lord’ and ‘lady’ of the corresponding English May-game. Robin Hood grew up independently from heroic cantilenae, but owing to the similarity of name he was identified with the other Robin, and brought Little John, Friar Tuck and the rest with him into the May-game. On the other hand Maid Marian, who does not properly belong to the heroic legend, was in turn, naturally enough, adopted into the later ballads. This is an hypothesis, but not, I think, an unlikely hypothesis.

Of what, then, did the May-game, as it took shape in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, consist? Primarily, no doubt, of a quête or ‘gaderyng.’ In many places this became a parochial, or even a municipal, affair. In 1498 the corporation of Wells possessed moneys ‘provenientes ante hoc tempus de Robynhode[590].’ Elsewhere the churchwardens paid the expenses of the feast and accounted for the receipts in the annual parish budget[591]. There are many entries concerning the May-game in the accounts of Kingston-on-Thames during some half a century. In 1506 it is recorded that ‘Wylm. Kempe’ was ‘kenge’ and ‘Joan Whytebrede’ was ‘quen.’ In 1513 and again in 1536 the game went to Croydon[592]. Similarly the accounts of New Romney note that in 1422 or thereabouts the men of Lydd ‘came with their may and ours[593],’ and those of Reading St. Lawrence that in 1505 came ‘Robyn Hod of Handley and his company’ and in 1507 ‘Robyn Hod and his company from ffynchamsted[594].’ In contemporary Scotland James IV gave a present at midsummer in 1503 ‘to Robin Hude of Perth[595].’ It would hardly have been worth while, however, to carry the May-game from one village or town to another, had it been nothing but a procession with a garland and a ‘gaderyng’; and as a matter of fact we find that in England as in France dramatic performances came to be associated with the summer folk-festivals. The London ‘Maying’ included stage plays[596]. At Shrewsbury lusores under the Abbot of Marham acted interludes ‘for the glee of the town’ at Pentecost[597]. The guild of St. Luke at Norwich performed secular as well as miracle plays, and the guild of Holy Cross at Abingdon held its feast on May 3 with ‘pageants, plays and May-games,’ as early as 1445[598]. Some of these plays were doubtless miracles, but so far as they were secular, the subjects of them were naturally drawn, in the absence of pastourelles, from the ballads of the Robin Hood cycle[599]. Amongst the Paston letters is preserved one written in 1473, in which the writer laments the loss of a servant, whom he has kept ‘thys iij yer to pleye Seynt Jorge and Robyn Hod and the Shryff off Nottyngham[600].’ Moreover, some specimens of the plays themselves are still extant. One of them, unfortunately only a fragment, must be the very play referred to in the letter just quoted, for its subject is ‘Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham,’ and it is found on a scrap of paper formerly in the possession of Sir John Fenn, the first editor of the Paston Letters[601]. A second play on ‘Robin Hood and the Friar’ and a fragment of a third on ‘Robin Hood and the Potter’ were printed by Copland in the edition of the Gest of Robyn Hode published by him about 1550[602]. The Robin Hood plays are, of course, subsequent to the development of religious drama which will be discussed in the next volume. They are of the nature of interludes, and were doubtless written, like the plays of Adan de la Hale, by some clerk or minstrel for the delectation of the villagers. They are, therefore, in a less degree folk-drama, than the examples which we shall have to consider in the next chapter. But it is worthy of notice, that even in the hey-day of the stage under Elizabeth and James I, the summer festival continued to supply motives to the dramatists. Anthony Munday’s Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon[603], Chapman’s May-Day, and Jonson’s delightful fragment The Sad Shepherd form an interesting group of pastoral comedies, affinities to which may be traced in the As You Like It and Winter’s Tale of Shakespeare himself.

As has been said, it is impossible to establish any direct affiliation between the Robin Hood plays and earlier caroles on the same theme, in the way in which this can be done for the jeu of Adan de la Hale, and the Robin and Marion of the pastourelles. The extant Robin Hood ballads are certainly not caroles; they are probably not folk-song at all, but minstrelsy of a somewhat debased type. The only actual trace of such caroles that has been come across is the mention of ‘Robene hude’ as the name of a dance in the Complaynt of Scotland about 1548[604]. Dances, however, of one kind or another, there undoubtedly were at the May-games. The Wells corporation accounts mention puellae tripudiantes in close relation with Robynhode[605]. And particularly there was the morris-dance, which was so universally in use on May-day, that it borrowed, almost in permanence, for its leading character the name of Maid Marian. The morris-dance, however, is common to nearly all the village feasts, and its origin and nature will be matter for discussion in the next chapter.

In many places, even during the Middle Ages, and still more afterwards, the summer feast dropped out or degenerated. It became a mere beer-swilling, an ‘ale[606].’ And so we find in the sixteenth century a ‘king-ale[607]’ or a ‘Robin Hood’s ale[608],’ and in modern times a ‘Whitsun-ale[609],’ a ‘lamb-ale[610]’ or a ‘gyst-ale[611]’ beside the ‘church-ales’ and ‘scot-ales’ which the thirteenth-century bishops had already condemned[612]. On the other hand, the village festival found its way to court, and became a sumptuous pageant under the splendour-loving Tudors. For this, indeed, there was Arthurian precedent in the romance of Malory, who records how Guenever was taken by Sir Meliagraunce, when ‘as the queen had mayed and all her knights, all were bedashed with herbs, mosses, and flowers, in the best manner and freshest[613].’ The chronicler Hall tells of the Mayings of Henry VIII in 1510, 1511, and 1515. In the last of these some hundred and thirty persons took part. Henry was entertained by Robin Hood and the rest with shooting-matches and a collation of venison in a bower; and returning was met by a chariot in which rode the Lady May and the Lady Flora, while on the five horses sat the Ladies Humidity, Vert, Vegetave, Pleasaunce and Sweet Odour[614]. Obviously the pastime has here degenerated in another direction. It has become learned, allegorical, and pseudo-classic. At the Reformation the May-game and the May-pole were marks for Puritan onslaught. Latimer, in one of his sermons before Edward VI, complains how, when he had intended to preach in a certain country town on his way to London, he was told that he could not be heard, for ‘it is Robyn hoodes daye. The parishe are gone a brode to gather for Robyn hoode[615].’ Machyn’s Diary mentions the breaking of a May-pole in Fenchurch by the lord mayor of 1552[616], and the revival of elaborate and heterogeneous May-games throughout London during the brief span of Queen Mary[617]. The Elizabethan Puritans renewed the attack, but though something may have been done by reforming municipalities here and there to put down the festivals[618], the ecclesiastical authorities could not be induced to go much beyond forbidding them to take place in churchyards[619]. William Stafford, indeed, declared in 1581 that ‘May-games, wakes, and revels’ were ‘now laid down[620],’ but the violent abuse directed against them only two years later by Philip Stubbes, which may be taken as a fair sample of the Puritan polemic as a whole, shows that this was far from being really the case[621]. In Scotland the Parliament ordered, as early as 1555, that no one ‘be chosen Robert Hude, nor Lytill Johne, Abbot of vnressoun, Quenis of Maij, nor vtherwyse, nouther in Burgh nor to landwart in ony tyme to cum[622].’ But the prohibition was not very effective, for in 1577 and 1578 the General Assembly is found petitioning for its renewal[623]. And in England no similar action was taken until 1644 when the Long Parliament decreed the destruction of such May-poles as the municipalities had spared. Naturally this policy was reversed at the Restoration, and a new London pole was erected in the Strand, hard by Somerset House, which endured until 1717[624].

CHAPTER IX
THE SWORD-DANCE

[Bibliographical Note.—The books mentioned in the bibliographical note to the last chapter should be consulted on the general tendency to μίμησις in festival dance and song. The symbolical dramatic ceremonies of the renouveau are collected by Dr. J. G. Frazer in The Golden Bough. The sword-dance has been the subject of two elaborate studies: K. Müllenhoff, Ueber den Schwerttanz, in Festgaben für Gustav Homeyer (1871), iii, with additions in Zeitschrift für deutsches Alterthum, xviii. 9, xx. 10; and F. A. Mayer, Ein deutsches Schwerttanzspiel aus Ungarn (with full bibliography), in Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie (1889), 204, 416. The best accounts of the morris-dance are in F. Douce, Illustrations of Shakespeare (1807, new ed. 1839), and A. Burton, Rushbearing (1891), 95.]