MEDIEVAL MUMMERS.
(From Strutt’s “Sports and Pastimes”)
These, of course, were exaggerations bred of a general roughness beyond all modern experience. Even Christmas mumming was treated as an objectionable practice in London; as early as 1370 we find the first of a series of Christmastide proclamations “that no one shall go in the streets of the city, or suburbs thereof, with visor or mask ... under penalty of imprisonment.” Similarly severe measures were threatened against football in the streets, against the game of “taking off the hoods of people, or laying hands on them,” and against “hocking” or extorting violent contributions from passers-by on the third Monday or Tuesday after Easter. But the very frequency of the prohibitions is suggestive of their inefficiency; and in 1418 the City authorities were still despairingly “charging on the King’s behalf and his City, that no man or person ... during this holy time of Christmas be so hardy in any wise to walk by night in any manner mumming plays, interludes, or any other disguisings with any feigned beards, painted visors, deformed or coloured visages in any wise, upon pain of imprisonment of their bodies and making fine after the discretion of the Mayor and Aldermen.”[126] Much of this mumming was not only pagan in its origin but still in its essence definitely anti-ecclesiastical. When, as was constantly the case, the clergy joined in the revels, this was a more or less conscious protest against the Puritan and ascetic ideal of their profession. The rule of life for Benedictine nuns, to which even the Poor Clares were subjected after a very brief career of more apostolic liberty, cannot be read in modern times without a shudder of pity. Not only did the authorities attempt to suppress all natural enjoyment of life—even Madame Eglantyne’s lapdogs were definitely contraband—but the girls were trammelled at every turn with the minutely ingenious and degrading precautions of an oriental harem. That was the theory, the ideal; yet in fact these convent churches provided a common theatre, if not the commonest, for the riotous and often obscene licence of the Feast of Fools. To understand the wilder side of medieval life, it is absolutely necessary to bear in mind the pitiless and unreal “other-worldliness” of the ascetic ideal; just as we can best explain certain of Chaucer’s least edifying tales by referring, on the other hand, to the almost idolatrous exaggerations of his “A. B. C.”
But, however he may have revelled with the rest in his wilder youth, the elvish and retiring poet of the “Canterbury Tales” mentions the sports of the townsfolk only with gentle irony. “Merry Absolon,” the parish clerk, who played so prominent a part in street plays, who could dance so well “after the school of Oxenford ... and with his leggës casten to and fro,” and who was at all points such a perfect beau of the ’prentice class to which he essentially belonged—all these small perfections are enumerated only that we may plumb more accurately the depths to which he is brought by woman’s guile. The May-dance was probably as external to Chaucer as the Florentine carnival to Browning. While a thousand Absolons were casting to and fro with their legs, in company with a thousand like-minded giggëlots, around the Great Shaft of Cornhill, Chaucer had slipped out into the country. Many other townsfolk came out into the fields—young men and maidens, old men and children—but Chaucer tells us how he knelt by himself, worshipping the daisy as it opened to the sun—
| Upon the smallë softë sweetë grass, That was with flowrës sweet embroidered all. |
At another time we listen with him to the leaves rustling in undertone with the birds—
| A wind, so small it scarcely might be less, Made in the leavës green a noisë soft, Accordant to the fowlës’ song aloft. |
Or watch the queen of flowers blushing in the sun—
| Right as the freshë, reddë rosë new Against the Summer sunnë coloured is! |
But for the daisy he has a love so tender, so intimate, that it is difficult not to suspect under the flower some unknown Marguerite of flesh and blood—