Both of wepying and of game.
The tales of game, as the poet expresses himself, were short jocular stories calculated to promote merriment, in which the reciters paid little respect to the claims of propriety, or even of common decency. The tales of game, however, were much more popular than those of weeping, and probably for the very reason that ought to have operated the most powerfully for their suppression. The gestours, whose powers were chiefly employed in the hours of conviviality, finding by experience that lessons of instruction were much less seasonable at such times, than idle tales productive of mirth and laughter, accommodated their narrations to the general taste of the times, regardless of the mischiefs they occasioned by vitiating the morals of their hearers; hence it is, that the author of the Vision of Pierce the Ploughman calls them contemptibly "japers, and juglers, and janglers of gests." [590] He describes them also as haunters of taverns and common alehouses, amusing the lower classes of the people with "myrth of minstrelsy and losels tales," loose vulgar tales, and calls them tale-tellers and "tutelers in ydell," tutors of idleness, occasioning their auditory, "for love of tales, in tavernes to drink," where they learned from them to jangle and to jape, instead of attending to their more serious duties, he therefore makes one to say,
I can not parfitly my pater noster as the priest it singeth,
But I can ryms of Roben Hode, and Randol erl of Chester
But of our Lord or our Lady I lerne nothing at all:
I am occupied every daye, holy daye, and other,
With idle tales at the ale. [591]—
He then blames the opulent for rewarding these "devils dissours," as he calls them, and adds,
He is worse than Judas that giveth a japer silver. [592]
The japers, I apprehend, were the same as the bourdours, or rybauders, an inferior class of minstrels, and properly called jesters in the modern acceptation of the word; whose wit, like that of the merry-andrews of the present day, consisted in low obscenity, accompanied with ludicrous gesticulation. They sometimes, however, found admission into the houses of the opulent. Knighton indeed mentions one of these japers who was a favourite in the English court, and could obtain any grant from the king "a burdando," that is, by jesting. They are well described by the poet: