CHAPTER II.
Amusements of the Fairs in the Middle Ages—Shows and Showmen of the Sixteenth Century—Banks and his Learned Horse—Bartholomew Fair in the time of Charles I.—Punch and Judy—Office of the Revels—Origin of Hocus Pocus—Suppression of Bartholomew Fair—London Shows during the Protectorate—A Turkish Rope-Dancer—Barbara Vanbeck, the Bearded Woman.
Numerous illuminations of manuscripts in the Harleian collection, many of which were reproduced in Strutt’s work on the sports and pastimes of the English people, having established the fact that itinerant professors of the art of amusing were in the habit of tramping from town to town, and village to village, for at least two centuries before the Norman Conquest of this country, there can be no doubt that the fairs were so many foci of attraction for them at the times when they were respectively held. As we are told that the minstrels and glee-men flocked to the towns and villages which grew up under the protection of the baronial castles when the marriage of the lord, or the coming of age of the heir, furnished an occasion of popular revelry, and also when the many red-letter days of the mediæval calendar came round, we may be sure that they were not absent from Bartlemy fair even in its earliest years.
Glee-men was a term which included dancers, posturers, jugglers, tumblers, and exhibitors of trained performing monkeys and quadrupeds; and, the masculine including the feminine in this case, many of these performers were women and girls. The illuminations which have been referred to, and which constitute our chief authority as to the amusements of the fairs during the middle ages, introduce us to female posturers and tumblers, in the act of performing the various feats which have been the stock in trade of the acrobatic profession down to the present day. The jugglers exhibited the same feats with balls and knives as their representatives of the nineteenth century; what is professionally designated “the shower,” in which the balls succeed each other rapidly, while describing a semi-circle from right to left, is shown in one of the Harleian illuminations.
Balancing feats were also exhibited, and in one of these curious illustrations of the sights which delighted our fair-going ancestors, the balancing of a cart-wheel is represented—a trick which might have been witnessed not many years ago in the streets of London, the performer being an elderly negro, said to have been the father of the well-known rope-dancer, George Christoff, who represented the Pompeian performer on the corde elastique, when Mr. Oxenford’s version of The Last Days of Pompeii was produced at the Queen’s Theatre.
Performing monkeys, bears, and horses appear in many of the mediæval illuminations, and were probably as popular agents of public amusement in the earliest years of Bartlemy fair as they can be shown, from other authorities, to have been in the sixteenth century. That monkeys were imported rather numerously for the amusement of the public, may be inferred from the fact of some Chancellor of the Exchequer of the middle ages having subjected them to an import duty. Their agility was displayed chiefly in vaulting over a chain or cord. Bears were taught to feign death, and to walk erect after their leader, who played some musical instrument. Horses were also taught to walk on their hind legs, and one drawing in the Harleian collection shows a horse in this attitude, engaged in a mimic fight with a man armed with sword and buckler.
All these performances seem to have been continued, by successive generations of performers, down to the time of Elizabeth. Reginald Scot, writing in 1584, gives a lengthy enumeration of the tricks of the jugglers who frequented the fairs of the latter part of the sixteenth century. Among them are most of the common tricks of the present day, and not the least remarkable is the decapitation feat, which many of my readers have probably seen performed by the famous wizards of modern times at the Egyptian Hall. Three hundred years ago, it was called the decollation of St. John the Baptist, and was performed upon a table, upon which stood a dish to receive the head. The table, the dish, and the knife used in the apparent decapitation were all contrived for the purpose, the table having two holes in it, one to enable the assistant who submitted to the operation to conceal his head, the other, corresponding to a hole in the dish, to receive the head of another confederate, who was concealed beneath the table, in a sitting position; while the knife had a semi-circular opening in the blade to fit the neck. Another knife, of the ordinary kind, was shown to the spectators, who were prevented by a sleight of hand trick from observing the substitution for it of the knife used in the trick. The engraving in Malcolm’s work shows the man to be operated upon lying upon the table, apparently headless, while the head of the other assistant appears in the dish.
That lusus naturæ, and other natural curiosities, had begun to be exhibited by showmen in the reign of Elizabeth, may be inferred from the allusions to such exhibitions in The Tempest, when Caliban is discovered, and the mariners speculate upon his place in the scale of animal being. It seems also that the practice of displaying in front of the shows large pictures of the wonderful feats, or curious natural objects, to be seen within, prevailed in the sixteenth century, and probably long before; for it is distinctly alluded to in a passage in Jonson’s play of The Alchymist, in which the master of the servant who has filled the house with searchers for the philosopher’s stone, says,
“What should my knave advance
To draw this company? He hung out no banners
Of a strange calf with five legs to be seen,
Or a huge lobster with six claws.”