The literature of the period immediately succeeding his death is full of allusions to Will Sommers.
Richard Tarleton, famous as a comic actor, cannot be omitted from any list of jesters. A book of Tarleton’s Jests was published in 1611, and, together with his News out of Purgatory, was reprinted by Halliwell Phillips for the Shakespeare Society in 1844. Archie Armstrong, for a too free use of wit and tongue against Laud, lost his office and was banished the court. The conduct of the archbishop against the poor fool is not the least item of the evidence which convicts him of a certain narrow-mindedness and pettiness. In French history, too, the figure of the court-jester flits across the gay or sombre scene at times with fantastic effect. Caillette and Triboulet are well-known characters of the times of Francis I. Triboulet appears in Rabelais’s romance, and is the hero of Victor Hugo’s Le Roi s’amuse, and, with some changes, of Verdi’s opera Rigoletto; while Chicot, the lithe and acute Gascon, who was so close a friend of Henry III., is portrayed with considerable justness by Dumas in his Dame de Monsoreau. In Germany Rudolph of Habsburg had his Pfaff Cappadox, Maximilian I. his Kunz von der Rosen (whose features, as well as those of Will Sommers, have been preserved by the pencil of Holbein), and many a petty court its jester after jester.
Late in the 16th century appeared Le Sottilissime Astuzie di Bertoldo, which is one of the most remarkable books ever written about a jester. It is by Giulio Cesare Croce, a street musician of Bologna, and is a comic romance giving an account of the appearance at the court of Alboin king of the Lombards of a peasant wonderful in ugliness, good sense and wit. The book was for a time the most popular in Italy. A great number of editions and translations appeared, and it was even versified. Though fiction, both the character and the career of Bertoldo are typical of the jester. That the private fool existed as late as the 18th century is proved by Swift’s epitaph on Dicky Pearce, the earl of Suffolk’s jester.
See Flögel, Geschichte der Hofnarren (Leipzig, 1789); Doran, The History of Court Fools (1858).
(W. He.)
FOOLS, FEAST OF (Lat. festum stultorum, fatuorum, follorum, Fr. fête des fous), the name for certain burlesque quasi-religious festivals which, during the middle ages, were the ecclesiastical counterpart of the secular revelries of the Lord of Misrule. The celebrations are directly traceable to the pagan Saturnalia of ancient Rome, which in spite of the conversion of the Empire to Christianity, and of the denunciation of bishops and ecclesiastical councils, continued to be celebrated by the people on the Kalends of January with all their old licence. The custom, indeed, so far from dying out, was adopted by the barbarian conquerors and spread among the Christian Goths in Spain, Franks in Gaul, Alemanni in Germany, and Anglo-Saxons in Britain. So late as the 11th century Bishop Burchard of Worms thought it necessary to fulminate against the excesses connected with it (Decretum, xix. c. 5, Migne, Patrologia lat. 140, p. 965). Then, just as it appears to have been sinking into oblivion among the people, the clergy themselves gave it the character of a specific religious festival. Certain days seem early to have been set apart as special festivals for different orders of the clergy: the feast of St Stephen (December 26) for the deacons, St John’s day (December 27) for the priests, Holy Innocents’ Day for the boys, and for the sub-deacons Circumcision, the Epiphany, or the 11th of January. The Feast of Holy Innocents became a regular festival of children, in which a boy, elected by his fellows of the choir school, functioned solemnly as bishop or archbishop, surrounded by the elder choir-boys as his clergy, while the canons and other clergy took the humbler seats. At first there is no evidence to prove that these celebrations were characterized by any specially indecorous behaviour; but in the 12th century such behaviour had become the rule. In 1180 Jean Beleth, of the diocese of Amiens, calls the festival of the sub-deacons festum stultorum (Migne, Patrol. lat. 202, p. 79). The burlesque ritual which characterized the Feast of Fools throughout the middle ages was now at its height. A young sub-deacon was elected bishop, vested in the episcopal insignia (except the mitre) and conducted by his fellows to the sanctuary. A mock mass was begun, during which the lections were read cum farsia, obscene songs were sung and dances performed, cakes and sausages eaten at the altar, and cards and dice played upon it.
This burlesquing of things universally held sacred, though condemned by serious-minded theologians, conveyed to the child-like popular mind of the middle ages no suggestion of contempt, though when belief in the doctrines and rites of the medieval Church was shaken it became a ready instrument in the hands of those who sought to destroy them. Of this kind of retribution Scott in The Abbot gives a vivid picture, the Protestants interrupting the mass celebrated by the trembling remnant of the monks in the ruined abbey church, and insisting on substituting the traditional Feast of Fools.
This naive temper of the middle ages is nowhere more conspicuously displayed than in the Feast of the Ass, which under various forms was celebrated in a large number of churches throughout the West. The ass had been introduced into the ritual of the church in the 9th century, representing either Balaam’s ass, that which stood with the ox beside the manger at Bethlehem, that which carried the Holy Family into Egypt, or that on which Christ rode in triumph into Jerusalem. Often the ass was a mere incident in the Feast of Fools; but sometimes he was the occasion of a special festival, ridiculous enough to modern notions, but by no means intended in an irreverent spirit. The three most notable celebrations of the Feast of the Ass were at Rouen, Beauvais and Sens. At Rouen the feast was celebrated on Christmas Day, and was intended to represent the times before the coming of Christ. The service opened with a procession of Old Testament characters, prophets, patriarchs and kings, together with heathen prophets, including Virgil, the chief figure being Balaam on his ass. The ass was a hollow wooden effigy, within which a priest capered and uttered prophecies. The procession was followed, inside the church, by a curious combination of ritual office and mystery play, the text of which, according to the Ordo processionis asinorum secundum Rothomagensem usum, is given in Du Cange.
Far more singular was the celebration at Beauvais, which was held on the 14th of January, and represented the flight into Egypt. A richly caparisoned ass, on which was seated the prettiest girl in the town holding in her arms a baby or a large doll, was escorted with much pomp from the cathedral to the church of St Étienne. There the procession was received by the priests, who led the ass and its burden to the sanctuary. Mass was then sung; but instead of the ordinary responses to the Introit, Kyrie, Gloria, &c., the congregation chanted “Hinham” (Hee-haw) three times. The rubric of the mass for this feast actually runs: In fine Missae Sacerdos versus ad populum vice, Ite missa est, Hinhannabit: populus vero vice, Deo Gratias, ter respondebit Hinham, Hinham, Hinham (At the close of the mass the priest turning to the people instead of saying, Ite missa est, shall bray thrice: the people, instead of Deo gratias, shall thrice respond Hee-haw, Hee-haw, Hee-haw).