All writers who have taken the ancient English minstrels for a subject, agree in stating that the old Saxon invaders of our land brought with them bards, and a profound reverence for the bards themselves and the art they professed. These highly-esteemed personages were rhyming historians, chroniclers, theologians, and philosophers. They held the key, or, what was the same thing to them, men believed that they held the key, of many secrets appertaining, not only to earth, but heaven. They were mighty personages in their day; but they could not withstand a ray from the Star of Bethlehem. When the Saxons became Christians, or at least professed Christianity, the vocation of the old, mysterious, rapt, inspired bard, with his eternal memory of the past, and his prophetic view into a long future, was entirely gone. He had been a sort of god, and he became a mortal who sang for hire. The Jupiter of yesterday was now, in most cases, and in most men’s eyes, only a Jupiter Scapin. In most cases, but not in all; for, such as were scholars among the bards devoted themselves to the cultivation of poetry. There were others, like the early German jester who remarked that he did not know the Lord’s Prayer, but only the tune of it. They had more music in their souls,—such as the music was, and such as their souls were,—than religion. These turned minstrels, and sang and played for a reward.
With the superior class above noticed, I have nothing further to do; but have to keep companionship with the hired minstrel,—or the itinerating minstrel, who exercised his85 vocation for bread. The latter was not altogether wanting to the Anglo-Saxon, previous to the period of their conversion. The native gleeman who then exercised his welcome office, is described by Dr. Lingard, in his ‘History and Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church,’ as being a minstrel who was “either attached to the service of a particular chieftain, or wandering from place to place, and subsisting on the bounty of his hearers.” Mr. Eccleston, in his ‘Introduction to English Antiquities,’ describes the gleeman as all-important to the in-door life of the Anglo-Saxons, before whom he “sang, played, danced, and performed sleight-of-hand tricks for the pleasure of the company.” This would hardly seem to show that the gleeman was, as some have asserted, of a higher grade than the common minstrel of later years. It is certain that he was the popular minstrel of his day; his songs were sung in castle and farmyard; and when the great St. Adhelm was sensible of a call to preaching, and was desirous of getting together a congregation, he knew no better method than to assume the character of the gleeman. Thus accoutred, harp in hand, he would station himself at some cross-road, or at the corner of a bridge, and rattle forth a series of popular songs on passing and popular subjects. He soon drew an audience around him; and when he had fairly got them into a train of attention, he would gradually slip away from his comic songs and lively airs on the harp, and fulfil his office of Christian missionary, with as much success as he had played that of the vivacious gleeman.
There is another legend, showing how the guise of the minstrel was assumed for a different purpose. The legend to which I allude is that of Alfred entering the Danish camp in this false character, and spying out the weakness of his enemies, while he amused them with his songs to the harp. The story is altogether apocryphal, and was never heard of in Alfred’s time, nor till two centuries had elapsed86 since his death. It is certain that Alfred could not have safely entered the camp as a Saxon; and if he found admission as a Dane, his accent would have betrayed him as a spy. It has been suggested, that if he ever went at all, he went as a mimus, or buffoon (a word which had already been applied to minstrels), and that he amused his fierce enemies by the ordinary tricks, tumblings, and other performances of the jester.
For, in course of time, minstrel and buffoon came to be terms of much the same signification. This we find by another popular legend, which is supposed to have very little truth for a basis;—namely, the legend which tells of the faithful Blondel de Nesle, minstrel to King Richard I., seeking for his captured master, and discovering him by means of a song, sung outside the prison, to which the royal captive answered from within. Whether this story be true or not, it was accepted as truth at an early period, and in ‘Les Soirées de Guillaume Bouchet,’ we find, as a comment upon it, the following query:—“I just beg to ask you, if the wisest man in the world could have done more for his master; and if this buffoon of a minstrel (ce boufon de ménestrier) was not of more profit to King Richard, his lord, than the wisest scholars at court.”
For a long period, the minstrel seems to have been very well paid for the exercise of his art, at least in presence of royalty. At the marriage of the Countess of Holland, daughter of Edward I., every king-minstrel present received forty shillings! This guerdon, represented in modern money, would be not much under as many pounds sterling in value. The above was, perhaps, an exceptional occasion; but even the ordinary guerdon, of twenty and thirty shillings for a single night’s attendance, shows at what an early period the musical profession was exorbitantly remunerated;—for the individuals here alluded to were actual cantatores, and not mere joculatores.
87 The Court always thought better of them than the Church. “Actors and jesters,” says John of Salisbury (1160 circ.), “may not be admitted to the Sacrament.—Histriones et mimi non possunt recipere sacram Communionem.” And forty years later, there were some people who as much objected to marry their daughters to the King’s jesters, as the coachman of George II. did to his son marrying a maid-of-honour. One of the Pipe Rolls, supposed to be of the date of 1200, informs us that “Nicola, wife of Girard of Canville, accounts to the King for one hundred marks, for the privilege of marrying her daughter Maud to whatever person she pleases,—the King’s jester excepted—exceptis mimicis Regis. The mimici, whatever their exact office was, had as part of their duty, evidently, to amuse the King (John), and they would appear, from the reference made to them, to have been but a disreputable set of fellows. They were probably a sort of actors,—pantomimic, if not altogether dramatic;—for the descent of the ancient minstrel through poet and player to mere jester, is easy to be traced in the history of the profession in nearly every nation.
As I have but recently remarked, however, the minstrel proper, as well as he who joined gestas and joculatoria to his minstrelsy, was very much better paid than the clergy. Just so in the present day: we pay a tenore robusto a higher salary than the State awards to a general-in-chief or an admiral of the fleet, while a curate is more shabbily rewarded than the handicraftsman who makes his garments. To be sure, the “tenore robusto” can sing, while not one in ten of our curates knows how to read with effect. Perhaps, for some such reason, the minstrels of old had the advantage of the priest. Warton, in his second volume, notices the presence, in 1430, of a dozen priests and a dozen minstrels, at the festival of the Holy Cross at Abingdon. Both parties sang their best; but the clerics only received fourpence apiece for their pains, while the more lucky minstrels, who probably88 had some good jests for the Prior’s table, afterwards, received two shillings and fourpence each, and food for man and horse. Eleven years later, we are told of a feast held at the Priory of Maxtoke, near Coventry. Eight priests from Coventry were present, and half-a-dozen Mimi. The latter were players and jesters belonging to Lord Clinton, of Maxtoke. Well, priests and mimes sang, harped, and played, or sported,—the latter doubtless being the additional work of the “Mimi,” while the monks enjoyed themselves in the refectory. The Mimes received four shillings each, but the priests were supposed to be sufficiently well paid with just half the sum. Some such difference will be found by future examiners of court account-rolls regarding the payment of foreign and English singers of a very much later period. But, to return to the festival at Maxtoke, it is further to be observed, that the poor priests had no further compliment paid them, whereas the Sub-Prior invited Lord Clinton’s Mimi to sup with him “in the painted chamber,” and the chamberlain did honour to the occasion by putting eight massy wax tapers on the board. The incidents of this convent supper have not been recorded, but we may, without being uncharitable, judge them to have been of the jolliest aspect, with the Sub-Prior in the chair! At what time Lord Clinton saw his Mimi return to his castle, is not stated. The only further incident we hear of the conventual body at Maxtoke is, that for a sermon preached before its members by a travelling “Doctor Pr?dicans,” the Prior paid the preacher with sixpence! But, on consideration, that may have been as much as the sermon was worth.
If any doubt could exist of the identity of the minstrel and the jester, it might be removed by remembering that the jester alone had free access to the King, at any hour of the day or night, without let or hindrance, and without his being required to make previous application for permission. I believe no other official could enter the King’s chamber89 uninvited, unlicensed, or unannounced. Now I find the Serjeant Minstrel of King Edward IV. doing this, and on a very critical occasion. The King was in the North. The year was 1470; Edward had just quelled, or checked, the Lincolnshire insurrection, and he was passing his time in York, in gallantries and amusements, while Warwick was proclaiming Henry VI. One night his Serjeant Minstrel, Alexander Carlisle, rushed into the room where the monarch lay in bed, and bade him instantly arise, for enemies were abroad, and it would be well for him to be on the alert. We shall find a similar bold service enacted by the jester of William of Normandy, when we come to make record of the individual jesters, rather than of their profession generally. The above incident will help to show the identity of minstrel and jester; and the fact that Richard II., when he went to Ireland, had not only minstrels, but harpers, in his train, will serve to prove that the former was not identical with the latter. The minstrel, indeed, sang or acted, or did both, some Gest or story, from Scripture or romance. Hence probably the English term Jester,—originally the reciter and actor of some made-up poetical legend, with incidents added according to the taste of the hearers. The harper probably only accompanied the reciter of the Gest on his instrument.
It is not my province to narrate the history of the professional minstrel. It must suffice here to say, that they who commenced like gods, sank in course of time to a very degraded condition. The minstrels certainly belonged to the class of poor jokers about the time the law began to treat them as vagabonds. I can adduce an instance in the case of Richard Sheale, the author of one of the versions of the ballad of ‘Chevy Chace.’ Sheale was a minstrel by profession, and his home was at Tamworth, on the borders of Staffordshire and Warwickshire. Mr. R. White, in his Appendix to his ‘History of the Battle of Otterburn,’ affords90 us the following glimpse into the private and public life of this minstrel. “His wife was a ‘sylke woman,’ who sold shirts, head-clothes, laces, etc., at the fairs of Lichfield and other neighbouring towns. Being once in possession of above threescore pounds,—a large amount in those days,—and intending probably to settle various accounts contracted by his wife in her business, he left Tamworth on horseback, having his harp with him, and had the misfortune to be robbed by four villains who had lain in wait for him near Dunsmore Heath. The grief of his wife and himself at his loss—the coldness of worldly friends—the kindness of his patrons—the exertions of his loving neighbours at Tamworth, who induced him to brew a bushel of malt, and sell the ale for his benefit—and his appeal to the public for assistance, that he might clear off encumbrances, are all related in his ‘Chaunt,’ and show him to have been a simple, harmless man. But both this poem and the ‘Farewell’ afford humiliating evidence of the sorry life to which the poor minstrels were subjected in the early part of Queen Elizabeth’s reign.”
But leaving the descent of the English jester from the minstrel, or the question of their identity, to be decided upon by my readers, let us turn to the English poets for such information as they can afford us. The incidents there to be found in connection with this question, have doubtless reference to the English “fool” alone, in whatever country the poet may have located him. We meet with him however in England, in the tragedy of King Lear. The relation of fool and master, not a relation of the period of the play, but of a much later age, is very distinctly marked. Lear strikes a gentleman, only for chiding Lear’s fool; but the King keeps a whip for the latter, to be used when the jester’s truths smacked rudely, or were thrust forward unnecessarily. And these truths are occasionally of the very roughest quality, as, for instance, when the fool tells Lear,91 that he had given away all his titles save “fool,”—the one he was born with.
It is perhaps more by the comment of the jester than by the conduct of the King’s daughters, that Lear has fully revealed to him his state of terrible destitution; and if it be not an old traditionary saying of some jester, the advice is admirably in the jester’s way, which shows that if a man would rise in the world, it were better for him to let go a descending wheel, and to hang to one going up-hill.
The Yorick of Hamlet is probably a reminiscence of an English jester. He had carried the young prince on his back a thousand times, and the childish cavalier had kissed the merriest of fellows often. These were common incidents in a family where there was a household fool. Yorick however poured a flagon of Rhenish on the head of the gravedigger; but an English joculator would have drunk off the wine, and broken the gravedigger’s head with the flagon.
The whip was certainly ever present in the house that held an official Motley, in spite of the boasted license of speech supposed to be enjoyed by the latter. Touchstone is told that he shall be whipped for taxation. His qualities are, being able to string rhymes together in a butter-woman’s jog-trot pace to market; he has a memory for old verses; is full of smart sayings against the corrupt in fine linen, and has the faculty of making an honest calling seem uncleanly. He is a droll sort of philosopher, with a taste of the knave in him; and so far imitates the vices of his patrons, by being marvellously ready to seduce and betray. Rosalind tells him that he speaks wiser than he is aware, which a fool only seemed to do: it was part of his office. One of his happiest expressions has often been uttered by travellers who have gone abroad only to be disappointed: “Here am I in Arden. The more fool I! When I was at home, I was in a better place!”
The Duke admirably describes a first-rate jester when he92 notices Touchstone as “swift and sententious,” and that he “wore his folly as a stalking-horse, and, under presentation of that, shoots his wit.” Touchstone too is a gentleman in his way, seeing that he has “undone three tailors!”
The cynicism of the English fool is no doubt alluded to in Timon of Athens, where he is looked upon as a form of the old cynic philosopher, as indeed he was everywhere. To a sharp sentence of the fool, the churlish sage remarks, “That answer might have become Apemantas.”
Perhaps the truest likeness of Shakespeare’s fools to the actual Motleys, is the Clown in Twelfth Night. He preaches and quotes Latin with the facility of Chicot, and as if he had been much with the parson. The threat to hang him or turn him away, may show that loss of service was held to be a disaster; while the way in which (upon permission) he shows his mistress to be a fool, is an excellent illustration of the liberty arrogated by the professor of wit. Malvolio saw him put down in contention with an ordinary fool. These trials of wit were not uncommon when the household buffoon was common also; but it was all in jest. Nothing the jester uttered, however he meant it, was ever taken for serious. “There is no slander,” says Olivia, “in an allowed fool.” This shows the worth attached to Motley’s sayings; the clown, too, very accurately defines his own standing, when he says, “I am not her fool, but her corruptor of words;” and Viola exquisitely and perfectly portrays all that the fool should be, in the words:—
“This fellow’s wise enough to play the fool;
And to do that well craves a kind of wit:
He must observe their mood on whom he jests,
The quality of persons and the time;
And, like the haggard, check at ev’ry feather
That comes before his eye. This is a practice,
As full of labour as a wise man’s art:
For folly, that he wisely shows, is fit;
But wise men, folly fallen, taint their wit.”
93 It is impossible that any pen could better describe the requirements of the jester, his qualifications, the duty to be performed, and the way to perform it. No court fool of Shakespeare’s time or memory could have sat for the portrait. Neither Patch, nor Pace, nor Chester, nor Clod could have done so; perhaps Heywood comes nearest to it, but he was probably not in Shakespeare’s mind, when he imagined a more brilliant fool than ever sat at the hearth of a prince and railed at his patron.
Beaumont and Fletcher, in the Mad Lover, cannot be said to be nearly so successful in their description of the fool and his quality, though there is allusion in it to the would-be professors, worth noticing.
“Every idle knave that shows his teeth,
Wants and would live, can juggle, tumble, fiddle,
Make a dog-face, or can abuse his fellow,
Is not a fool at first dash. You shall find, Sir,
Strange turnings in this trade.”
In the Wit Without Money of these authors, we have a glimpse of a sort of household joker of those times, in the person of Shorthose, the widow’s fool, who grows dull in the country, brightens up by town associations, loves good living, dislikes morning prayers, and has a turn for clever similes and smart sayings, in the style of stage valets. He is superior, after all, to Tony, in A Wife for a Month, who is a mere low-comedy fool, with a wit to which Shakespeare’s jesters would scorn to condescend. In this piece, however, we again trace the presence of the whip, as a permanent menace against offending Motley, in English houses. The usurping Frederick, indeed, says to him, “Thou art a fool, and may’st do mischief lawfully;”—nevertheless, not only the fool’s master, but others of less authority, frequently threaten to chastise this official with an undefined position.
Geta, in the Prophetess, is described as a “jester,” but he is little more than a stage servant, who alludes to “turn-spits,”94 and who becomes duller the higher he rises in station. Villio, in the Double Marriage, is a type of the philosophical fool, of whom there were many; and who, with the wit of common sense, judges content in a cottage to be better than a throne with a thorn in the side of the king who sits on it. We have still fewer reflections of the jester in Penurio and Soto, of Woman Pleased, and in Jaques and Pedro of Women’s Prize. Beaumont and Fletcher have more success in painting the household dwarf than the household fool. The fidelity of Zoilus, dwarf to a duke’s son, in Cupid’s Revenge, is a compliment to his class. He is as ugly as most of these creatures were, who moreover lived in constant feud with the more gigantic jester, if there was one in the house. Zoilus is described as being “an ape’s skin stuffed; with a pudding in ’s belly;” and yet his lady loves him, for which, however, he is sent to death. Even Base, the jester to the passionate lord, in Nice Valour, is but a weak representative of our official friend. He has but one jest, and that is but a poor one. A servant says, “There comes a Cupid drawn by six fools.” To which Base replies, “That’s nothing, I ha’ known six hundred fools drawn by one Cupid.” There is a finer touch of the real Motley in Massinger’s Calandrino (Great Duke of Florence), when he remarks:—
“I confess,
I am not very wise, and yet I find
A fool, so he be parcel knave, in court
May flourish and grow rich.”
And his distinction between country and court air is quite in the fool’s vein:—
“As this court air taught me knavish wit,
By which I am grown rich, if that again
Should turn me fool and honest, vain hopes, farewell!
For I must die a beggar.”
Calandrino, however, is but the “merry servant” to the95 nephew of the Great Duke, and has only the attributes of the official jester, without actually exercising the office.
It will be remembered that against all fools, and especially against those introduced on the stage, Sir Philip Sidney made eloquent protest; and all that Puttenham could advance in support of the professional household jester, was that something amusing was to be found in listening to the pretended foolishness of a jester, who had the wit to be wise when he chose so to direct it.
The stage fool expired in 1662, in a prologue spoken by a “fool.” The play is a long-since forgotten piece called ‘Thorney Abbey,’ and the motley speaker of the prologue affects to reproach the author for writing a drama with a king and court in it, and omitting the time-honoured character of the jester.
Meanwhile, the buffoon was a prominent character, not only at court, but in corporations, where he measured out gaiety for the mayor and his guests; and in great households, when, for all his license, he sometimes got whipped for telling stories rather too coarse, in presence of ladies who could listen to a great amount of that sort of thing without blushing. We find him also in taverns, where he amused the topers by his rude jests and ruder minstrelsy, just as Dionysius, in his exile, is said to have done, when he enacted buffoon in a barber’s shop, for his daily bread; and finally, the buffoon was that, and bully too, in other establishments open to the public, but less favourably considered by the law.
We leave these, to follow more exclusively the court and household fool. The office of the jester was one which, says Fuller, in his ‘Holy State,’ “none but he that hath wit can perform; and none but he that wants it, will perform.” There is little doubt of this, for wit had its miseries, as Lodge graphically pointed out, in 1599, in a book which, under the title of ‘Wit’s Misery,’ has especial reference to this subject. The author, after pointing out the immoderate96 and inordinate jollity which was the stock-in-trade of the fool,—his comeliness of person, and his courtliness of dress,—adds that, after all, he was more of an ape than a man, and that his chief duties were to study the coining of bitter jests, to practise quaint and antique motions, to sing immodest songs, to laugh intemperately on very small occasion for it, and, when the wine was in his head, to mouth and gibe at all around him. The fool, says Lodge, “dances about the house, leaps over tables, outskips men’s heads, trips up his companions’ heels, burns sack with a candle, and hath all the feats of a lord of misrule in the country; feed him in his humour, you shall have his heart; in mere kindness, he will hug you in his arms, kiss you on the cheek, and, rapping out a horrible oath, cry, ‘God’s soul, Tom, I love you; you know my poor heart; come to my chamber for a pipe of tobacco; there lives not a man in this world that I more honour.’ In the ceremonies, you shall know his courting; and it is a special mark of him at the table, he sits and makes faces. Keep not this fellow company; for in juggling with him, your wardrobe shall be wasted, your credit cracked, your crowns consumed, and your time (the most precious riches in the world) utterly lost.” This was written in 1599; but only thirty-five years later, 1634, we find that some jesters at least had not a very miserable time of it; for Stafford tells us, in his Code of Honour, that “he had known a great and competently wise man, who would much respect any man that was good to his fool.”
In many cases, the latter was as much a household servant as mere jester, and was equally at home at the master’s board, or in the kitchen, where he received such whippings as he chanced to earn. That he was occasionally as much relished by the retainers as by his patron, there can be no doubt, and his position among these is so well described by Thornbury, in his rattling ‘Songs of the Cavaliers and Roundheads,’ that, in place of illustrating that position by97 citing old ballads and ballad-makers, I will place before my readers the lively picture portrayed by a skilful and living artist,—in ‘The Jester’s Sermon.’—
“The jester shook his hood and bells and leaped upon a chair;
The pages laughed, the women screamed, and tossed their scented hair;
The falcon whistled, stag-hounds bayed, the lap-dog barked without;
The scullion dropped the pitcher brown,—the cook railed at the lout;
The steward, counting out his gold, let pouch and money fall:
And why? Because the jester rose to say grace in the hall!
“The page played with the heron’s plume, the steward with his chain;
The butler drummed upon the board, and laughed with might and main;
The grooms beat on their metal cans, and roared till they turned red;
But still the jester shut his eyes and rolled his witty head;
And when they grew a little still, read half a yard of text;
And waving hand struck on the desk, then frowned, like one perplexed.
“‘Dear sinners all!’ the fool began, ‘man’s life is but a jest,
A dream, a shadow, bubbles, air, a vapour, at the best.
In a thousand pounds of law I find not a single ounce of love.
A blind man killed the parson’s cow, in shooting at the dove.
The fool that eats till he is sick must fast till he is well.
The wooer who can flatter most will bear away the bell.
“‘Let no man halloo he is safe till he is through the wood.
He who will not when he may, must tarry when he should.
He who laughs at crooked men should need walk very straight.
Oh, he who once has won a name may lie abed till eight.
Make haste to purchase house and land, be very slow to wed.
True coral needs no painter’s brush, nor need be daubed with red.
“‘The friar, preaching, cursed the thief (the pudding in his sleeve).
To fish for sprats with golden hooks is foolish, by your leave.
To travel well, an ass’s ears, ape’s face, hog’s mouth, and ostrich legs.
He does not care a pin for thieves, who limps about and begs.
Be always first man at a feast, and last man at a fray.
The short way round, in spite of all, is still the longest way.
“‘When the hungry curate licks the knife, there’s not much for the clerk.
When the pilot, turning pale and sick, looks up, the storm grows dark.’
Then loud they laughed; the fat cook’s tears ran down into the pan;
The steward shook, that he was forced to drop the brimming can;
And then again the women screamed and every stag-hound bayed:
And why? Because the motley fool so wise a sermon made!”
98 The preacher, in conclusion, probably took the pearl spoon he wore in his cap, and ate his porridge with it; and, his day’s duties terminated, turned to the kennel, and slept the night out with the hounds. He might have been worse lodged. There however we will leave him, to treat, henceforward, more with the especial individual than with the order generally.