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 his 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 elapsed 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. 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 probably 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 chamber 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,’ affords 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, 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 he 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.” 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,” “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 the 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 immoderate 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 by “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!” |