A Medieval Comedy Routine Was Found Tucked Into The Pages Of A Manuscript In Scotland
In 2023, a medieval comedy routine was found within the pages of a 15th-century text called the Heege manuscript in the National Library of Scotland.
Medieval minstrels, performers who entertained audiences with songs, stories, and stunts, are often depicted in fiction, but experts don’t actually know very much about the content of their jokes. Fortunately, the text can help with that.
“It gives us a glimpse into live comedy and entertainment in the Middle Ages that would otherwise be lost,” said James Wade, a literary scholar at the University of Cambridge.
The manuscript has been studied before, but previous research mostly focused on its physical traits and its importance as an artifact. It contains several different kinds of comedic acts. One of them is a satirical sermon from a preacher praising the practice of heavy drinking:
“If thou have a great black bowl in thy hand and it be full of good ale and thou leave anything therein, thou puttest thy soul into greater pain.”
Another is titled “The Battle of Brackonwet,” a nonsensical poem made up of alliterations and features the first known use of the phrase “red herring” in English.
There were also poems about killer rabbits and jousting bears. They were used not only as crowd-pleasing material but to challenge power dynamics and get the audience to think more deeply.
After examining the manuscript, it appeared that medieval minstrels offered more comical performances rather than the tales of honor and bravery, adventure ballads, and accounts of great battles we tend to think of.
It made humorous observations and roasted notable public figures. In addition, the quality of the writing was impressive. The minstrel was funny, wrote good poetry, and crafted clever, complex stories. This discovery was extremely rare because comedic acts were usually passed down orally.
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According to Wade, minstrels were often illiterate, so they would not have written records of their acts. He believes that this particular minstrel wrote down the act because it would’ve been difficult to perform from memory.
“He didn’t give himself the kind of repetition or story trajectory which would have made things simpler to remember,” Wade said in a statement.
The Heege manuscript is not an original. Richard Heege was a tutor to a family in Derbyshire and may have copied the text from a minstrel’s book.
There are still many unanswered questions about the minstrel himself. We don’t know if he traveled from town to town or if performing was his full-time job. He could have been a professional traveling minstrel or a local amateur performer.
The text’s material included the names of several local places but was still designed to appeal to audiences from different areas, suggesting that it was made for travel.
The details of the 2023 study were published in The Review of English Studies.
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