Fools and Jesters at the English Court

John Southworth

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780750934770
• eBook ISBN: 9780752479866
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Fools have been a feature of virtually every recorded culture in the history of civilization, making significant contributions to the development of early theatre and literary drama. This book offers a reign by reign chronicle of English court fools.

1

King and Fool

Clowns, fools – comedians of one kind or another – have been a feature of virtually every recorded culture in the history of civilisation and have made significant contributions to the development of early theatre and literary drama. This is certainly true of western European culture, and nowhere more so than in England, where the fool in various disguises is found at the heart of popular dramatic activity from its earliest recorded beginnings.

The history of the fool in that more general sense makes a fascinating story that has already been told, and will remain in the background of all that follows. But my subject here is with a particular type of fool, separated from others by the special relationship that he enjoyed with king or ruler as his personal retainer. He commonly goes by the name of ‘jester’, though that is a term that in its present usage dates only from the Tudor period. I shall call him simply a court or king’s fool.

In some of the earliest European records he is designated nebulo, a word expressive of clerical contempt but which nevertheless conveys an accurate assessment of his social standing; he was seen as a paltry, worthless fellow, a nobody. It was not merely that his position in the feudal hierarchy was low; like the minstrels, he was altogether excluded from it. Being neither lord nor cleric, freeman nor serf, he existed in a social limbo. Even in his natural habitat of the court, he remained apart, almost as if he belonged to another species. In this, his situation was more extreme than that of the minstrels. Though obliged to sit at a separate table (when not performing), they at least had the companionship of their fellows; he was alone in his separation. In fifteenth-century scenes of court life, he occupies otherwise empty spaces or is shown flitting from one group of courtiers to another, a barely corporeal presence.

It was only in relation to his master that he was able to gain identity. By definition, he was someone on whom the king could bestow his favour without giving rise to any of the jealousies or counter-claims on the part of competing court factions that normally accompanied the exercise of royal patronage. Indeed, his office was a gift of the dubious kind that few would regard as a favour at all; it was one that ‘none but he that hath wit can perform, and none but he that wants wit will perform’.¹ And whatever position at court the fool might obtain through a successful performance of his role over a period of time, he remained wholly and permanently dependent on that favour. It could be withdrawn at any time and frequently was; and when that happened, he could usually be relied upon to disappear from the scene as though he had never existed. Yet, for as long as it lasted, the bond between the king and himself might be close, even intimate, and in those circumstances he could come to have a real, if incalculable, influence on his master’s policy and decisions. Again, the fool’s nebulous status at court enabled him to act on occasion as confidential informant or spy – as the fool Golet is said to have done for William of Normandy, warning him of the approach of intending assassins and thus saving the future Conqueror’s life. It was the source and pre-condition of whatever freedom of action he enjoyed.

We now tend to picture the court fool – the traditional jester in cap and bells – as belonging in a special way to the Middle Ages and to western European culture. But his origins, though hidden in unrecorded antiquity, may be as old as kingship itself. For wherever forceful and ambitious men or women have attained a position of autocratic power over others, there is often found at their side an insignificant person of obscure origins who, whether given the formal title of ‘fool’ or not, is seen to fulfil an equivalent function.

The ‘trickster’ figure that anthropologists have identified in myths and legends across a wide range of early cultures as chaos-maker and sower of discord, but who at the same time is able to win boons for mankind from the creator-gods,² is here bound and contained in a mutually advantageous partnership with tribal chieftain or king; advantageous to the ruler because it provided him with necessary recreation, for putting aside the rituals and prerogatives of kingship in simple enjoyment of the humour and companionship of a fellow human being who carried no weight of social and political debt; advantageous to the fool because it gave him a privileged haven for the practice of his eccentric skills for so long as he could keep his patron amused and retain his interest.

In the course of its long history, the partnership was to take a variety of forms. In what follows, I focus on English records from the medieval, Tudor and Jacobean periods; but that it was known to much earlier cultures is evidenced by writings from ancient Egypt, the Historical Records of Sima Qian (‘father of Chinese historiography’), and by the classical, Celtic and Islamic texts that Enid Welsford drew upon in her more general account of the fool’s history.³

The curious double-act of king and fool, master and servant, substance and shadow, may thus be seen as a universal, symbolic expression of the antithesis lying at the heart of the autocratic state between the forces of order and disorder, of structured authority and incipient anarchy, in which the conditional nature of the fool’s licence (‘so far but no further’) gives reassurance that ultimately order will always prevail. The fool, though constrained, continually threatens to break free in pushing to its limits whatever freedom he is given. He is the trickster of myth in an historical strait-jacket from which he is forever struggling to escape. And if the king, as the dominant partner, sets the tone of their exchanges and the fool has everything to gain from a willing acceptance of his subservient role, his participation can never be forced. If, for whatever reason, he should come to feel that his master has reneged on the unwritten contract between them (the rules of the game), it is always open to him to refuse to play, however costly to himself the refusal might prove to be. He thus retains – and needs to retain if he is to achieve the full potential of his role – a degree of independence. Like the actor on stage in a live performance, success is inevitably accompanied by the possibility of failure, and the higher the stakes that are played for, the greater the possible failure. It is only the successful fool who lives on in the remembrance of later generations to find his way into the jest-books. The sycophantic, flattering fool produces an inferior type of humour and is soon forgotten; those who take too high a risk and fail in the attempt face a grimmer fate in prison or madhouse.

But there was danger on both sides of this balancing act. If the fool risked going too far in his banter and tricks, the king was also vulnerable to the fool’s abuse of the licence he was given. In the case of a foolish king and an unscrupulous fool, the danger could be very real. The classic example here is that of the eleventh-century Byzantine fool Romanus Boilas, who exploited the privileged position he had gained at court to plot against the life of his patron, the Emperor Constantine IX. Romanus had fallen in love with the emperor’s mistress and aimed, not only to eliminate his rival, but take over his throne. According to a contemporary historian, he came within an ace of success.⁴

In medieval psalters, Psalm 52 (beginning ‘The Fool says in his heart/There is no god’) was usually illustrated by a depiction of King David the Psalmist in company with his fool, or, more rarely, the suicide of Saul. In the fourteenth-century Barlow Psalter, these two subjects are juxtaposed in a telling image of the potentially destructive power of the fool as perceived by clerics: the fool’s bladder-stick mimics the thrust of Saul’s self-directed sword.

It is in the infinitely varied nuances of the relationship between king and fool, and the widely differing tone of their exchanges, that the greatest interest may be found to lie. At one extreme, the fool – in St Chrysostom’s definition, ‘he who gets slapped’ – is a more or less complicit butt in the low but universal comedy of the banana skin and the custard pie. At the other, their partnership may be so close as to allow an identification, even a voluntary exchange of roles, in which the fool becomes an alter ego of the king, and the king assumes his fool’s identity in religious ritual or actual combat. We shall encounter instances of both.

But it is remarkable that in nearly all medieval illustrations of the court fool that have survived, he is represented as armed with a weapon – club, marotte (stick with a miniature fool’s head at the top), bladder, dagger or sword. The club may be padded and the dagger or sword (like that of the Roman actor) made only of wood, but the hint of aggression – or, at the least, of preparedness for an active defence – remains. The coxcomb, familiar in Renaissance art and literature as an emblematic badge of fools and of folly, gives warning of similar assertiveness. The madman-fool of the mentally unstable Charles VI of France was named Haincelin Coq.

At this point, however, it is necessary to make a basic distinction between two broad categories of fool; between the natural and the artificial; those who were regarded as fools ‘by nature’ and those who pretended folly to fulfil a professional, comedic role. It is a distinction that in Europe was understood and applied from as early as the twelfth century, but, in a wider context, goes back to the earliest recorded beginnings of the fool’s history. A subdivision of the first of these categories (the naturals or ‘innocents’, as I prefer to term them) should also be made between the madman-fools who were congenitally or spasmodically insane and those who would now be described (in politically incorrect but plain language) as ‘slow-witted’ or ‘mentally retarded’. Of this latter group, a few rare individuals – of whom Will Somer, the fool of Henry VIII, was a notable exemplar – might be further distinguished as ‘wise innocents’.

The relations that these several categories of fool normally enjoyed with their patrons naturally differed from each other greatly, as did the costume and ‘props’ with which each was associated in succeeding periods. In later pages I have detailed information to offer on the complex subject of costume, and this will be summarised in a concluding chapter; but to illustrate the distinctions that were made between the clever and the innocent, the mad and the simple, it may be useful here to pursue a little further the related matter of their ‘weapons’ as these were depicted in contemporary psalters. This will enable me also to indicate the plan of my subsequent chapters in which their histories – insofar as these have required separate treatment – are told.

The medieval Latin word for fool, follis, had the original, classical meaning of a leathern sack or air-filled bag; hence the bladders or ‘baubles’ of the innocents. Such visual clues to their identity would have been essential to illiterate lay users of the psalters. But the phallic suggestiveness of the clubs and branches of wood wielded by the clever or ‘counterfeit’ fools carried an additional, more ominous message; not only were these elegantly dressed figures to be identified as fools (a fact not otherwise apparent in their appearance), they were to be regarded by the layman as fools of an especially dangerous kind. They are unlikely to have been drawn from life. The artists who painted them were not so much concerned with individual fools as in making a general, admonitory point about the wickedness and folly of the secular world of their time, and in warning of its moral dangers. In the Eadwine or Canterbury Psalter of 1147, which derives from a Utrecht original of ninth-century date, the situation described in – is given a literal interpretation. Here, the fool appears as an evil prince, installed on a dais, surveying with evident complacency a scene of universal disorder, rapine and slaughter. A sword rests in readiness across his lap, while above the figure of Christ appeals in vain for peace to be restored.⁵

Psalm 52 –

God is looking down from heaven

at the sons of men . . .

All have turned aside,

all alike are tainted . . . (vv. 2–3)

We know, however, that fools of the mentally competent kind existed from an early date and were often armed with real weapons. For these, we shall look first (in Chapter 3) to Ireland, where a unique body of oral lore, comprising praise poetry, annals and pseudo-historical myths and legends, survived the coming of Christianity to provide what one distinguished scholar has described as a ‘window on the Iron Age’.⁶ In this Irish Celtic tradition, kings were little more than tribal chieftains in constantly shifting warfare with their rivals; and the fools who are said to have accompanied them were expected to take an equal share in the fighting with their lord’s other attendants. The riogdruth (king’s fool) was thus required to combine the gift of eliciting laughter with prowess as a warrior; his aggressive potential was fully absorbed in defence of his lord and the defeat of his enemies. Norman joculatoris, literally ‘jokers’, are also found to have been active on the field of battle; and one of them, Taillefer, is credited with initiating the decisive charge of the French cavalry at Hastings and decapitating an opponent.

It is only with his domestication in the more settled courts of the Angevin and Plantagenet kings (as evidenced in Chapter 5) that the clever fool forfeits his right to carry arms. It is a process whereby the joculator – along with his old companions, the wandering mimi et histriones of early Latin documents – takes shelter under the new, umbrella term of menestrel in its original meaning of ‘little servant’, combining a talent to amuse with utilitarian skills of huntsman, waferer or messenger.

In the thirteenth century, he is given the title of Magister, a horse to ride and a servant to attend him at the king’s expense, and may be rewarded with a plot of land to cultivate on his retirement. We are not deceived by such royal favours. The Celtic chieftain, when he realises that his defeated opponent in personal combat is not the kingly rival he had taken him to be but merely his rival’s ‘double’ with the ‘shameful haircut’ of a fool under his crown, feels insulted and disgraced. To medieval clerics, especially the king’s chaplains, the presence of such people at court was never less than an embarrassing nuisance. It was against that continuing social and religious prejudice that the fool was to achieve his modest apotheosis as Mr Nobody. (His subsequent history, culminating in his emancipation as itinerant entertainer and stage fool, will be traced in Chapters 9–11, and 13–15.)

The hefty clubs and marottes carried by the psalter fools of disordered mind were in part representative of the threat that the fool of the psalm (who ‘says in his heart, There is no god’) was seen to pose to the people of God. But their weapons were not merely emblematic in kind. Though rare at the English court, ‘frantic fools’, as they were termed in the Middle Ages, made regular appearances at the court of France. The madman Sibelot, armed with a marotte, is said to have attacked on sight everyone he encountered at the court of Henri III with the sole exception of the king himself, ‘whom a marvellous instinct obliged him to respect’.⁷ Though doubtless contained to tolerable limits by the restraining hands of their keepers, such fools come closest in character to the anarchic tricksters of myth.

The sticks and bladders of those fools who were accounted ‘simple’ rather than mad were probably used as much for defence as attack. For the closer the bond between king and fool – and with the innocents this might reach to mutual affection – the more the fool was resented by other court servants. However, Master Guillaume, a seventeenth-century Mantuan fool, was described as a ‘mortal enemy to Pages and Lacqueys’, and as carrying under his coat a ‘short Stick, which he call’d his Bird, and when he beat them he was always the first that cry’d out Murder’.⁸ The stubborn little fellow shown in, with cudgel resting conveniently on his shoulder, is giving as good as he gets in his argument with David. A near-naked fool from another psalter carries what appears to be a dagger or sharpened stick in one hand and a large wafer in the other. The ‘targe’ or small shield bought by Edward II for one of his innocents called Robert was probably for a play fight of some kind, as was certainly the cardboard armour with which Will Somer was equipped for the Christmas revels of 1551 (Chapters 6–8). The ‘mock combat’ was to be a popular turn in the repertoire of English court fools, both innocent and clever, throughout their history.

I have said that the king/fool relationship was advantageous to the kingly patron in that it provided him with recreation and the companionship of a person with whom he could establish rapport at the basic level of one human being to another; but there was always something more to it than that. A medieval bishop is reported to have said on the occasion of his election, ‘I have heard the truth for the last time’. For the more powerful men become, the more isolated they tend to be as their channels of communication with the real world outside the artificial ambience of the court are progressively impeded by the desire of their courtiers to please; to tell them what they like to hear rather than what they need to know. The king’s need for truth, especially of the unpalatable kind, and the fool’s ability to communicate it in a uniquely acceptable form as humour was a crucial factor in the relations between them from which the fool derived much of his raison d’être. Part of the fascination of Shakespeare’s handling of the king/fool relationship in King Lear lies in his reversal of what is often thought to be the typical slapping order, in which the king becomes a target for the fool’s truth-bearing shafts. Far from distracting Lear from his grief (as is sometimes supposed), their effect is to confront him with the unbearable reality of the situation in which he finds himself, a painful but necessary stage in his progress to self-knowledge and ultimate redemption.⁹ Shakespeare’s dramatic treatment of this theme is wholly in accord with an ancient historical tradition.

The innocent speaks the truth because he can do no other. He blurts it out and (more often than not) escapes retribution because of his transparent honesty. It was not so much for his folly as for his ‘wisdom’ – that special gift he possessed for hitting the nail of truth on the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. King and Fool
• 2. The Elusive Dwarfs
• 3. Warrior Fools
• 4. Norman Buffoons
• 5. Minstrel Fools
• 6. The Innocents
• 7. Tudor Innocents
• 8. William Somer
• 9. The European Dimension
• 10. Fools to Jesters
• 11. ‘Jugler’ and Jester
• 12. Jane: a Female Innocent
• 13. Elizabeth’s Fools
• 14. The Player Fools
• 15. The Last of the Jesters
• 16. Jeffery Hudson: Court Dwarf
• 17. The Fools’ Motley
• 18. Mr Nobody
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Further Reading