![]() “These texts are far more comedic and they serve up everything from the satirical, ironic, and nonsensical to the topical, interactive, and meta-comedic. Fictional depictions suggest they performed ballads about Robin Hood, chivalric romances, adventure stories, and songs about great battles. The texts add to what we thought minstrels did. The self-irony and making audiences the butt of the joke are still very characteristic of British stand-up comedy.” Wade says: “You can find echoes of this minstrel’s humor in shows like Mock the Week, situational comedies, and slapstick. This caught the attention of Cambridge researcher Dr James Wade. Scribe’s note ‘By me, Richard Heege, because I was at that feast and did not have a drink’, in the Heege Manuscript (bottom of p.60 verso). Some may have traveled across the country, while others stuck to a circuit of local venues as Wade thinks this one did. Many minstrels are thought to have had day jobs, including as plowmen and peddlers, but went gigging at night and on weekends. To get an insight into someone like that from this period is incredibly rare and exciting.” “Here we have a self-made entertainer with very little education creating really original, ironic material. “He didn’t give himself the kind of repetition or story trajectory which would have made things simpler to remember,” Wade says. Wade thinks the minstrel wrote part of his act down because its many nonsense sequences would have been extremely difficult to recall. The texts all feature in-jokes to appeal to local audiences and show a playful awareness of the kind of diverse, celebrating audiences that we know minstrels performed to. All three texts are humorous and designed for live performance – the narrator tells his audience to pay attention and pass him a drink. Wade connected multiple clues pointing to a minstrel’s repertoire. The booklet’s secrets have been hiding in plain sight because, Wade believes, a previous study has focused on how the manuscript was made and overlooked its comedic significance. The first lines read: “Jack Wade was never so sad / As when the hare trod on his head / In case she would have ripped out his throat.” Credit: National Library of Scotland Part of ‘The Hunting of the Hare’ poem in the Heege Manuscript (p.4 verso), featuring the killer rabbit. ![]() Stand-up comedy has always involved taking risks and these texts are risky! They poke fun at everyone, high and low.” It’s mad and offensive, but just as valuable. “Manuscripts often preserve relics of high art. “Most medieval poetry, song, and storytelling has been lost”, Wade says. The three texts comprise a tail-rhyme burlesque romance entitled The Hunting of the Hare a mock sermon in prose and The Battle of Brackonwet, an alliterative nonsense verse. This booklet contains three texts and Wade concludes that around 1480 Heege copied them from a now-lost memory-aid written by an unknown minstrel performing near the Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire border. Wade’s study, published today in The Review of English Studies, focuses on the first of nine miscellaneous booklets in the ‘ Heege Manuscript’. That made him investigate how, where, and why Heege had copied out the texts. “It was an intriguing display of humor and it’s rare for medieval scribes to share that much of their character,” Wade says. He then had a “moment of epiphany” when he noticed the scribe had written: ‘By me, Richard Heege, because I was at that feast and did not have a drink.’ James Wade, from Cambridge University’s English Faculty and Girton College, came across the texts by accident while researching in the National Library of Scotland. We have first names, payments, instruments played, and occasionally locations, but until now virtually no evidence of their lives or work.ĭr. ![]() Fictional minstrels are common in medieval literature but references to real-life performers are rare and fleeting. Throughout the Middle Ages, minstrels traveled between fairs, taverns, and baronial halls to entertain people with songs and stories. This breakthrough alters our perception of English comedic culture during the period bridging Chaucer and Shakespeare. ![]() The documents comprise the earliest known usage of the phrase ‘red herring’ in English, extremely rare forms of medieval literature, as well as a killer rabbit worthy of Monty Python. These boisterous texts – which include jests at the expense of kings, priests, and peasants advocate for audience inebriation and surprise them with physical comedy – provide fresh insights into the renowned British sense of humor and the significant role minstrels held in medieval society. Credit: National Library of ScotlandĪn unprecedented record of medieval live comedy performance has been identified in a 15 th-century manuscript. ‘Red herring’ appears 3-4 lines from the bottom of the page. ![]()
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