Chapter 26
In This Chapter
● Seeking out medieval football hooligans
● Checking out hocking, cucking and ducking
● Performing with the Mummers and Goliards
Medieval life was difficult, dangerous and unhealthy. In Christian Western Europe, most people lived with one eye focused on the afterlife and did everything possible to ensure that they would get to Heaven. Despite these conditions, however, medieval people still knew how to enjoy themselves. In this chapter I look at some of the more bizarre ways in which they let the good times roll. Warning - don’t try these things at home!
Playing Football
Yes, that’s right. The world’s most popular sport originated in the Middle Ages - although medieval football was a world away from the modern game that millions know and love today. In fact, football in the Middle Ages was popular in England but considered to be a sinful and perverse pastime by anybody not involved in it because people let themselves indulge in reckless behaviour when playing. Then again, when you see how they played it, you can understand why.
The traditional day for football was Shrove Tuesday when matches were held throughout the country. These events were more like a battle than a game though, with whole villages pitched against each other, hundreds of players involved and the goals placed several miles apart. Games lasted most of the day and people literally fought for the ball (which was usually an inflated bladder), resulting in serious injuries and even deaths. Edward III went so far as to ban the game in 1336, but nobody took any notice and it carries on today - although in a slightly more organised form!
Savouring Subtleties
Gastronomic curiosities known as subtleties were popular among the nobility during the Middle Ages. They took the form of small, intricately made dishes that were served between courses at a banquet. Known as entremets in Old French, they began as simple oat dishes in amusing shapes, but by the fourteenth century European rulers were demanding ever more complex and impressive subtleties from their cooks. Before long, the creations were only partly edible, with more and more non-edible elements being added - including people!
Popular subjects included models of castles with tiny figures, replicas of animals and even life-size models of human genitalia made out of pastry! Sources describe some incredible creations, such as a huge wooden model of Jerusalem for Emperor Charles IV in 1378, which was accompanied by several soldiers performing an attack on it from a model wooden boat on wheels! Another famous example was a banquet given by Philip the Good of Burgundy in 1454 in honour of the fall of Constantinople, which involved a giant pie that held four musicians. Not so subtle really!
Trying Out Charms and Remedies
Despite the fact that most of Western Europe became Christian during the Middle Ages, some pagan traditions continued. In Anglo-Saxon England, even after conversion, charms - protective spells that were repeated to ward off evil or bad luck - continued to be very popular. People spoke hundreds and hundreds of different brief verses to ward off trouble, such as a charm to ward off a swarm of bees and one to stop people from stealing your cattle.
Similar to charms were remedies that gave instructions on what to do to ward off problems. This idea is slightly different to how we now understand ‘remedies’ - as a way of helping to deal with something that has already happened. Many medieval remedies are contained in Bald’s Leechbook, which was composed during the tenth century. Among the many suggestions is the following remedy to ward off the effects of a chattering woman:
Against a woman’s chatter: eat a radish at night, while fasting; that day the chatter cannot harm you.
Make sure that you write that down for use next time you sit beside a major talker on the bus or train!
Enjoying Music and Dancing
Wherever a celebration was taking place in the Middle Ages, you’d find people enjoying music and dancing. In particular, people danced themselves and watched performing troupes. The performances were more like acrobatic displays and often involved tumbling, juggling and dangerous activities involving weapons. Edward II was a big fan of dance. In 1313, he was entertained by ‘Bernard the Fool and his 54 nude dancers’, which must have been quite a spectacle!
Minstrels were by far the most popular medieval entertainers. These musicians travelled far and wide, playing a variety of fantastically named instruments such as nakers (small drums), sackbuts (early trombones), crumhorns (curved wind instruments) and tabors (drum-like tambourines). (You can see examples of these instruments at the Mary Rose museum in Portsmouth,
England.) If they were good, minstrels were able to earn a tremendous amount, far beyond the income of most people. The aforementioned Edward II was particularly generous in paying minstrels - up to £1 a time - which was the equivalent of several months wages for a skilled worker.
Hocking Your Friends
Historians know little about the medieval sense of humour. Surviving examples take the form of sarcasm in correspondence or the laboured ‘jokes’ made by fools and jesters. Hocking, one of the more famous games played in England, does give a sense of medieval people’s idea of fun. Essentially a kidnapping for amusement, hocking involved taking people prisoner and then ransoming them back to their families in a kind of parody of how noble hostages were taken after battles (as I describe in Chapter 21).
Hocking was meant to be carried out on high days and feast days, and sometimes women captured men and vice versa. Unfortunately, the games often spilled over into violence and sexual assault. A popular way of catching people was to lay a noose on the ground so that the unwary stepped on it and were catapulted upside down into the branches of a tree. Hilarious!
Cucking
Cucking was a familiar but bizarre public punishment (and therefore also public entertainment!) during the Middle Ages. Several Anglo-Saxon sources describe similar reprimands for women (mostly) who were considered gossips or scolds, and the Domesday Book also refers to the practice.
The woman in question was trussed to a stool at the end of a pole by her accuser. The pole was levered up and down. In the case of cucking, the woman was levered into the air and left suspended so that the crowd were able to mock and possibly throw things at her. Sometimes this involved the stool being continually lowered into a river so that the victim came close to drowning. A similar punishment was a Skimmington ride that involved the victim being paraded through the streets to general abuse. That these activities were considered acceptable and public displays tells you a lot about the medieval mindset.
Hunting for Sport
Hunting was the most popular pastime for the European nobility during the Middle Ages. Indeed, many rulers were absolutely obsessed with it. One reason for hunting’s popularity was because it was considered to be training for battle. The skills developed on the hunt would prove invaluable to a young man who later wanted to go to war as a knight or man-at-arms.
Hunts were very organised, with ten or so carefully established stages, and were carried out from horseback, with hounds or with the aid of trained hawks and falcons. The most popular animals to hunt were the hart (an adult male red deer), wild boar and wolves, although other animals such as bears, foxes and badgers were also common quarry.
Hunting was exceptionally dangerous (not least for the animals!), and many European rulers were killed while hunting. Most famous was William II (known as William Rufus) the king of England and son of William the Conqueror. He was killed by a stray arrow in the New Forest (in Hampshire, England). The hunt was also a great opportunity for assassination: many people were killed in ‘hunting accidents’ that appeared to be very carefully arranged!
Laughing Aloud at Mummery
Mummery literally means ‘disguising’, and the word was used in England to describe a certain kind of dramatic performance that was very popular across Medieval Europe. The plays used masks and few words to recreate famous scenes from history and folklore. The performances would be put on anywhere, sometimes for the delight of an invited audience of nobles or sometimes just in the street as a kind of public protest.
Disguising games were a much simpler version of mummery that people at court used to entertain other nobles. Masked players - often the nobles themselves - acted out scenes and played tricks on people, often with quite cruel and unusual results such as lampooning them, tripping them or covering them with unpleasant substances. Essentially, these events involved nobles arriving in fancy dress as pirates or priests or something similar. Eventually they whisked off their masks to reveal who they truly were. Apparently people found the whole show hilarious: it takes all sorts I suppose.
Going Ga-Ga for Godards
Another form of medieval humour was practised by goliards, wandering students and scholars who composed satirical verses and gave live performances that mocked and lampooned the Church. Goliards and their work were popular throughout Medieval Europe, and in particular in the universities that were founded in France, Germany, Spain and Italy: rather like a medieval version of an undergraduate review show.
Some goliard activities still seem quite amusing today. Often they would dress as women, lead donkeys into the church or play dice on the altar. Their pranks had a serious point to them; the accompanying poems railed against the increasing power of the Church and perceived abuses. These activities were frequently outlawed by Church authorities but that didn’t stop goliards from playing their pranks.
Jousting the Day Away
Probably the most famous medieval pastime was jousting: combat between two knights on horseback that took place at tournaments. You can read more about this activity in Chapter 11, but I mention it here as well because it was second only to hunting in popularity with the medieval nobility.
The first recorded joust was in 1066 in France, but by the twelfth century it was amazingly popular throughout Europe. Basically jousting was yet another medieval pastime that involved people trying to kill each other and practising methods of doing so. Huge sums were gambled on the outcome, with people frequently making or losing fortunes. The knights themselves became the closest thing that the Middle Ages had to celebrities.
Jousting was incredibly dangerous. The jouster who was hit felt the power of a blunt tipped lance travelling at over 60 kilometres (or 37 miles) per hour. One historian has suggested that, travelling at that speed, the blow was equivalent to being struck with a hammer that weighs half a tonne. Few survived the impact from an incoming lance.