The first time Dr. James Wade, of Cambridge University’s English School, read the newly discovered manuscripts at the National Library of Scotland, he couldn’t help but smile. He found the texts by accident and was surprised by one of the sentences: “For me, Richard Heege, because I was at that party and I didn’t have a drink.”
“It was an intriguing display of humor and it is very rare that medieval scribes share so much of his character,” Wade says in an article published in The Review of English Studies. From there, the expert decided to investigate how, where, when and why Heege had copied the texts.
His conclusion is that this 15th-century manuscript is an “unprecedented” record of the roots of British comedy. It is a compendium of live performances by medieval minstrels, including raucous texts about jeering kings, priests and peasants, and others encouraging audiences to get drunk.
In the documents appears, in addition to a murderous rabbit and Robin Hood, the first known use of the English idiom called Red Herring (red herring). This fallacy of the red herring, this diversionary maneuver, what it does is divert attention towards a wrong conclusion (common in the mystery genre).
But let’s go in parts. Throughout the Middle Ages, minstrels traveled between fairs, taverns, and stately halls to entertain people with songs and stories. Fictional minstrels are common in medieval literature, but references to real-life performers are rare and fleeting.
References to names, payments, instruments played, and occasionally locations exist, but until now there was virtually no evidence of his life or work. The pamphlet discovered by Wade, the first of nine included in the Heege Manuscript, contains three texts and was probably written by a minstrel operating near the Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire border around 1480.
The writing contains a burlesque romance entitled The Hunt for the Hare, a mock prose sermon, and The Battle of Brackonwet, a nonsense alliterative verse. “Most of the medieval poetry, songs and narratives have been lost,” James Wade says in a statement. “These crazy and offensive manuscripts mock everyone, high and low.”
The brochure’s secrets have been hiding in plain sight because, the researcher believes, previous studies had focused on how the manuscript was made and overlooked its comedic significance. Details such as the narrator asking his audience to pay attention to him or to pass him something to drink. In addition, there are jokes to attract the audience.
Wade believes that the minstrel wrote part of his performance because his many nonsensical sequences would have been extremely difficult to remember. “Here we have a self-made artist, with very little training, creating really original and ironic material. To get a glimpse of someone like that from this period is incredibly rare and exciting,” he notes.
It is believed that many minstrels had day jobs, including as farm workers and peddlers, but would go to perform at night and on weekends. Some may have traveled across the country, while others stuck to a local circuit as the creator of the Heege Manuscript might have done.
“The Hunt for the Hare,” for example, is a poem about peasants that is full of absurd jokes and pranks. The document features fictional men, including Davé of the Dale and Jack Wade, who could be from any medieval town. One scene is reminiscent of the “Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog”, which appears in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail and in Spamalot. “Killer rabbit jokes have a long tradition in medieval literature. Geoffrey Chaucer did this a century earlier in the Canterbury Tales,” Wade notes.
The account includes one of the few surviving examples of a Middle English mock sermon. This example comically addresses its audience as ‘cursed creatures’ and embeds snippets of drinking songs, including: “Drink you to me and I to you and raise your glass high” and “God loves neither horses nor to the mares, but to the happy men who in the cup can gaze fixedly”.
The mock sermon ridicules the aristocracy and, in doing so, makes the earliest recorded use of Red Herring when he explains that three kings ate so much that 24 oxen came out of their bellies fighting with swords. The oxen butcher each other so much that they are reduced to three “red herrings.”
“The images are strange, but the minstrel must have known that people would get this false reference. Kings are reduced to mere distractions. What good are kings? Gluttony. And what is the result of gluttony? Absurd spectacle that it creates distractions, ‘red herrings,'” explains Dr Wade.
The Battle of Brakonwet, for its part, is nonsense alliterative verse, something extremely rare in Middle English. The text features Robin Hood, as well as jousting bears, fighting bumblebees, and partying pigs. The poem names several villages near the Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire border and invites the audience to imagine absurd incidents happening in their neighbourhood.
Richard Heege was a clergyman who served as guardian to the Sherbrooke family, which was part of the Derbyshire gentry. His writings seem to indicate his sense of humor and a penchant for literature that others may have considered too vulgar to retain in manuscript.
While this minstrel was performing, the War of the Roses, the civil war that pitted the House of Lancaster against York between 1455 and 1487, was still raging, and life was hard for most people in England. “These texts remind us that festive entertainment was flourishing at a time of increasing social mobility,” says the expert.
“People back then partied much more than we do today, so minstrels had a lot of opportunities to perform. They were really important figures in the lives of people throughout the social hierarchy. These texts give us a snapshot of medieval life. well lived”, concludes James Wade.