The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (39 page)
Authors: Ian Mortimer
Tags: #General, #Europe, #Great Britain, #History, #bought-and-paid-for, #Medieval, #A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century
What to Do
It is a challenge, when confronted by the extreme adversities of life, to remember that fourteenth-century England has a strong element of joy running through it. It is a calamitous century, no doubt about it, but people cope. Indeed, they are exuberant about life, whether it be caroling and dancing that gives them pleasure, or fighting jousts and hunting with hawks. Lords and kings have their jesters and minstrels to tell them jokes and stories and to play music, dance, and sing. Laughter is an integral part of daily life. When no one can bear to tell the king of France about the defeat of his navy at Sluys in 1340, it is his jester who breaks the news to him, exclaiming, “How brave the Frenchmen are, throwing themselves into the sea, unlike those cowardly English, who cling to their ships.” Edward II is thoroughly entertained in 1313 by Bernard the Fool and fifty-four nude dancers.
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You might speculate as to what this says about Edward II, but there can be few people whose curiosity is not aroused by such an event, whatever era they come from.
Listen.
It is very quiet.
Out on the open road, you can hear nothing but the wind in the trees, the streams trickling, occasional calls of voices, and birdsong. The French knight of La Tour Landry, wandering in a garden, remarks on the wild birds singing in their different languages, “full of mirth and joy”
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The poet William Langland, lying by the side of a brook, leaning over to look in the water, remarks that the ripples in the stream
sound
so sweetly.
Indoors, there is practically no noise but the crackle of the fire, the thud as a wooden vessel is set down heavily on the stone floor, the clatter as a pewter plate is dropped. People speak to one another and sometimes sing to themselves. The loudest noises you will ever hear are thunder, trumpets being sounded; bells ringing across a city; the rumble of warhorses’ hooves (in a cavalry charge, for example, or during a tournament); and very, very occasionally, the sound of a cannon being fired. But, apart from musical instruments and bells, these loud noises are unusual. Sitting at a table in the great hall of a castle, the loudest noises will be the chatter from the lower tables.
As a result of this comparative quiet, people listen differently. They hear with greater clarity. When a dog barks, they can recognize whose dog it is. They are more sensitive to voices. And, above all else, they listen intently to music.
Medieval people love music. It is—along with a love of good food, good jokes, and good stories—one of those aspects of life which unites everyone, from the most powerful nobleman to the most miserable villein. Even monks have been known to enjoy minstrelsy, especially the plucked notes of the harp. Music is part of the largesse of a great lord, offered to all those in his hall. Without it, his hospitality is considered inferior. Musicians are highly valued. In February 1312 Edward II makes a gift of forty marks (£26 13s 4d) to his herald-cum-minstrel, “King Robert,” and his fellow performers at a feast.
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In 1335 Edward III cheerfully gives fifty marks (£33 6s 8d) to another herald-cum-minstrel, Master Andrew Claroncel, and his companions, for “making their minstrelsy” for the king and his companions at court.
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These are huge sums for a few hours of entertainment. Roger Bennyng and his minstrels receive only twenty marks (£13 6s 8d) when performing for the king and queen at King’s Langley in July 1341, but that is certainly not a sum to be sniffed at.
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Nor is the personal payment of just half a mark (6s 8d) to Hanekino in return for playing his fiddle in front of the king before the statue of the Virgin at Christchurch, Canterbury, in 1369.
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Most people have to work for at least three weeks to earn as much.
The instruments played by these musicians vary and are constantly evolving. There is no one pattern for a harp, or a trumpet, or even a fiddle. No two instruments are exactly the same, being handmade and thus rather of a type than an exact design. The numbers of strings on a
harp may vary, so too may the length of a trumpet. The arrangements of instruments in a band vary considerably too. Those depicted on the Exeter Cathedral minstrels’ gallery (built about 1350) include a set of bagpipes, a recorder, a fiddle, a harp, a trumpet (without any valves), a portable organ, a tambourine, and three other instruments which you might not immediately recognize: a gittern, a citole, and a shawm.
As music is one of the few ways of making a loud noise, it has other purposes besides delighting audiences. “High” minstrelsy is the description of loud instrumentation—using trumpets, sackbuts, bagpipes, clarions, shawms, and nakers—while “low” minstrelsy is the more melodic variety. The cooperation between heralds and trumpeters is obvious; many heralds are in charge of troupes of musicians, for making loud, proclamatory sounds. Lords when traveling or setting out for war take minstrels who are experienced in high minstrelsy. Edward Ill’s household in France in 1345-47 includes a department of minstrels, with five trumpeters, a citoler, five pipers, one tabor player, two clarion players, a nakerer, and a fiddler.
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Henry IV as earl of Derby, sets out on his journey across Europe in 1392 with two trumpeters, three pipers, and a nakerer.
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Town “waits” or bands of watchmen also use musical instruments, in case they need to sound the alarm. As brass trumpets and clarions are very expensive, and thus rare outside noblemen’s households, shawms are the next best thing, carried by those guarding city gates. If no shawm is available, a good old hunting horn is used.
As for “low” music, the more melodic variety, where might you hear it? The answer is, almost anywhere. You will always hear musicians at a nobleman’s feast—no fewer than 1
75
of them are employed at the knighting of the prince of Wales (the future Edward II) in May 1306. But you will also hear shepherds playing their flutes and whistles in the hills. Nicholas, the Cambridge student in Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale,” plays a psaltery. Absolon in “The Reeve’s Tale,” plays the bagpipes, and so does the “Miller,” who tells “The Miller’s Tale.” The esquire serving the narrator of “The Knight’s Tale” plays the flute. Wander across the Lincolnshire manor of Sir Geoffrey Luttrell in 1340 and you might see a peasant playing bagpipes while a female acrobat dances before him. You might see other peasants there playing a hurdy-gurdy, nakers, bagpipes, bells, and even a portable organ.
Fourteenth-Century Musical Instruments (excluding those still in common use) | |
Name | Description |
Gittern | A small round-backed instrument, like a lute, but without a neck (its neck being merely an extension of its teardrop-shaped body). It has four or five pairs of strings and is plucked with a quill plectrum. |
Citole | A stringed instrument peculiar to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It has a holly-leaf-shaped body, a short neck, a flat back, and three or four pairs of strings which are plucked with the fingers. |
Shawm | A long wooden pipe with a double reed at the top (like a modern bassoon) and a bell shape at the bottom. It resembles the main pipe in a set of bagpipes but is much larger. |
Nakers | Metal drums, like kettledrums, played in pairs suspended from the waist or, in much larger versions, set on the ground. |
Tabor | A handheld drum which includes skins stretched across a frame (often played in conjunction with a pipe or whistle). |
Rebec | A fiddle with three strings, played with a bow. |
Psaltery | A metal-stringed medieval harp in a square box, plucked with a quill. |
Clarion | A curved trumpet. |
Sackbut | An extended and curved trumpet, like a trombone. |
Crumhorn | A curved shawm with a mouthpiece over the reed, allowing it to be used by men on horseback (otherwise they would break the reed with every jolt). |
Hurdy-gurdy | A stringed instrument played by the rotation of a hand-driven wheel passing over the strings (often played in conjunction with bagpipes). |
Come the time when ale is brewed at the church house—a scotale as it is called—then all the working instruments in the village will be put to good use for the enjoyment of all.
Where there is music, there is dancing. As minstrelsy includes acrobats and jugglers, often dancers and musicians will travel together, as a troupe. Sometimes their performances are extraordinary: doing a handstand on the points of two swords while being accompanied by a man playing two recorders at once is a trick you ought to see.
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Acrobats doing tumbling acts to the beating of a drum, or young women dancing the erotic dance of Salome are hardly less eye-catching. Alternatively, the spectacle of a dancing bear or a performing dog might be built into a musical act. At a local event, like a scotale, you are likely to find the common folk taking to their feet. Most amateur dancing takes the form of “caroling” in which everyone holds hands or links arms in a big circle and skips to the left or right around the leader, who stands in the middle singing the verses of the song. Everyone taking part in the dance then sings the chorus. Unlike modern carols, which tend to be exclusively religious, many medieval ones are bawdy songs, and some are downright lascivious. As caroling sometimes takes place in a churchyard (dancing outdoors is as common as indoors), a number of priests are offended. Some will wag a finger at you and remind you of the story told by William of Malmesbury—how, on a Christmas night, twelve dancers went caroling around the church and persuaded the priest’s daughter to join them. The priest forbade the dancers from dancing and swore that, if they did not desist, he would see to it that they would carry on dancing for the next twelve months. And so it occurred: his curse worked, their hands became inseparably joined, and they could not stop dancing. When the priest’s son ran out to try to save his sister, he seized her hand and her arm broke off like a rotten stick.
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Pay no attention to William of Malmesbury or finger-wagging priests. Everyone dances. Everyone sings. In the churches and monasteries the clergy sing Mass. English descants (three-part polyphony) and motets are written in the last decades of the century. By 1400 England is on the brink of becoming the preeminent musical kingdom in Christendom. Even the royal family write and play music (the recorder and the harp). In his youth, Henry IV and his first wife, Mary de Bohun, sing and play music together. Chaucer writes of how
Henry’s mother, Lady Lancaster, used to “dance so comely, carol and sing so sweetly . . . that never has Heaven seen so blissful a treasure.” Even his Wife of Bath declares that “I could dance to a small harp, and sing like any nightingale, when I had downed a draught of mellow wine.” Similarly Chaucer says of the carpenter’s newly wedded wife in “The Miller’s Tale” that her voice is “as brisk and clear as any swallow perching on a barn.” At the start of William Langland’s
Piers Plowman,
a whole crowd of people come over the hill making music. Everyone sings and dances. In a century of plague, war and suffering, you have to.
Traveling from town to town you are likely at some point to come across a performance of a play. The most common sorts are the miracle plays and mystery plays which are performed on feast days in the larger towns. The sequences of plays performed at York, Chester, and Wakefield are very famous, but you will also find mystery plays put on at Coventry, Newcastle, Norwich, Northampton, Brome (in Suffolk), Bath, Beverley Bristol, Canterbury, Ipswich, Leicester, Worcester, Lincoln, London (at Clerkenwell), and Exeter.
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Worcester’s five plays or pageants are enshrined in the town ordinances (see
chapter 10
).
The York mystery plays are held on the movable feast of Corpus Christi (the Thursday after Trinity Sunday). Each of the city guilds (otherwise known as “mysteries”—hence the name) takes responsibility for putting on one play. The Guild of Goldsmiths stages the “Coming of the Three Kings” and the Guild of Shipwrights performs the “Building of the Ark.” How apt, you might think, until you realize that the “Death of Christ” is performed by the Guild of Butchers. Each play is staged on a two-storey wagon, with a stage on the upper floor and the changing room and props area below. These wagons are pulled between the twelve watching places around the city So all you have to do is turn up at one of these places and see each play brought to you, over the course of several days.
Just as people in the modern world rush to see a star performer, so medieval people flock to see a familiar religious play. In medieval drama it is God, or Jesus, or the martyred saints who are the stars.
Members of the audience can become passionately involved. Watch the fascination on their faces as they see Christ suffering, in agony, giving his life on the cross/or
them.
When the crowd watches Eve tempting Adam with an apple in the Garden of Eden, they see the Fall of Man for themselves. Similarly, the reenactment of Noah and the Flood symbolizes the destruction of evil people and their desire to escape damnation. They can see with their own eyes a representation of what might happen to them if they do not repent of their sins. In a century which has seen God smite nearly half the population with plague, these scenes have huge resonance.
Another variety of religious play you might come across is the morality play. As performed by clerks, in Latin, these have a long history, dating back centuries. In English they are only just beginning to take off. The great morality plays, such as
The Somonynge of Everyman,
will not be written until the fifteenth century. Nevertheless, if you come across a drama which takes the form of a battle between the vices and the virtues, then you are probably watching an early morality play. Characters will include the likes of “Ignorance,” “Humility,” “Covetousness,” “Good Deeds,” “Riot,” and so on. They are nowhere near as sensational as the sufferings of the saints and less meaningful to most people than the Bible-history plays. But you might find the characters of the Devil and Old Vice entertaining, even if for the wrong reasons.
