A Medieval Comedy Act Has Been Discovered in First-Ever Find, Researcher Says

If you were to travel back in time to Medieval England, you might catch some raunchy jokes and tall tales performed live by traveling minstrels, who were like old-timey versions of touring stand-up comics. 

Minstrels were fixtures of European life in the Middle Ages, but though countless references to these entertainers exist in literature from this era, no clear records of an actual minstrel’s “repertoire,” meaning their act or set, has been identified—until now.

James Wade, a professor in the English department at University of Cambridge, serendipitously stumbled across a manuscript that he thinks may be an ultra-rare glimpse of a minstrel’s live repertoire that reflects modern tropes of British humor, such as Monty Python’s murderous rabbit. 

Wade was reading the Heege Manuscript, a 15th century collection of booklets, when he noticed a message from the scribe, who wrote: “By me, Richard Heege, because I was at that feast and did not have a drink.” The little aside is still funny and relatable more than 500 years later, and it caught Wade’s eye. 

“I went to the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh to look for medieval chivalric tales and romances, so I wasn’t looking for medieval comic material or anything tied to minstrels,” Wade told Motherboard in an email. “But the nonsense poetry in the manuscript was hard to ignore, and then this signature line jumped out at me.” 

The joke was the first of many clues that suggested to Wade that the lamentably beverage-less Heege “copied these texts from the repertoire of a local entertainer,” thereby filling in the gap of “a major category of lost literature,” according to his new study published in The Review of English Studies on Tuesday. While it’s possible that Heege may have scribbled down the text during an actual live performance, the study concludes that it’s more likely he copied them from a repertoire manuscript that served as a minstrel’s setlist.

“Scholars have more-or-less given up on any hope of finding medieval manuscripts that we can confidently claim to have been made or used by actual medieval minstrels. My essay does not contest that,” Wade said. “Instead, it suggests that we might look to other kinds of sources for glimpses of live performance, or minstrelsy, from the Middle Ages. These sources will be more mediated and less mobile, but for all that no less a valuable witness to live entertainment culture.”

The Heege Manuscript is a well-studied collection of booklets that was assembled by various scribes, including Heege, who probably copied the trio of texts included in the first booklet around 1480. This booklet, which is utterly unique, records a rhyme called “The Hunting of the Hare,” a satirical version of a sermon, and a nonsense verse called “The Battle of Brackonwet” that includes Heege’s note about lacking a drink at the feast.  

As Wade delved into the origins and context cues in these three texts, he discovered a host of clues that Heege may have copied them from a minstrel’s memory aid. In this way, the booklet may preserve an unprecedented, if indirect, record of a minstrel’s act.

“All three texts survive only in this booklet,” Wade noted in his study. “All three are composed in forms suited to and conventionally aligned with live performance (tail-rhyme, prose sermon, feast meta-comedy). All three are short enough to be suitable for interludes or after-dinner entertainment. All three contain ‘minstrel tags’ and otherwise directly address and anticipate a live and interactive audience. All three are entertaining and light-heartedly humorous.” 

“All three are locally oriented, using local place-names, alluding to local traditions, or situating narratives in the context of present or neighboring villages,” he continued. “And finally, all three (gently) mock peasants and kings alike, and show a playful awareness of possible mixed audiences, or the possibility of audiences shifting depending on location, from the village fair to the baronial hall.”

This list of attributes will be familiar to any touring band or comedian that incorporates banter about regional rivalries and local legends into their act to appeal to different audiences. For instance, “The Battle of Brackonwet” weaves in references to real villages near the Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire border even as it recounts absurd episodes involving Robin Hood, jousting bears, and partying pigs. You can almost imagine the delight of hometown crowds as they heard their familiar stomping grounds surfacing in fantastical tales.  

The booklet also reveals some interesting insights about the evolution of British humor, which maintains a distinctive edge to this day. Even the trope of the killer rabbit, which is now most famous as a Monty Python gag, turns up in “The Hunting of the Hare,” a poem that mockingly withholds the name of the village where it all supposedly happened because the performer doesn’t want to get into trouble.  

“The comedy in the Heege Manuscript reminds us that being meta can be funny, whether you’re in the fifteenth century or the twenty-first,” Wade told Motherboard. “In other words, a good technique for making people laugh is using the occasion or situation of the performance to make jokes, and those jokes tend toward either self-ironizing on the part of the performer, or mocking of the crowd.” 

To that end, Wade plans to continue looking for texts that could be minstrel repertoires hiding in plain sight. Until then, Heege’s work survives as a “vestige of medieval life lived vibrantly: the good times being as good as they ever have been, and probably ever will,” according to the study.

“I think it’s possible to look at the work of some medieval scribes and re-conceive them as collectors of folklore, oral storytelling, and song, alongside their more typical occupation of copying from prior written texts,” Wade concluded. “I have in mind a few other manuscripts I want to study with this in mind, and no doubt there are many other such manuscripts I don’t yet know about—and that’s exciting!”