'Playing The Fool' by Karen Maitland

Ask most people to imagine a medieval feast and they will usually picture a jester or ‘fool’ prancing around the tables clad in bells and pointed hats, but how accurate is that image? In the 11th and 12th centuries the title minstrel, meaning little servant, was the name given to a wide range of entertainers, including musicians, tumblers and magicians as well as joculators or jesters. Both men and women were employed as minstrels and there is a record of joculatrix called Adeline, owning land in Hampshire in 1086.

In the 12th century the title of follus or fool began to be mentioned in documents, often when these jesters had been rewarded with land as payment for loyal service. A fool named Roland le Pettour was given 30 acres of land by King Henry II, probably when he retired, on condition that Roland returned to the royal court every year on Christmas Day to ‘leap, whistle and fart.’

But noblemen and even kings did not throw daily banquets and, besides, listening to same fool or joculator every night of the year would have become tedious, so medieval jesters only performed occasionally. The rest of the year they were expected to carry out other duties in the household, such as being keeper of the hounds, or travelling to markets to buy provisions for the household.

In the Middle Ages there were three types of fool. The professional fool employed by a nobleman was usually very astute, educated and generally wore normal clothes, like their masters, rather than the classic fool’s costume. But wealthy families also adopted boys and men who had mental illnesses or physical deformities, keeping them almost as pets for their amusement or as an act ‘Christian charity’. These too were given the title of ‘the Queen’s fool’ or ‘Lord X’s fool’, but they were not paid, just fed and clothed. If their masters decided these poor fools no longer amused them they were sometimes provided with a pension in the form of regular alms, but sadly many ended their days as beggars.

1400. The author of the manuscript (centre) is shown writing for all ranks

of society, from the highest, the pope and the king on either side of him to the lowest - the jester with

monkey on the far left and the beggar on the far right.

The third class of fool was the Fool Societies, particularly popular in France. These were groups of amateurs who performed at Christmas, or at fairs or festivals. They were generally the ones to don the classic jester’s costume of a hood with ears, multi-coloured tunics and tie bells to their shoes or clothes. They would dance and prance through the streets, some even carrying their infants on their backs.

1614. Tom Durie, beloved jester to Queen Anne of

Denmark, wife of James VI. He holds the cup

of hospitality offered to guests.

Both King Edward II and Edward III had a succession of professional fools and called them all ‘Robert’ regardless of their real names. But by the 13th century some talented jesters were beginning to achieve superstar status. Those who were lucky enough to be employed by royalty were provided with their own horse and servants. Tom le Fol – Tom the Fool – performed at the marriage feast of Edward I’s daughter Elizabeth and was given a fee of 50 shillings which was a fortune, since a skilled thatcher could expect to earn only 2½ pence a day and you could buy a goose for 1½ pennies.

Of course, most fools weren’t lucky enough to come to the attention of the king. One traveller complained that no one gave him rabbit-trimmed robes or costly gifts, because he couldn’t play instruments, tell jokes and stories, juggle, dance, and fart a tune.

The Battle of Morgarten, 15th Nov 1315

showing the court jester, Kuony von Stocken,

in red standing next to his master's horse.

When I was researching the life of a medieval jester, who is one of the characters in my novel, 'The Plague Charmer', I discovered that dwarf jesters were also expected to carry clandestine kisses and illicit fondlings between men and women in the noble houses who were flirting or having affairs.

That task could be hazardous, but jesters or professional fools could be required to carry out duties that were even more dangerous. On the battlefield one of their roles was to carry messages between the leaders of warring armies and sometimes the enemy did 'kill the messenger' and often in particularly nasty ways.

Fools certainly earned their wages. It was serious game they had to play.

APPLE DAY AT COPPED HALL by Adèle Geras

Once upon a time, O Best Beloved, there was no email. People sent one another postcards. The photograph below shows a caryatid at Copped Hall. One of the first cards sent to me by Linda Newbery, who's been a friend since the mid-1980s, carried a similar image.  This is my photograph but the one Linda sent had been taken by her mother, Iris Newbery, a wonderful photographer and one of the volunteers who, over the last 17 years,  has been responsible for the resurrection of Copped Hall from the ruin it was until quite recently.  Iris  often takes the photographs for the Friends of Copped Hall's calendar and Linda has sent me each one as it appeared. 

 The caryatids greet you as you go into the gardens. Opposite them are their male equivalents, the Telemons, see below. On October 9th, Linda took me and Jon Appleton and  Christian Keys       to Apple Day at the house, and for me it was like fiction coming to life, a sort of dream come true.

Linda's novel, THE SHELL HOUSE, (pub 2002)  features Copped Hall, though in a state far removed from its present condition. Linda changed things, as novelists often do and has added a grotto and a lake to the landscape,  but this was the place that inspired her.  I  love the book and I've wanted to visit Copped Hall for a long time.

Below is the view that greets you when you come up the  long drive. Copped Hall has been a place of habitation for several centuries.   From 1150, there have been families here, farming the land, building, and right up until the fire of 1917, it has been a home.  The Cranfields, the `Conyers and most recently the Wythes added to the original structure, made gardens, erected statues and created a house that could be seen from the surrounding countryside. Copped Hall overlooks three valleys and is a perfect example of a dwelling in a landscape - something that appeals deeply to the British. 

 Below is the present day façade of the house. After the fire in May, 1917, the Wythes did not restore the mansion. In 1952, the estate was sold and things from the mansion (staircases,  leadwork, gates, railings etc) were dispersed to dealers and others. One of the most touching things about the resurrection of Copped Hall is the effort being made to retrieve these items from the places they went to and a great many of them have been returned and put back where they used to be. After 1952, the gardens went to rack and ruin and there were also problems with vandalism.

It was clear to us, walking round the gardens, that archaeological work is still being done. Here is a photo of the excavation which hopes to uncover some of the Elizabethan remains discovered  on the estate.

In  1988 a group led by architect Alan Cox  got together to fight a proposal to put up offices on the land in the 1990s.  They won and the scheme was rejected.  They became the Friends of Copped Hall with the aim of buying the property and restoring it to its former glory. They gained support both locally and nationally for their principles.

Below is a picture of the Walled Garden, a place of supreme order and beauty. In the last fifteen years, it has changed from the tangled, messy jungle the original volunteers found when they took it over.  Iris Newbery has been a volunteer for many years and remembers these days very well. She is now nearly 91, but still volunteering. On the day we visited, she was in the office, in a gallery above the shop,  fretting over a printer which wasn't behaving properly. The laminator was also, she felt, on the brink of causing trouble.  She and others have each had a task that they've undertaken enthusiastically day after day, week after week, in all weathers. They have made an orderly paradise out of what was once a ruin and seeing it on a beautiful October day you realise how much work was involved. 

Here is one of the glasshouses. They were nothing but metal skeletons when the volunteers arrived to start the work.

And below is a heap of collected  bits of the decorative border to one of the paths which will be put back together again one day. Nothing that's rescued is thrown away. Everything that is found or bought from other owners is used imaginatively and intelligently.

And here is the gate of the Walled Garden. 

While the garden was being restored, work on the house was also continuing. The rooms of the mansion are still not exactly as they were. You can see bare walls, and roof beams and exposed areas which will one day be covered, but the soul of each room is there already. Here's the kitchen.

Here is what will one day be a most beautiful staircase. The Friends of Copped Hall are seeking money to restore it, bit by bit. Every little helps, as they say, and on Apple Day they displayed a number which people could text to donate even small sums and earmark them for this staircase. That's what I'm going to do with my donation because my photograph doesn't fully convey how wonderful it looks.

Here in one of the bedrooms is a dress displayed in a creative way which enables you to imagine previous owners, standing at the window. I'm a sucker for dressmakers' dummies and this is a particularly lovely outfit in front of a very nice view.

And this is a model of the house which is also a money box. You can put your notes and coins into a hole in the roof!

And here is another part of the garden.

Finally, what made Copped Hall extra enchanted for me was this discovery: it was where A Midsummer Night's Dream was performed for the very first time. You would have to go far to find a more perfect venue for such an occasion.

There's a website. It's at www.coppedhalltrust.org.uk 

The Hall hosts a great many cultural and educational events, though it's not open very often. It's best to look on the website if you want to visit, but I can promise you will love it. The volunteering continues into the catering too. I saw, (though I didn't eat) ranks of delicious - looking home- made cakes but I can vouch for a terrific veg and nut roast and salad.  50 p bought me Margaret Gervis's recipes for Mincemeat Cake and Tea Loaf on both sides of one piece of A5, beautifully laminated by Iris Newbery's laminator when it was in tip top condition...

Sat Nav -- 1908-style by Sheena Wilkinson

My iPhone map app updated today and now contains singularly useless – to me – information about transport in Japan.  I find no charm in this unasked for, space-hogging data.  

But I find a great deal of charm in this little book.

I found it, appropriately enough, in a National Trust bookshop – Contour Road Book of Ireland 1908. The Edwardian equivalent of a sat-nav, I suppose. Pocket-sized, designed primarily for the cyclist though inevitably of interest to the early motorist, its 250 pages contain lists of routes with details of each road’s gradients, surface and notes on anything of interest along the way.

It’s cute, with its gilt-edged tissue-thin India paper and cross-sections of 2,000 hills, but it’s also fascinating and revelatory, about much more than the state of the roads.   The Preface explains why this volume took ‘eight years to prepare’: ‘Great difficulties have been encountered … as the Maps of Ireland, when the work was started, were hopelessly misleading.’ (Interested readers might seek out Brian Friel’s play Translations for more on that subject.)

Some of the entries read like found poems:

LONDONDERRY TO LETTERKENNY

Description: Class II.

The road has excellent surface,

though with a tendency to be bumpy

for the first 3m;

after that it is better.

The road commands some fine views

of the Donegal mountains.

Irish milestones.

Irish milestones? Ah yes, ‘Some of these are Irish Miles and some English, but these are nearly all noted in the book. The tourist will find that Counties Dublin, Waterford, Cork, Antrim and Armagh use English; the other counties either have both, or only one or two roads have Irish M.S.’ One Irish mile was one-and-a-half English miles. It’s not that different from today, I suppose, when I drive across the border and exchange the Northern Irish signs in miles for the Republic’s signs in kilometres.

And let’s not forget that in 1908, ‘Irish time is 25 minutes later than Greenwich time, but in cross-channel telegrams the latter is used.’

What about the people? ‘No Englishman or Scotsman can ever understand the feelings that sway an Irishman.’ Ireland in 1908, after all, with Home Rule gathering momentum, was a no less complex than Northern Ireland today: ‘a nation fighting out its own destiny in its own way, handicapped by the very powers that make it loveable.’

The characters in my work-in progress, set in1918, will be travelling some of these roads, climbing some of these hills and wrestling with some of these issues of national destiny. I’m often asked how I do research – I’m sure all History Girls are; and the answer is, in many different ways. But this, the stumbling across little gems which tell us so much more than they meant to, is one of my favourites. There are Contour Road Books of England and Scotland too – I may have to start collecting them.

Trying to Like the Fifth of November by Joan Lennon

I came to the whole 5th of November thing late, as an adult, and let's face it, I'm just not a fan.  It's just too gory and violent and religiously intolerant and, well, pants.  But, 5th of the month's my History Girl slot, so I thought I should try.  Try to find something to say about Guy Fawkes/Gunpowder Plot/Bonfire Night that was a bit more positive.  Off I wandered, from images ...

(Wikipedia)

... to poetry ...   

The Fifth of November

    Remember, remember!
    The fifth of November,
    The Gunpowder treason and plot;
    I know of no reason
    Why the Gunpowder treason
    Should ever be forgot!
    Guy Fawkes and his companions
    Did the scheme contrive,
    To blow the King and Parliament
    All up alive.
    Threescore barrels, laid below,
    To prove old England's overthrow.
    But, by God's providence, him they catch,
    With a dark lantern, lighting a match!
    A stick and a stake
    For King James's sake!
    If you won't give me one,
    I'll take two,
    The better for me,
    And the worse for you.
    A rope, a rope, to hang the Pope,
    A penn'orth of cheese to choke him,
    A pint of beer to wash it down,
    And a jolly good fire to burn him.
    Holloa, boys! holloa, boys! make the bells ring!
    Holloa, boys! holloa boys! God save the King!
    Hip, hip, hooor-r-r-ray!

English Folk Verse (c.1870) from Poem of the Week.  


... to North American history ...

In 1775, when the Continental Army was trying to form an alliance with Catholic French Canadians to help throw out the British, George Washington found out how his troops were planning to celebrate "Pope Night".  You can hear his exasperation in the orders that ensue:

“As the Commander in Chief has been apprized of a design form’d for the observance of that ridiculous and childish custom of burning the Effigy of the pope—He cannot help expressing his surprise that there should be Officers and Soldiers in this army so void of common sense, as not to see the impropriety of such a step at this Juncture; at a Time when we are solliciting, and have really obtain’d, the friendship and alliance of the people of Canada, whom we ought to consider as Brethren embarked in the same Cause. The defence of the general Liberty of America:

“At such a juncture, and in such Circumstances, to be insulting their Religion, is so monstrous, as not to be suffered or excused; indeed instead of offering the most remote insult, it is our duty to address public thanks to these our Brethren, as to them we are so much indebted for every late happy Success over the common Enemy in Canada.”

(Quotation source: General orders for 5 Nov 1775, George Washington Papers, American Memory Project of the Library of Congress.

Image source: Washington portrait from the collections of The Bostonian Society/Old State Museum.)


... to cartoons ...

Punch magazine, November 1850 

a commentary on the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England

(Wikipedia)

It wasn't going well.  And then I read this, from Mary Poppins' author P. L. Travers, writing in 1943 about the ban on Guy Fawkes Day celebrations because of the blackout.

"Since 1939, however, there have been no bonfires on the village greens. No fireworks gleam in the blackened parks and the streets are dark and silent. But this darkness will not last forever. There will some day come a Fifth of November — or another date, it doesn't matter — when fires will burn in a chain of brightness from Land's End to John O' Groats. The children will dance and leap about them as they did in the times before. They will take each other by the hand and watch the rockets breaking, and afterwards they will go home singing to the houses full of light...."

Bonfire Night linked to thoughts of hope and freedom from war - at last, something I could like!  And then I realised that I had never, in fact, read a Mary Poppins book.  So I got hold of Mary Poppins Opens the Door (Chapter One:  The Fifth of November) and I read it.  And now I have a new pet hate.  That woman!  The way she mistreats those children - introducing them to wonders and then trying to make them think they hadn't seen what they'd just seen - psychological damage much?  But that's a dislike for another day.

Other History Girls musings on this particular day can be found from Gillian Polack here, Celia Rees here, and Sue Purkiss here - they do a much better job of making it interesting, but that's me done with it, till 5th November next year ...

Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.
Silver Skin.

Tudor Coney-Catchers and Modern Scammers - by Katherine Langrish

A few years ago on holiday in Paris, my daughter and I were walking along the Seine from the Musée D’Orsay (we’d hoped to get in, but the staff were on strike), heading for the pedestrian bridge that crosses the Seine to the Jardins des Tuileries, when a woman walking a few paces ahead of us suddenly exclaimed, bent down and stood up with a gold ring in her hand.  Eyes wide with amazement she turned to us, and asked us (in French) if we thought it was real gold?  

She passed it to me. My daughter and I examined it. It looked real. There was a hallmark on it. It seemed to be a man’s wedding ring. I passed it back. ‘Whatever shall I do with it?’ the woman asked. ‘Take it to the police?’I suggested. It seemed a long shot that anyone would claim it... ‘No I don’t have time’ the woman declared. She hesitated, seemed to make up her mind. She pressed it into my hand.  ‘Take it! I don’t want it! You keep it!’

‘Oh we couldn’t,’ I said, but she smiled brilliantly: ‘No no – it’s a bit of good luck!  Do what you like with it!  Bonne chance! Bonne journée!’ She started to walk away. My daughter and I glanced at each other in consternation. A gold ring? What were we to do with it?  We didn’t even know where to find a police station! Then the woman turned back. ‘But – if you have any spare change – some money for a meal...?’

Light dawned. I said to my daughter in English, ‘It’s a scam.’ But it had been so clever, so well-acted, I had to grin. The woman saw; she grinned too, but her hand was out and her eyes were fixed on my face.  I opened my purse and gave her a couple of Euros – enough for a coffee – which she took without fuss. We kept the ring as a cheap souvenir and crossed the bridge.  A hundred metres along the other bank, another woman waved at us. ‘Regardez ce que j’ai trouvee! - Look what I’ve found! A ring!  Is it real, do you think?’ We laughed at her and passed on. 

Paris that day was bursting with women doing the ring trick and clearly the way it was supposed to work – and must actually have worked a significant proportion of the time – was by a form of emotional blackmail. The victims examine the ring, find the hallmark and pronounce it real. A ‘valuable’ ring is then ‘gifted’ to them, plunging them into confusion. The request for money, an apparent after-thought, takes them by surprise and is hard to refuse. Some people may well have paid the scammer a fair percentage of what they felt the ring was ‘worth’... Last time I went to Paris, the scam of the moment seemed to be card tricks – men doing ‘Find the Lady’ on the Rive Gauche and under the Eiffel Tower, surrounded by small crowds of the fascinated and unwise, who may later have discovered their pockets had been picked.  

There is nothing new under the sun. I feel sure the ring trick was probably being played in Babylon and Ninevah. Certainly in Tudor England, the honest countryman coming into London on business was in grave danger of being fooled and robbed. The journalist Robert Greene wrote an exposé of them in his 1591 pamphlet  ‘A Notable Discoverie of Cozenage’. ‘Cozenage’ means ‘trickery’, and the scams were known as ‘Cony-catching’.  The conies, or rabbits, were the simple victims. The coney-catchers were the gangs of scamsters.  Here’s some of what Greene had to tell of their methods and how they struck up an acquaintance with their victims!

The cony-catchers, apparelled like honest civil gentlemen or good fellows, with a smooth face, as if butter would not melt in their mouths, after dinner when the clients are come from Westminster Hall and are at leisure to walk up and down Paul’s, Fleet Street, Holborn, the Strand ... these cozening companions attend only to spy out a prey; who, as soon as they see a plain country fellow, well and cleanly apparelled, either in a coat of homespun russet or of frieze ... and a side-pouch at his side – ‘There is a cony,’ saith one. At that word out flies the setter [‘the party that takes up the cony’, who ‘sets him up’]. And overtaking the man, begins to salute him thus: 

‘Sir, God save you, you are welcome in London! How doth all our good friends in the country? I hope they be all in health?’ The countryman, seeing a man so courteous he knows not, half in a brown study at this strange salutation, perhaps makes him this answer: ‘Sir, all our friends in the country are well, I thank God; but truly I know you not. You must pardon me.’

‘Why sir,’ saith the setter, guessing by his tongue [accent] what countryman he is, ‘are you not such a countryman?’ If he say ‘Yes’ then he creeps upon him closely. If he say ‘Nay’, then straight the setter comes over him thus: ‘In good sooth sir, I know you by your face... I pray you, if without offence, let me crave your name and the place of your abode.’  The simple man straight tells him where he dwells, his name and who be his next neighbours, and what gentlemen dwell about him. 

In these days of internet fraud, you may well wince. It was no different then, for Greene goes on to tell how the setter, having learned all he can, cunningly apologises: 

‘...Hold me excused, I took you for a friend of mine, but since by mistaking I have made you slack your business, we’ll drink a quart of wine or a pot of ale together’. If the fool be so ready as to go, then the cony is caught; but ... if he smell a rat by his clawing, and will not drink with him, then away goes the setter and discourseth to the verser [‘he that playeth the game’] the name of the man, the parish he dwells  in, and what gentlemen are his near neighbours. With that, away goes [the verser], and, crossing the man at some turning, meets him full in the face and accosts him thus: 

‘What, Goodman Barton, how fare all our friends about you? Why, I am such a man’s kinsman, your neighbour not far off. How doth this or that good gentleman, my friend? Good Lord, that I should be out of your remembrance.  I have been at your house divers times.’

On this, the countryman, too embarrassed to admit he has forgotten this ‘neighbour’, is persuaded to go for a drink in an ale-house, where ‘ere they part, they make him a cony and so ferret-claw him at cards, that they leave him as bare of money as an ape of a tail.’ 

Greene’s pamphlet, which goes into much detail on this and many other scams, was immensely popular, though it got him into some danger: in his follow-up pamphlet ‘The Second Part of Cony-Catching’, 1592, he claims that:

These cony-catchers, these vultures, these fatal harpies that putrefy with their infections the flourishing estate of England ... stand upon their bravadoes ... swearing by no less that their enemies’ blood, even by God Himself, that they will make a massacre of his bones, and cut off my right hand, for penning down their abominable practices.  But alas for them, poor snakes! ... every thunder-clap hath not a bolt, nor every cony-catcher’s oath an execution. I live still, and I live to display their villanies, which, Gentlemen, you shall see set down in most ample manner in this small treatise. 

'Robert Greene in Death's Livery' from John Dickenson's 'Greene in conceipt' (1598)

Be that as it may, Greene died the same year on 3 September 1592, aged only 34. He died not from violence (we’d probably have known about that) but, according to scholar and rival pamphleteer Gabriel Harvey, from ‘a surfeit of pickle herring and Rhenish wine’.  The rather spiteful Harvey also claimed in his ‘Four Letters and Certain Sonnets’, December 1592, that Greene kept a mistress, "a sorry ragged quean” and  the sister of a criminal known as "Cutting Ball" hanged at Tyburn.  If true, then the ‘Cony-Catching’ pamphlets were truly drawn from the low-lifes with whom Greene and many another minor Elizabethan writer knocked about. They are vivid and amusing pictures of the rough streets, ale-houses and back-alleys of Tudor London.