Masks were an important element of seasonal play in all the countries of medieval Europe. Evidence for this goes back well before the Middle Ages: the first records of popular masking games come from the Kalends New Year celebrations of the end of the Roman Empire. They remain largely a winter affair: by the later Middle Ages on the Continent they flourished during the extended carnival season; in Britain, where the pre-Lenten Carnival never seems to have taken real hold, during the midwinter celebration of the Twelve Days of Christmas. It is in these popular festivities that we find the most flamboyant and most participatory of late medieval masking practices.
They are not always easy to reconstruct: popular masking was informal, the province largely of ordinary people whose customs were transmitted through generations and communities by imitation, not writing. Yet it seems clear that for a thousand years or more in mainland Europe there was a long and apparently unbroken tradition of winter festivity which frequently included popular masking games; that at some time this spilled over into Britain; and that there were many similarities in customs which largely ignored the in any case shifting national boundaries.
But this should not blind us to their significant differences, at different times and in different areas of Europe; or even that a custom may die and be re-invented. We have learned to suspect the antiquity of folk customs which often turn out to have been ‘revived’ by enthusiastic vicars in the later nineteenth century. Social historians, especially of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, have discovered that the history of ‘folk traditions’ is far more complicated and discontinuous than is popularly thought.1 There is no reason to believe that it was any different in the Middle Ages. Current critical attitudes emphasise the elusive nature of experience, and ask us to be specific about time and place, and the nature and contexts of our evidence. Recorded evidence has regained primacy over folk memory.
The problem with the written evidence for the earlier periods is not so much that it is sparse, which it is, but that its significance has been taken for granted. Much of it was amassed over a century ago by scholars in the great nineteenth-century anthropological tradition. Even now, research on this period has to start at E.K. Chambers’ Medieval Stage, still an impressively solid and encyclopaedic treasure-house of material. But these scholars had an agenda, to demonstrate the underlying identity of all European folk custom, and its roots in a pagan ritual past. Every card-indexed2 excerpt, every modern custom, was fitted painstakingly but a-historically into this construction. The individual pieces of evidence are still coloured more deeply than we realise by their assumptions. Our first task has to be to go back and look at them in context, when our perception of what they tell us can shift quite radically.
Working on this area in particular re-emphasises how much the nature and even the existence of evidence depends on the nature and preoccupations of written records, and the mind-set of their medieval authors. It also throws up the problem of silence. There are places where we have to say, ‘There is no evidence for this’. This may present a mutilated version of the irrecoverable reality, but it is more honest than patching it over with speculative fantasy. This problem is particularly acute in our first chapter. The Anglo-Saxons have left no written evidence for any kind of masking activity except that associated with the arts of war. We simply do not know whether anything else existed and, if not, how and why masking, in our own terms, ‘spilled over’ from the Continent.
English masking was by no means a simple extension of Continental practices. Yet the European context is important. Late medieval Britain was far from insular. It had been conquered and settled at least twice. It is quite possible that many of the urban customs for which we have records were adopted or modified because of trade and even tourism. Others are connected with the international Church. The English court adopted masking entertainments from its aristocratic European neighbours as well as adapting home-grown popular customs. Some ‘folk’ customs may equally have percolated downwards through the social scale.3 Lastly, literature, and eventually the theatre, plays a part in spreading knowledge and possibly even imitation of exotic customs. Shakespeare recreates continental masking games, in Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado about Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, Love’s Labour’s Lost, as well as home-grown ones in Henry VIII and The Merry Wives of Windsor, from a variety of popular romances and chronicles if not from personal experience. By the late sixteenth century he seems able to expect his audience to be as familiar, if vicariously, with the forms and etiquette of carnival in Verona or Venice as with the disguisings of the Tudor court. English practices may have differed in detail, but they patently belong to the wider context of European masking.
Notes
1 See Ronald Hutton The Stations of the Sun for a recent review of this topic.
2 This is of course a deliberate anachronism. The card index was first invented c. 1900.
3 The hobby horse may be an imitation of tournament gear; the London citizens often hired the costumes for ‘masks’ as wedding entertainments from the court.