Courtly entertainment at this period is characterised by fluidity of form, the apparent irrelevance of generic boundaries. It has long been recognised that ‘Plays, pageants, tournaments, disguisings, dances, interludes and mummeries all developed together, and with much mutual interchange both of theme and form’.1 Although this often makes it difficult for us to distinguish the different elements involved in courtly disguising games, it is clear that within them significantly separate patterns developed which exploited different masking possibilities. One of these involves the transformation of a popular custom that we have already explored: mumming.
As we have seen, the popular urban custom of mumming involved a night-time visit to a household by a band of strangely dressed and masked mummers, who would challenge the householders to a game of dice, hoping to win money or at least food and drink. Ideally the visitors would not speak in order that they ‘sholde nott be knowen’ by either face or voice.2 These visiting mummers have neither past nor future: they come out of the night and disappear into it again. The pleasure of the custom seems to have involved the fearful delight of the strange visitation, the edge of danger but potential good fortune in the disguised challenge to a game of luck, the licence endowed or enhanced by the mask. The mumming was adopted as a court entertainment; but the courtly context inevitably alters the relationship between mummers and ‘audience’, even though apparently the same sequence of actions is performed.
The earliest recorded exploitation of this informal folk custom is the famous visit on 25 January 1377 of the Commons of London to the ten-year-old Prince Richard, soon to be Richard II.3 A cavalcade of 130 citizens rode through London to Kennington degisement arrayes … pur moummere (‘disguizedly aparailed … to goe on mumming’), lavishly costumed as 48 squires, lour faces covertes od visers bien et avenablement faitz (‘their faces covered with vizerds well and handsomly made’), 48 knights, an Emperor, a Pope, 24 Cardinals, and viii ou x arraiez ode visers nayrs come deblers nyent amyables, apparauntz come legates (‘8 or 10 arayed and with black vizerdes like devils appering nothing amiable, seeming like legates’).4 At Kennington they dismounted, and the prince and his court entered the hall where the mummers challenged them by signs to the traditional game of dice. But the
diz furount subtilement faitz issint qe come le prince ietast il deveroit gayner; et les ditz iuers et mummers metterount al prince troys iuels chescune apres autre, une pelit dor, une cupe dor et une anel dor; les queux le dit prince gayna a troys iettes come fust ordine …
dice were subtilly made so that when ye prince shold cast he shold winne and ye said players and mummers set before ye prince three jewels each after other: and first a balle of gould, then a Cupp of Gould, then a gould ring ye which ye said prince wonne at three castes as before it was appointed …
Once the dicing was over the prince called for wine and music:
et le prince et les seignours dauncerount dun part et les mummers dautre part par longe tenps et puis beverount et pristrent conge et despartirent devers Loundres.
and ye prince and the lordes danced on ye one syde and ye mummers on ye other a great while and then they dronck and tooke their leaue and so departed toward London.
We have here all the elements of the traditional urban mumming, but the scale, the social context, and the resultant formality transform the custom. This not an impromptu visit but a spectacular planned entertainment. The costumes are far from ad hoc and random, theatrically designed in strikingly matching sets, and made of silk and sendal bien arraiez (‘exellently arrayed’). The mounted torch-lit procession, which brought out a crowd of spectators, resembles the masked tournament parades of Edward III rather than a wandering band of anonymous revellers. The dice-play is equally transformed. Instead of being loaded in favour of the mummers, these dice are made to favour the host. They turn the game of chance into a graceful way of making a New Year’s gift while implying that Richard is the favourite of Fortune. This is also the first recorded mumming which features dancing, that staple of courtly entertainment, although it is worth noting that mummers and courtly household dance separately from each other before the mummers disappear, seemingly masked as they had come.
This poaching of a traditional form modifies its meaning without changing its structure. The relationship of mummers to mummed is altered. These mummers are no longer predatory strangers but come to give rather than to get. Though they are masked, and individually unrecognisable, the court must have known who they were as a group, and at least some of the household must have been prepared for their coming. In a private mumming the power belongs to the mummer, with the householder at a disadvantage; here this plays in counterpoint to the hierarchical relationship of prince to commons which all parties know underlies the fiction. The raw excitement of the encounter with unexpected and weirdly dressed guests is tempered by the formality of the occasion. Any sense of personal threat is clearly playful, in spite of the devil masks.
With all its conscious splendour and role-playing, this mumming nonetheless offers a recognisable version of the domestic game. However, its heightened theatricality draws particular attention to the fictional narrative implicit in its structure. Many games and folk customs contain the seed of a narrative: the simple factors of disguise, encounter, competition, exchange, departure, can be read as episodes in a short story. (The same is true of the patterns of dancing, which can easily develop into implicit or mimetic narrative.) This particular masking game has a marked dramatic shape which implicitly suggests a strong and intriguing story-line. In adapting it as an entertainment the London mummers have drawn attention to this fictional scenario. Into the festive Christmas court erupts a visitation from supposedly unknown, certainly unrecognisable, and strikingly strange beings. The visitors, representatives of an unknown ‘other’ world, make a challenge to involve the king and court in a game of chance, a game in which all might be won – or lost. The household is bound by the rules both to play and to extend hospitality in exchange for the entertainment. In this case it is a good-luck visit in every sense: the household wins. Having conferred this good fortune, the visitors, apparently still unrecognised, take their leave and go back to the other world from whence they came.
The direct narrative fiction implicit in the game is further fictionalised by the court setting. The social fiction dictates that both sides should act as if the game were a normal folk-custom. The unexpected visit cannot be not entirely unexpected, but everyone must behave as if it were; the mummers are neighbours, but must be treated as total strangers; the game of chance has been rigged, but no-one must notice. This courteous role-playing is superimposed upon the generic willingness to join in without which the whole game would collapse, for the conduct of the game is itself a fiction of a different sort, which depends upon collusion between both parties. This then creates a metatheatrical fiction, for the audience is well aware that they too are acting a role, enacting themselves encountering the mummers. The theatricalisation of the court setting emphasises the conscious sophistication of this double vision.
Once consciously fictionalised like this, the mumming narrative nests elegantly into parallel courtly literary fictions. Just as the tournament lent itself to Arthurian fantasies, the ‘otherworldly visitor’ of the mumming meshes neatly with the familiar Arthurian motif of ‘the hostile challenger at the feast’.5 But what is a game, a fiction, in real life can become a reality in fiction. Moreover literary fiction can take the unexpressed sense of hostility and threat lurking beneath the surface of the mumming game, and make it explicit.
We find this in what is probably the most famous Christmas visit in medieval English literature. The arrival of the Green Knight at Arthur’s revelling court in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is recognisably structured as a mumming.6 The eruption of the unknown, weirdly dressed, and unpredictable being from a world beyond the civilised court, challenging the security of the household to interact with the stranger in a game of chance, uncannily echoes the primitive challenge involved in a popular mummers’ visit. But the Gawain poet is aware of the complex resonances and shifting point of view that the event acquires in a courtly setting. He goes out of his way to stress its theatricality. The Green Knight is no ordinary vilains. He is dressed as ‘disguisedly’ as any member of a disguising or tournament team, in furs, gold, silks, and embroidery, his horse costumed to match with embroidered and enamelled trappings. His green face with flowing hair and beard echoes many a masking vizard: compare the wildmen with ‘bodies, heddes, faces, handes, and legges, covered with grene Sylke flosshed’ in one of the disguisings accompanying Henry VIII’s 1511 tournament, and the more closely contemporary wodewoses of Edward III and the Bal des Ardents.7 Even the beheading and its animatronic sequence would have been possible to arrange theatrically.8
Like Richard’s mummers the Green Knight enters the hall abruptly, unheralded yet half-expected as Arthur waits for ‘sum aventurous thyng’, offering them a ‘Crystemas gomen’ with a tangible prize, ‘thys giserne ryche’.9 With the licence of a mummer,10 he initiates the competition on his own terms, and the theatrical rules of the encounter demand that the challenge is accepted even though this game involves not chance, but apparently certain death. The rules of probability are dissolved, this time not by benevolent conjuring with weighted dice to affirm the royal self-image, but by a suspension of the laws of nature in which everything becomes uncertain, even the very values by which the court identifies itself. Yet throughout everyone continues to talk in terms of game and entertainment. Even when the Green Knight withdraws, as mysterious and unknowable as when he came, Arthur insists on interpreting what has happened at the level of a mumming, ‘wel bycommes such craft upon Cristmasse’.11
The poet’s creation of the opening fitt suggests a familiarity with just such a Christmas courtly mumming as Prince Richard encountered,12 and its complex shifts between self-conscious game and underlying psychological challenge. He transfers this to a fictional world where the sense of threat and challenge can have real results. In the Arthurian world, ‘fantoum and fayrye’ are, if not everyday, at least possible.13 Yet the anatomical details of the beheading are realistic, and it is done with a real weapon. Arthur’s court are presented as real people, reacting realistically. The sense of shifting focus present in the theatrical mumming becomes a destabilising force in the dynamic of the poem.
There was, however, a further dimension yet to the mumming of 1377. Like Edward III’s 1343 tournament procession of the Pope and Cardinals, it had a political subtext – indeed several of them.14 On the surface the mumming was a purely complimentary fiction: the two highest-ranking figures in Christendom, Pope and Emperor, ride to pay homage to the young heir to the throne. Yet there is the odd detail of the diabolical papal legates: although the Pope, like the Emperor,15 seems benign, the legates are specifically masked ‘like devils appering nothing amiable’. The official report of the Parliament opened three days later reveals that, besides the perennial grievances about papal provisions, the Pope, a Frenchman himself, was thought to have engineered the current truce with France specifically so that the enemy might re-arm under its cover.16 But since it would not be fitting to lampoon the Pope himself, the opprobrium is saved for the papal legates, caricatured by the diabolical black masks.
This relatively safe satire is in fact only one layer of the complex political implications carried by the mumming. By the end of 1376 relations between the City and central government were very tense. The City was in turmoil: several prominent magnates had been impeached for fraud in the Good Parliament,17 and an internal power struggle had forced through a major reorganisation of the local electoral system. London was jealous of its chartered rights of self-determination, and nervous about anyone who might encroach on them. There was always the spectre that the king, or his deputy, might make an excuse of dissension or disorder to ‘take the City into his hand’.18
Meanwhile the reign of Edward III was ending in uncertainty and suspicion, with the succession in question. The Black Prince had died in June leaving only a nine-year-old son, Richard of Bordeaux. The effective ruler of the kingdom was the king’s oldest surviving son, John of Gaunt.19 The City’s nervousness focused on Gaunt who was frequently at loggerheads with them. Ugly rumours began to circulate that he was planning to poison the prince and take the crown for himself.20
Gaunt responded. A reactionary parliament was summoned for Tuesday 27 January 1376/7, at which the Prince of Wales, now ten, presided from the throne as the King’s deputy.21 Gaunt went out of his way to demonstrate conspicuous loyalty to his brother’s son. It was a public relations coup: the chroniclers record immense popular enthusiasm for this golden boy whose innocence was to bring a fresh start to the kingdom.22 The Chancellor’s opening speech to Parliament drew on the Prince’s recent Epiphany birthday to link him with the Christ-Child.23 They were urged to honour him in the same way as les trois Rois de Coloigne firent al Filz Dieux (‘the Three Kings of Cologne did to the Son of God’). The Chancellor interpreted the Magi’s gifts as symbols of the subjects’ loyalty to their prince, though gold, in the practical form of the poll-tax, was paramount.
The mumming at Kennington had preceded the opening of Parliament by only two days. The contrived giving of three gifts may well be a graceful reference to the Prince’s Epiphany birthday,24 but at this particular political moment it also has an important symbolic function. Though disguised as a New Year’s present, it appears to anticipate the inaugural gift-ceremonies of a Royal Entry, which were often also based on the liturgy of this season.25 By their mumming the Londoners are thus presenting a pre-emptive fealty, demonstrating their loyalty to their king-in-waiting before it is asked. How far this was intended as a snub to Gaunt can only be guessed.
The structure of the mumming fiction also hints at a rather more provocative power-play. The traditional mumming is a visit from one autonomous group (the mummers) to another (the household).26 Mounted with this magnificence and with these particular characters, the Londoners’ mumming, rather than being deferentially complimentary, almost suggests a state visit from a sovereign power. There is a political subtext to this more immediate and potentially disturbing than the overt and safe anti-papal satire.27 At times of crisis over the succession, the Londoners had assumed the not-quite-constitutional privilege of, if not choosing, at any rate confirming the choice of a king.28 In the following months they pointedly stressed the special relationship between themselves and Richard, while he in turn enthusiastically took up the role of Prince of Peace and forced through a reconciliation between the City and Gaunt.29 Whether the mumming was understood at the time, by participants or observers, as asserting the City’s autonomy in this way is impossible to tell. But the very fact that it found its way into the Anonimalle Chronicle in such detail suggests that it was recognised as significant.
It is interesting that something as inexplicit as a mumming could be so politically eloquent. It is unlikely that all courtly mummings would carry such a weight of significance, but on at least one occasion the 1377 gesture was repeated and recorded by the chroniclers as if it were more than just an entertainment. At Christmas 1392/3, following the confrontation and reconciliation between Richard and the City, the Londoners appear to have mounted a similarly lavish propitiatory visit:
Dominus rex tenuit suum Natale aput Eltham; ad quem circa festum Epiphanie venerunt Londonienses glorioso apparatu et presentarunt sibi unum dromedarium cum uno puero sedente super eum: presentaruntque eciam domane regine unam magnam avem et mirabilem, habentem guttur latissimum.30
The king kept Christmas at Eltham, where he was waited upon in great state about the feast of Epiphany by the Londoners and presented by them with a dromedary ridden by a boy: to the queen they gave a large and remarkable bird with an enormously wide gullet.
After their entertainment, the king thanked the Londoners and forgave them a large part of the fine he had demanded. Although the chronicle does not describe this visit as a mumming, account-books record that the City Chamberlain was lent 40s ‘for the mumming at Eltham at Christmas’, and the Mercers paid £3 to supply five mummers.31 Here again, there seems a hidden political agenda, and the mumming gives the King the opportunity of making a grand gesture with solid financial consequences.
The adoption of this popular folk custom by the city dignitaries as a vehicle for compliment and corporate gift-giving continues. The following Christmas the Londoners visited Richard diverso apparatu (‘with different kinds of show’) and presented a marvellous ship full of spices and other gifts.32 At Christmas 1401 we hear that ‘xv Aldermen of London and their sonnes rode in a mumming, and had great thanks’ from Henry IV at Eltham.33 The courtly/civic mumming seems to have provided a format in which two different strata of society or indeed two different centres of power might interact festively. The political agenda was presumably more or less to the fore depending on the context of events.
In the fifteenth century, the fictional scenario implicit in the courtly mumming – the household feast interrupted by a formal visitation from beings from another world – was adopted as a matrix for a range of entertainments. Some of the earlier elements may disappear: the game of chance may vanish, the masking may be replaced by more general disguising, even the silence may be broken by song. Most curiously, it can even acquire a script. Our main evidence for this is a rather problematical set of poems described as ‘mummings’ by their twentieth-century editors on variously certain grounds. Seven are by Lydgate, with one, editorially entitled ‘A Mumming of the Seven Philosophers’, possibly by him.34
The Lydgate poems are grouped together and introduced by detailed and apparently circumstantial rubrics, probably by his fifteenth-century editor John Shirley.35 These range from:
A balade made by daun Iohn Lidegate at Eltham in Cristmasse, for a momyng tofore the kyng and the Qwene
to:
A lettre made in wyse of a balade by Ledegate … of a mommynge, which the goldesmythes of the Cite of London mommed in right fresshe and costelewelych36 desguysing to theyre Mayre Eestfeld, upon Candelmasse day at nyght, affter souper; brought and presented vn to the Mayre by an heraude, cleped Fortune.37
While they all suggest complimentary visits by disguised persons, the nature and status of these poems are by no means clear. Some are for the court, and some for London civic occasions. All but one are in the Christmas season;38 four seem to involve the presentation of gifts by people in costume, and very little else, while three apparently accompany somewhat more complicated dumbshows without gifts.39 They are all in direct address, though this need not itself guarantee performance: so are various other poems by Lydgate which appear to be elaborated tituli for tapestries or wallpaintings,40 and it has been suggested that some were worked up afterwards to commemorate the event.41 Attempts to visualise performance tend to turn them into elaborate pageant-car entries like the later disguisings,42 but there is no proof that much of the detail existed anywhere but in Lydgate’s imagination. Certainly they do not show any marked theatrical sense,43 and their mode is expansively literary: but contemporary taste apparently enjoyed highly wrought and allusive declamations. The common link is that they all seem to be speeches by a Presenter (or Presenters) who acts either as prologue or interpreter to a largely silent show.44
Once the main purpose of ceremonial mumming became the giving of gifts, it abandons the subterfuge of the dice-game. The central action loses its residual edge of unease as uncertain Fortune is replaced by good fortune.45 However, it keeps the basic premise: the mummers are visitants from a world unknown to the society they invade. But once they have become benevolent visitors they cannot be hostile or terrifying. In naturalistic terms, they therefore often become foreigners. We have already noted the enthusiasm in court disguisings for dressing up in the costume of Turks, Russians, Prussians, or Moors.
In this type of mumming, the shock of the unknown and uncanny gives way to a frisson of pleasure at the exotic. The exact identity of Lydgate’s visitors is determined by a scenario which builds on the real-life character and status of givers and recipients, and on the nature of the gifts. The visitors are often envoys of the real gift-givers, who remain in their distant homelands. At Eltham (1424) the classical gods Bacchus, Juno, and Ceres present Christmas gifts of wine, oil, and corn to Queen Katherine and her infant son by the hands of ‘marchandes þat here be’. At the Twelfth Night banquet of 1429 the London Mercers’ Company sends Mayor Eastfield letters purporting to come from Jupiter, by the hand of a pursuivant (presumably dressed as Mercury, god of merchants as well as messenger of the gods), who announces the arrival of other visitors (‘certein estates’) disembarked from merchant ships at anchor in the Thames. In both these cases, the visit is presented as an embassy from a foreign potentate, further enhancing the status of the recipient. The London Goldsmiths, four weeks later, compliment the Mayor with a state visit from King David himself, dancing before the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark, presented to the Mayor as a gift for the City of London, is presumably a piece of goldsmith’s work, though it is stressed that its meaning is ‘boþe heuenly and moral /Apperteyning vn-to good gouuernaunce’.46
The fiction of a royal embassy naturalises the role of the pursuivant or herald. He is also pragmatically necessary. A popular mumming needs no presenter, but once the ceremonial mumming has become a complex artistic confection, it requires explication. If, as we assume, the mummers remain masked and retain at least a vestige of the traditional obligation to silence, they had to acquire the Presenter or Interpreter, the one person who is allowed to speak. There is a ready-made contemporary analogy for this figure in the pageants of the Royal Entry, where the habit of having a custos or expositor who might read and ‘translate’ verses held by characters or pinned to the stage was a well-established convention.47 Kipling suggests that the custos ‘remained outside the action of the show and formed, as it were, a barrier between the King and the actors’; in the mummings he is not so much a barrier as the link and mediator between performers and spectators. In the fiction of the embassy, he is their truchman or interpreter.48 The mummers’ silence is also rationalised: they do not speak because, being foreign, they do not know the English language.
The masking in Love’s Labour’s Lost plays teasingly with the genre. The four young men, disguised as Russians and with ‘Blackamors’ as musicians, attempt to train Moth the page as their ‘herald’; but when the ladies, turning their backs, refuse to behave as a proper audience, he retires discomfited. Rosaline wickedly pretends to set the scenario back on its right course:
What would these strangers? know their minds, Boyet:
If they do speak our language, ’tis our will
That some plain man recount their purposes:
Know what they would.49
Boyet then acts as go-between, faithfully reporting response and counter-response until the joke runs out. Here the mumming scenario mirrors the real-life political situation – the Princess is genuinely the ambassador of her father, the King of France – and the amorous situation, as the men attempt to negotiate a rapprochement with their reluctant mistresses. The formal distance between them, political and amorous, is temporarily bridged but, as in a mumming, the two worlds cannot come together in the time-span of this game, and both sides depart, as the scenario demands, ‘You, that way: we, this way’.50
The ‘embassy’ scenario translates happily to any interaction between fictional kingdoms. The so-called ‘Mumming of the Seven Philosophers’ only really merits the name because it is a speech by a herald from
Senek the sage that kyng ys of desert,
Regent and rewler of all wyldernesse
to the youthful Christmas King of some establishment of learning: possibly, since the manuscript appears to be a London one, from the Inns of Court.51 The realm of the Christmas King was a natural place for this motif to settle. As the role proliferated in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the various ‘kingdoms’ in a city would make processional state visits to each other.52 In London in 1552/3, the Sheriff’s Lord of Misrule received the King’s Lord, and in December 1561 Machyn saw both ‘a lord of mysrulle from Whyttchapell’ and Robert Dudley, the ‘Prince Pallaphilos’ of the Inner Temple, ride through the city.53
The royal court had a Lord of Misrule from Henry VII’s time,54 but the most famous and best documented comes from the court of his grandson. In 1551/2, George Ferrers, a mature courtier, lawyer, MP, and man of letters in his fifties, was appointed by the council as Lord of Misrule to the young king Edward VI.55 The following year he provided the Master of the Revels with a full device of his intentions. His reign was to begin with the statutory embassy:
Vppon Christmas daie I send a solempe ambassade to the kinges Maiestie by an herrald trumpet an orator speaking in a straunge language an // Interpreter or a truchman with hym.56
Their drummers were to be ‘apparelled like turkes garmentes according to the patornes I send you’. The following day Ferrers himself was to arrive by river at Greenwich from his imaginary kingdom:
… where the last yeare [1551/2] my devise was to cum oute of the mone /this yeare I Imagin to cum oute of a place caulled vastum vacuum. I. the great waste /asmoche to saie as a space voyde or emptie withoute the worlde where is neither fier ayre water nor earth /and that I haue bene remayning there sins the Last yeare …57
Despite the Turks’ garments, the unknown realm has changed from the exotic East of the previous century to further-flung kingdoms of the imagination. Perhaps the new explorations had widened horizons. It seems more probable, however, that Ferrers was inspired by the literary voyages and imaginary kingdoms sparked off by Erasmus and More, whose ultimate ancestor was Lucian.58 The Moon was to become a great favourite as the target for celestial voyages with a satirical edge.59 His second choice, the vastum vacuum, is not, as is sometimes assumed, a technical term for ‘outer space’.60 Ferrers’ translation, ‘the great waste’, makes it clear that vacuum is an adjective rather than a noun and that the ‘space voyde or emptie withoute the worlde [universe]’ is not outer space, chaos, or even the empyrean, but Nowhere. In this, as with More’s Utopia (‘No place’),61 he is in the tradition of the Feast of Fools rulers who could date their charters Anno regni regis nulli (‘in the year of the reign of No King’).62 Like those curious creatures the Nusquams, the Nowhere People, who appear as a mask in the Revels inventory for 1560,63 the Lords of Misrule are kings of Never Never Land. It is an interesting reversion to the tantalising dislocation of the original mummers, except that here the enigma has become a conscious paradox and play on words. Anonymity has become a naming as nothing.64
Here the mumming tradition meshes with the continental Fool tradition.65 Like the Inns of Court Christmas Kings, Ferrers as Lord of Misrule assembled a complete replica royal household. We do not know precisely how this court interacted with the real one, or what role the real King played during the reign of the mock one. Ferrers seems mainly to have organised feats of activity – jousts, hunts, disguisings – which would have kept him performing rather than presiding. Nor is it clear if he wore the traditional mask of the mummer. The Revels accounts for 1551/2 enter 20d ‘for gyldinge of a vyser for the lorde of Mysrule occupied in his playe before the king’,66 but this may have been for the mock joust which, judging from Edward’s Diary, was what impressed the King most.67
Meanwhile ordinary folk mummings continued (despite the many statutes issued suppressing them), and the form remained as a resource. Our last example is much closer in form to the original, but again taken over by the court and transformed, because the ‘visit’ is a fiction, and the head of the household actor rather than audience.
As we have seen, the young Henry VIII was an enthusiastic performer, whether at jousting, music, or dancing. He seemed to find particular pleasure in the sense of surprise, wonder, and admiration created by impromptu performance. In the first year of his reign Hall records him erupting into the Queen’s chamber disguised as Robin Hood with his company. Katherine’s reaction seems a perfect response:
… the Quene, the Ladies, and al other there, were abashed, aswell for the straunge sight, as also for their sodain commyng, and after certain daunces, and pastime made, thei departed.68
PLATE 19: A blue version of the white disguising in PLATE 17, but with the dancers dressed as Hungarians, and the game of mumchance in progress on the High Table. The ‘ladies’ sitting on the floor in front of the cupboard wear masks with large blank eyeholes. Simon Bening: Book of Hours (c. 1530), calendar illustration for December.
© Munich: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm lat. 23638 fol. 13v.
This unexpected visit of dancing strangers has elements of the disguising, but translated into the more private domestic context of the mumming. Henry’s frequent use of the form thereafter suggests he found it particularly congenial to his own relationship with his court. On Shrove Sunday, a month after the Robin Hood episode, he and five exotically dressed companions:
… brought in a mommerye. After that the Quene, the lordes, and ladyes, such as would had played [i.e. at dice] the sayd mommers departed, and put of thesame apparel, & after entred into the Chamber, in their usuel apparell.69
Here we have an apparently entirely conventional mumming: disguised strangers enter, challenge the hosts to dice, and disappear again still in disguise. Yet the courtly context again alters what is happening. The costumes were not a strange or monstrous disguise, turning the visitors into unpredictable unknowns: the king and his ‘cumpeer’, the Earl of Essex, were:
… appareled after Turkey fasshion, in long robes of Bawdkin, powdered with gold, hattes on their heddes of Crimosyn Velvet, with greate rolles of Gold, girded with two swordes, called Cimiteries, hangyng by greate bawderikes of gold.
Though the magnificent costumes are traditionally exotic, even heathen, this is disguising display, identifying the strangers clearly as members of the court circle. Recognisable or not, they are friends and equals; and although they do not unmask, they do return ‘in their usuel apparell’ after the mumming.
As with the disguising, this question of identity transforms the courtly mumming. The reporting of these games imply they are significant not in themselves, but because the king himself took part. Although the mummers, in the tradition, do not unmask, there is a strong sense that the identity of at least one of them is extremely important. Consequently the mumming game comes to invite a guessing element: who are these extravagantly disguised strangers, and which one is the king? Instead of the sense of otherness that the mummers traditionally invoke, that the Green Knight symbolises, these mummers imply exotic familiarity, so drawing the spectators’ attention not to the masks, but to the faces behind them. A teasing relationship is established between mask and face.
That the participants were well aware of this and played upon it is apparent from an account of a rather more elaborate royal mumming. George Cavendish, Gentleman Usher of Cardinal Wolsey’s household, describes a visit that follows precisely the traditional mumming form: a band of masked strangers unexpectedly visiting to offer a game of dice.70 (This, probably as adapted by Holinshed, is dramatised by Shakespeare as the setting for Henry’s first meeting with Anne Boleyn, but though he keeps many of its features, there is no dicing, and he turns it into something much more like an amorous masking.) It demonstrates many of the innovations and the self-consciousness of the courtly context; it is plain from the account that everyone knows exactly what roles to play as they carefully enact the unpredictability of a mumming. The Cardinal is giving a banquet. The king arrives by water at York House with a party of mummers, dressed rather improbably as shepherds in crimson satin and cloth of gold ‘wt visors of good proporcion of visonamy, ther heares & beardes other of fynne gold wyers or elles of sylver / And Some beyng of blake sylke’.71 They let off a peal of ordnance and:
the Cardynall desired the seyd lord Chamberleyn & Controller to loke what this soden shot shold mean (As thoughe he knewe no thyng of the matter) They thervppon lokyng owt of the wyndowe in to Temmes retorned agayn & shewed hyme that it Semed to them that there shold be some noble men & strayngers arryved at his brygge As Ambassitors frome some fforrayn prynce / Wt that qd the Cardynall / I shall desier you bycause ye can speke ffrenche to take the paynnes to goo down in to the hall to encounter and to receyve tham accordyng to ther estates And to conducte them in to thys Chamber / where they shall se vs and all thes noble personages syttyng merely [merrily] at our Bankett desyryng them to sitt down wt vs and to take part of our fare & pastyme.72
It is plain that Wolsey knows exactly what is happening, yet plays his allotted role of ignorant surprise. The strangeness of the mummers is then naturalised by the traditional interpretation as ‘foreign ambassadors’, which also allows their silence to be rationalised as ignorance of the language, and instantly creates the role of ‘Interpreter’.
Escorted upstairs, the king’s party saluted the Cardinal:
to whome the lord Chamberlayn (for them) sayd /Syr for as myche as they be strayngers And can speke no Englysshe thay haue desired me to declare vnto yor grace thus / They havyng vnderstandyng of thys yor tryhumphant bankett where was assembled suche nomber of excellent fayer dames / cowld do no lesse vnder the supportacion of yor grace but to repayer hether to vewe as well ther incomperable beawtie as for to accompany them at Mume chaunce And than After to daunce wt them …73
The entertainment is to follow the traditional pattern: a game of dice, followed by dancing. The dicing proceeds in a manner that highlights the tension and theatricality it could engender as the centrepiece of the game:
And to some they lost And of some they won / And this don they retourned vnto the Cardynall wt great reuerence poryng down all the Crownes in the Cuppe wche was abought iic Crownes / at all qd the Cardynall and so cast the dyse And wane them all at a Cast / where at was great Ioy made.74
What happens next is more enigmatic, and worth quoting in some detail as it reveals the participants’ fascination with the new dynamic of the courtly mumming game. The Cardinal asked the Chamberlain:
I pray you qd he shewe them that it semys me howe there shold be among theme some noble man / whome I suppose to be myche more worthy of honor to sitt and occupie this rome & place than I / to whome I wold most gladly (yf I knewe hyme) surrender my place accordyng to my dewtie / than spake my lord Chamberlayn vnto them in ffrenche declaryng my lorde cardynalles mynd And they Roundyng hyme agayn in the eare [‘whispering to him’] / my lord Chamberlayn seyd to my lord Cardynall / Sir they confesse qd he that among them there is suche a noble personage / Among whome if yor grace can appoynt hyme frome the other he is contented to discloos hyme self And to accepte yor place most worthely / wt that the Cardynall takyng a good avysemet among them / at the last / qd he / me Semys the gentilman wt the blake beard shold be evyn he / And wt that he arrose owt of hys chayer and offered the same to the gentilman in the blake beard (wt his Cappe in his hand) The person to whome he offered than his Chayer / was Sir Edward Neveyll A comly knyght of a goodly personage that myche more resembled the kynges person in that Maske than any other / The kyng heryng & perceyvyng the Cardynall so disseyved in his estymacion and choys cowld not forbeare lawyng / but plukked down his visare & mr Neveylles & dasht owt wt suche a pleasaunt Countenaunce & cheare / that all noble estates there assembled seying the kyng to be there amoong them reioysed …75
The king’s identity is known and not known; the spectators are explicitly invited to try to penetrate the mask which teasingly conceals the face beneath. Whether Wolsey’s wrong guess is itself tactful stage-management, or whether it is real (and the concealing effect of mask-and-costume can be surprisingly complete), it is part of a deliberately playful game centring on the identity of the king. These courtly mumming masks neither obliterate the wearer, nor endow a new identity: they conceal, but in concealing they deliberately draw attention to what is hidden. Although in a sense no more than a party game, this mumming seems symptomatic of some of the shifts in sensibility that appear to accompany the Reformation. The mask-play demonstrates a self-conscious awareness of role-play and of masking, and their relationship to identity.76
Notes
1 Anglo ‘Early Tudor Disguising’ 11.
2 Statutes of the Realm 3: 30.
3 The Anonimalle Chronicle 1333 to 1381 edited V.H. Galbraith (Manchester University Press, 1970) 102–3. The translation is from the late-sixteenth-century excerpt in British Library MS Harley 247 fol. 172v (once belonging to John Stow) quoted in Paul Reyher Les Masques anglais (Paris: Hachette, 1909) 499. Another version of the account appears in John Stow A Survey of London edited Charles Kingsford, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908 [reprinted 1971]) 1: 97.
4 Stow misses the point of this in his version of this translation in the Survey, saying ‘as if they had beene Legates from some forrain Princes’ (96). This reflects the way the mumming fantasy was interpreted by his day: see below.
5 See J.A. Burrow A Reading of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965) 17–21.
6 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in Poems of the Pearl Manuscript edited M. Andrew and R. Waldron (London: Edward Arnold, 1978) lines 60–490. The date of the poem is unknown, though Gawain’s armour closely resembles that of the effigy of the Black Prince (d. 1376) in Canterbury Cathedral.
7 Hall Union 517. For the wild men of the famous Bal des Ardents, and the wodewoses of Edward III’s earlier Christmasses, see 144–8.
8 It could well have made use of a false head. The Green Knight is ‘Herre [higher] then ani in the hous by the hede and more’ (line 333), and the flowing beard and hair would conceal the junction. See the chapter on ‘Tournaments’ for the effect. A similar giant-beheading is called for in Redford’s Wit and Science (Tudor Interludes edited Happé 181–219) s.d. at line 963. We may perhaps underestimate the medieval theatrical engineer’s ability to produce such feints: see the mechanical golden angel at Richard’s coronation procession which leaned down and offered him a crown: Walsingham Historia anglicana 332.
9 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight lines 93, 283, and 288.
10 Unlike the mummer, the Green Knight has to speak, since the plot depends on verbal pledges, and the repercussions of the game last longer than the space of the visit.
11 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight line 471.
12 See Michael J. Bennett ‘The Historical Background’ in A Companion to the ‘Gawain’-Poet edited Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Cambridge: Brewer, 1997) 71–90, for the theory that the Gawain Poet was one of the Cheshire retainers attached to the court of Richard in the 1390s. See further Michael J. Bennett Community, Class and Careerism: Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ (Cambridge University Press, 1983). The 1390s would be too late for personal experience of this particular mumming, but see below for later visits of the Londoners to Richard’s court.
13 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight line 240. In Chaucer, stage illusion is sometimes explained as ‘natural magic’, the work of ‘subtile tregetours’, which further blurs the distinction: see the Franklin’s Tale (Canterbury Tales F 1139–51 and 1189–1204).
14 For a more detailed discussion, see Meg Twycross ‘The Londoners’ Mumming of 1377’ forthcoming.
15 Richard was to marry his daughter Anne of Bohemia in January 1382.
16 Rotuli Parliamentorum edited J. Strachey, 6 vols (London, 1766–77) 2: 363, 367. See May McKisack The Fourteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959) 272–95 for a succinct account of the problems.
17 28 April–6 July 1376.
18 Ruth Bird The Turbulent London of Richard II (London: Longmans, Green, 1949).
19 … qui usque ad obitum Regis stetit regni gubernator et rector (‘who remained the governor and ruler of the realm up to the death of the King’): Walsingham 322. The King seemed unwilling to proclaim Richard heir apparent on the death of his father and this only happened, probably at Gaunt’s instigation, in November.
20 Chronicon Angliae 1328–1388 edited E.M. Thompson Rolls Series 64 (1874) 92.
21 Rotuli Parliamentorum 2: 361.
22 See, for example, Walsingham Historia anglicana 331.
23 The speech is reported in full in Rotuli Parliamentorum 2: 361–2.
24 For Richard’s attachment to the Feast of the Epiphany, see Dillian Gordon Making and Meaning of the Wilton Diptych (London: National Gallery Publications, 1993) 57.
25 See Gordon Kipling Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) 117–24.
26 It would thus come under Pettitt’s classification of an Encounter custom where the power lies with the initiator: see ‘Charivary’ 25.
27 The ‘hidden transcript’: see J.C. Scott Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990) for the concept. It has been applied to folk-drama by Max Harris Festivals of Aztecs, Moors, and Christians: Dramatisations of Reconquest in Spain and Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000).
28 May McKisack ‘London and the Succession to the Crown during the Middle Ages’ in Studies in Medieval History presented to F.M. Powicke edited R.W. Hunt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948) 76–89.
29 The Chronicon Angliae reports that Gaunt’s followers ironically said that Richard was not King of England, but ‘King of the Londoners’, because he had been chosen more by the common people and the citizens than by the nobles (199–200).
30 The Westminster Chronicle 1381–1394 edited and translated L.C. Hector and Barbara Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982) 510–11. The bird was presumably a pelican, but the chronicler does not seem to have recognised it as such, missing any symbolic significance it might have had. See Twycross ‘The Londoners’ Mumming’, forthcoming.
31 Caroline Barron ‘The Quarrel of Richard II with London 1392–7’ in The Reign of Richard II edited F.R.H. Du Boulay and Caroline M. Barron (London: Athlone Press, 1971) 173–201; references in note 91.
32 Westminster Chronicle 516 (our translation).
33 Stow Survey of London 97. The king must have had a strong nerve: it was only a year after the assassination attempt sub simulatione ludorum natalitiorum (‘under the guise of Christmas games’) at Windsor: Walsingham Historia anglicana 2: 243. See chapter 4 on ‘Mumming’ 99–100.
34 Manuscript Trinity R.3.19: a Facsimile introduction by Bradford Y. Fletcher (Variorum Chaucer; Norman, Oklahoma: Pilgrim Books, 1987) fols 1r–v. The poem is attributed to Lydgate in a later hand. Text in Rossell Hope Robbins Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952) 110–13.
35 Derek Pearsall John Lydgate (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) 73–8 and 184.
36 Meaning ‘expensive’. We have run this word together, as it looks misleading in its manuscript form of costele welych.
37 The Minor Poems of John Lydgate: part 2 edited Henry MacCracken EETS OS 192 (1934) 668–701. For the ‘Mumming at Hertford’, see Derek Forbes Lydgate’s Disguising at Hertford Castle (Pulborough: Blot, 1998). Two of the poems are described in the rubrics not as ‘mummings’ but as ‘disguisings’.
38 The disguising at London takes place ‘þis Cristmasse’ (line 280). The Goldsmiths’ is at Candlemas. Only Bishopwood is a spring holiday event.
39 Glynne Wickham distinguishes those referred to as ‘mummings’, in which gifts are generally presented, from those designated ‘disguisings’ in which they are not: Early English Stages 195. However the Virtues in the ‘disguising’ of Fortune and the Four Cardinal Virtues may have presented their attributes to the presiding dignitaries of the feast: see lines 315–27.
40 For example, Lydgate Minor Poems 433–8, 623–4, and 649–51.
41 Like Lydgate’s accounts of the Royal Entries of Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou: see Gordon Kipling ‘The London Pageants for Margaret of Anjou’ Medieval English Theatre 4:1 (1982) 5–27.
42 Wickham Early English Stages 200–202; Westfall Patrons and Performance 35–7.
43 It is not clear, for example, whether Juno, Ceres, and Bacchus in the ‘Mumming at Eltham’ are actually present, or are supposed to be potentates in a far-off land who have sent the merchants with their embassy – a more likely scenario.
44 Although one of the poems contains what looks like a direct speech from a performer, the ‘aunswer of the wyves’ in the Hertford entertainment, this is also a ‘bill’ by way of replication which could be delivered by a representative.
45 Fortune is banished for the more dependable virtues in the ‘Mumming at London’. The herald who presents the Goldsmiths’ mumming is called Fortune, but he seems to bring only good fortune.
46 Lines 19–20. It was also a fitting present to mark 2 February, the Feast of the Purification, since the Ark was one of the types of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The parallels are elucidated at length by the Speculum humanae salvationis in the context of the Purification: edited J. Lutz and P. Perdrizet (Leipzig, Hiersemann, 1907) 22. The ‘three thinges which þer inne beo cloos’ are the Tables of the Law (hence the connection with good governance), the gold cup with manna, and Aaron’s rod.
47 Kipling suggests that figures in the Royal Entry pageants did not begin to speak themselves until after the 1445 entry: ‘Margaret of Anjou’ 25 note 8.
48 The word comes from the Arabic turjaman, ‘translator’, which also gives us the word dragoman. Feuillerat Edward VI and Queen Mary 89: ‘an orator speaking in a straunge language an Interpreters or a truchman with hym’; Feuillerat Elizabeth 287.
49 Love’s Labour’s Lost Act 5 Scene 2 lines 175–8.
50 This scene is discussed at more length in chapter 8 on ‘Amorous Masking’.
51 See note 34 above, and Horner ‘Christmas at the Inns of Court’ 46–7.
52 In Cambridge it enabled courtesies between Town and Gown, as the parish Lords visited the colleges: Records of Early English Drama: Cambridge edited Alan H. Nelson, 2 vols (Toronto University Press, 1989) 2: 736. Recorded dates range from 1508/9 to 1552/3.
53 Diary of Henry Machyn 33, 157, 273–4.
54 Sydney Anglo ‘The Court Festivals of Henry VII’ Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 43 (1960–61) 12–45, especially 21–2. For a survey, see Hutton Stations of the Sun 105–11.
55 Feuillerat Edward VI and Queen Mary 56. For Ferrers’ career, see the Dictionary of National Biography and William Baldwin and others The Mirror for Magistrates edited Lily B. Campbell (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1960; reprint of Cambridge University Press, 1938 edition) 25–31.
56 Feuillerat Edward VI and Queen Mary 89.
57 Feuillerat Edward VI and Queen Mary 89.
58 Erasmus published a Latin translation of Lucian’s Icaromenippus in 1514; the True History (of a fantastic voyage to the Moon) had been available in Latin since 1475, and was in the 1538 translation of Lucian’s Complete Works into Latin. See Christopher Robinson Lucian and his Influence in Europe (London: Duckworth, 1979) 81–2, 95–9, 129–33, 190–7. Sir Thomas Chaloner, who helped with the 1552 revels and was a long-time friend and colleague of Ferrers, had published a translation of Erasmus’ Encomium Moriae in 1549: see Chaloner The Praise of Folie edited Clarence H. Miller EETS 257 (1965) xxv.
59 Marjorie Hope Nicolson Voyages to the Moon (New York: Macmillan, 1960: reissue of 1948 edition). Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, published 1532, also popularised the satirical Moon-voyage: see edition by S. Debenedetti and C. Segre (Bologna: Carducci, 1960) Canto 34.
60 See e.g. Billington Mock Kings 37–46. But the scientific authorities she quotes are all from the end of the century. Vacuum is not cited in our sense in the OED until 1652; vast meaning ‘huge’ is not recorded before 1575. See Edward Grant Much Ado about Nothing: theories of space and vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1981) especially 192–228, for a detailed account.
61 Thomas More Utopia in The Complete Works of St Thomas More Volume 4 edited Edward J. Surtz SJ and J.H. Hexter (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1965) 250–51, where More explains the meaning of Utopia’s negative placenames.
62 Mankind line 694.
63 Feuillerat Elizabeth 39. In his letters to Erasmus, More called his Utopia-in-writing ‘Nusquama’: Opera epistolarum Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami edited P.S. Allen and others, 12 vols (Oxford University Press, 1906–58) 2: 339. In 1516, waiting for its publication, More writes to Erasmus of a daydream in which he became King of Utopia: a short-lived, world-upside-down reign, very much like that of a Christmas King: Opera epistolarum 2: 414.
64 For the long-standing joke on St Nemo (‘Nobody’), see Martha Bayless Parody in the Middle Ages: the Latin Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996) 57–86. Later in English the ‘picture of Nobody’ shows a figure with his breeches up to his neck, ‘a pun’, as Malcolm Jones remarks, ‘not available to other vernaculars’: ‘Illustrated Broadsides recorded in the Stationers’ Registers 1562–1656’ Journal of the Walpole Society (forthcoming). Similar trompe l’oeil effects can be seen in mask designs: see McGowan Court Ballet of Louis XIII nos. 73 (all legs) and 182 (all head).
65 Ferrers made the connection of his royal person with folly obvious by dressing his ‘ayer apparaunt’ John Smith as a disard (‘jester, sage fol’), and including other fool ‘sons’ in his entourage: Feuillerat Edward VI and Queen Mary 119–20.
66 Feuillerat Edward VI and Queen Mary 66.
67 The Chronicle and Political Papers of Edward VI edited W.K. Jordan (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966) 102–7.
68 Hall Union 513. This was a Christmas visit, despite the Maytime connotations of Robin Hood.
69 Hall Union 513; for accounts of similar ‘mummeries’ see 516, 595.
70 Cavendish Wolsey 25–8; see Twycross ‘Philemon’s Roof.
71 Cavendish Wolsey 25.
72 Cavendish Wolsey 26.
73 Cavendish Wolsey 26–7. Shakespeare virtually paraphrases this.
74 Cavendish Wolsey 27.
75 Cavendish Wolsey 27–8. Shakespeare omits this mistake in his version of the scene, presumably because it would be an unnecessary distraction.
76 See e.g. Jonathan Dollimore Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984) especially 153–81, 249–71; Catherine Belsey The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London and New York: Methuen, 1985) 13–54.