It is hard to overstate the volume and variety of entertainers whom one might have encountered on England’s roads in the early 1500s. But then, it’s a phenomenon that we’re viewing through the filter of what occurred later, around the turn of the century and after, when theatrical and performance culture was forcibly narrowed, shaped into a metropolitan elite itself but also reordered to cater to a more elite, ‘sophisticated’ audience.
For my part, what surprises me most, perhaps, looking at the data, is the sheer number of patrons. A quick scan through the Records of Early English Drama (REED) index of patrons for Kent, say, reveals some 83 patrons of some sort over the course of the 16th century, of whom 50 supported troupes of players and 54 minstrels or other specifically named musicians, be they drummers, trumpeters, lutenists, pipers, or harpers.
These figures are, of course, no more than illustrative – the survival of any such information is arbitrary and the way in which clerks recorded such visits was prey to whim – but they do, I think, convey something of the rich texture of itinerant entertainment in the period. Kent, in fact, was in a particularly privileged position being so close to London while also benefiting from occasional visits from continental entertainers, among them, for example, the King of Poland’s bearwards, who were in Kent in 1521-2.
Bear-baiting was the other principal entertainment receiving patrons’ support: bearwards belonging to 21 different patrons are noted in the surviving county records . One bearward, John Sackerston, had a career that can be traced through four decades, from Shrewsbury in 1553-4 to Bristol in 1579-80, by which time he was in the service of the Earl of Derby. He was, it would seem, something of a legend; Sackerson, the famous bear at Paris Garden on the Bankside, close by the Globe, was named after him. ‘I have seen/Sackerson loose twenty times, and have taken him/By the chain’, boasts Slender in Merry Wives of Windsor.
Another famous performing animal, Marocco, better known as Bank’s horse – the ‘dancing horse’ that Moth refers to in Love’s Labours Lost – could be seen across England, as well as at its more usual home at the Bell Savage Inn on Fleet Street. Banks had trained it to tap out with its hooves the answers to simple mathematical problems. There were other, more exotic beasts, too: Henry VII’s marmoset came to Dover in 1488-9 and his lion to Shrewsbury in 1492-3, a town which also had a chance to see Henry VIII’s camel in 1525-6.
Clearly the health of this itinerant culture was to some extent indicative of a society in which power had yet to be fully centralised and feudal landowners were largely unconstrained in acting as kings in their own territories, with all the ceremonial imperatives that that implied. But, more importantly perhaps, it was also made possible by the pre-Reformation festive culture, both religious and secular, which created an extensive market for Lucrece’s ‘feast-finding minstrels’ and their peers.
The church year, in particular, was rich in feasts and celebrations, but it is hard to disentangle more secular festivities, often agricultural in inspiration, since they were often sanctioned, even co-opted by local churchmen. Actually, that ‘co-opted’ is unfair: in what was largely a subsistence economy, spiritual and physical welfare were almost co-determinate: if the crops failed, people starved; divine succour and comfort were intrinsic to survival.
Mathew Lyons 