Way more dangerous than running a brothel while your parents are on vacation. (More importantly, no pants!)
Jesters didn’t just juggle fruit and make fun of the French. Unlike a class joker, court comedians had to be good at everything, from singing to puppetry to espionage. But spying silly-men is a whole other tankard of worms (I’ll just say some fools were up close and personal with the most powerful people in ye olde merry England, and no one’s going to suspect a bawdy buffoon of eavesdropping). Infiltrating activities aside, the job description was a bit scarier than that of your run-of-the-mill party clown.
Guess what, kids?? I could die today!
Just like your little brother, medieval people found injury and poop HILARIOUS. One super fun party (or "pleasant guise") game a jester might have to perform entailed removing his trousers, basting his Little John with honey, and dancing around while a large and hopefully post-lunchtime bear licked the sweet bee-stickiness off his not-so-privates. LOL, amirite?!
This honey pot is hiding my shame.
So yeah, being a fool was pretty dangerous. But mad humor often resulted in, as Catherine of Aragon used to say, "mad dough."* The most lucrative and ludicrous jesting job definitely goes to my dream BFF, Roland the Farter. King Henry II employed the talented Roland (alternately "Berthold le Fartere"), a fool whose official job description as inscribed in the royal records included performing “a jump, a whistle, and a fart” every year at Christmastime. In return, Roland received a fat parcel of land. Are chu kidding me?! I want that job!
I should lend my copy to ol' Henry deuce. More like Henry drops-a-deuce.
I know you like to think your shit don't stink, but roses really smell like 30 acres of land for farting christmas songs.
Gassily Yours,
The Rad Historian
*She totally did, I swear. This blog is 100% historically accurate.**
**If 100% means 97% historically accurate and 3% historically awesome.
