Medieval Lives (2004) s01e04 Episode Script

There was once a minstrel, a happy-go-lucky fellow wandering the country to sing at the courts of lords and kings.
Everywhere he was welcomed with open arms.
And that is the end, that is the end That is the end of my story Strumming his lute and spinning his tales of romance and derring-do, he'd charm the ladies and then move on.
oh! What a life.
Yes, nice life.
Except, of course, it wasn't like that at all.
showbiz was just as fickle in the Middle Ages as it is today, the tastes of audiences just as likely to change.
And then, as now, behind the entertainment, there was often a political agenda.
In fact, being a minstrel or court poet was often downright dangerous.
(shouting) Especially when performing in front of a hostile audience.
or, even worse, a hostile army, as in the case of the Norman minstrel Taillefer.
Oh, Taillefer is my name and singing is my game And if you wanna know what a minstrel's for Here's how I got to start a war It's the story of one of the greatest acts of bravado of all time.
Well, one of the daftest acts of bravado, if you ask me.
And it took place in that field over there.
1066, at the Battle of Hastings.
King Harold and his 7,000 English trooPs are packed behind their shield wall up on that ridge there, where Battle Abbey now stands.
Duke William had his Normans aligned up in equal numbers further down the slope over there.
It looks like the English have got the advantage.
And for a moment, it seems as if the Normans have got last-minute nerves.
Nobody wants to be the first to charge.
But then suddenly a figure rides out of the Norman lines.
But it's not Duke William, it's not even a soldier, it's the minstrel Taillefer.
And he starts riding straight to the English lines, Performing a juggling act with his sword and lance.
Well, the English stand there enjoying the show, until Taillefer gets to the Point where he hurls his sPear at one of the English soldiers and kills him.
And then all hell breaks loose.
The French charge and the rest is extremely well-known history.
Considering how well-known the story of the Battle of Hastings is, it's surprising that Taillefer never seems to figure in it, not even in the Bayeux Tapestry.
In fact, if it wasn't for one of the chronicles, we'd have never heard of Taillefer's bravery.
Then, I suppose the Norman knights, whom the Bayeux Tapestry was supposed to be celebrating, wouldn't want to be shown uP by a mere minstrel.
But then, what was a minstrel doing on the battlefield in the first Place? Well, there was a lot more to being a minstrel than just playing music.
The word ''minstrel'' actually means little servant.
And they were low down in the social order.
And in that rough-and-ready military culture of the 11th century, little distinction was made between those servants who could cook or do other chores and those who could write poetry or play musical instruments.
These were not particularly soPhisticated courts.
The warlords who ran them placed little value on fancy stuff like the arts and entertainment.
Their main interests evolved around the subtleties of fighting and killing each other.
so minstrels counted as little more than menials in the household, and the more talents they had, the better.
one 13th-century poem defines a true minstrel as one who can speak and rhyme well, be witty, know the story of Troy, balance apples on the point of knives, juggle, jump through hoops, play the citole, mandora, harp, fiddle and psaltery.
He's further advised, for good measure, to learn the arts of imitating birds, putting performing asses and dogs through their paces and of course of operating marionettes.
It seems it was also an advantage if you were good at breakdancing.
Nothing's new.
( # Low note ) These little servants, these minstrels, would be exPected to perform lots of different roles.
For example, they might be asked to act as night watchmen, so they could sound the alarm in case of fire or attack.
In fact, in 1306, a minstrel by the name of Richard raised the alarm at Windsor and prevented the castle from being burnt down.
pity there weren't a few minstrels around in 1992.
( # Low notes ) Servants who could blow a trumpet would also have been vital amidst the cacophony of battle, to rally the troops or cheer them on.
Away from the battlefield, these same servants provided the entertainment, though with rather a restricted repertoire.
You see, the warriors and warlords of the 11th century weren't particularly interested in stories of teenage love or stories about how someone who, despite appalling handicaps, manages to become a concert pianist.
What they wanted was stories about men like themselves killing other men, like the ones they killed that morning.
preferably with lots of gory details and swaggering about.
These were called chansons de geste, or songs of great deeds.
( # sings in French) The chanson on every minstrel's lips was this, the Song of Roland, a 4OOO-line epic and the Norman number one for nearly a century.
so that's kind of the Norman Top Of The pops, is it? Well, it's a sort of big ballad you'd have heard in the early 12th century, it would have been very popular.
It's the most popular of the chansons de geste.
Any love element there? No, it's an environment where love had very littleplace.
It's a kind of boys' culture, is it? Yeah, I think it's been referred to as the sort of buddy movie mentality where the lads get together, they do what they have to do.
If there's any women there, they're very peripheral.
The only romance in the Song of Roland is when the hero charlemagne declares his undying love and loyalty to his sword.
It's a lovely song and there's another 3,554 lines to go.
They certainly knew how to get value out of their minstrels.
so why did they stick minstrels up in the galleries like that? Well, there are two reasons for it really.
There was obviously an acoustical reason for it, the sound would carry better.
There was also another reason.
In the courts, you invite musicians in who are of a lower caste, you don't really want them to be hobnobbing with you, so you keeP them away, so it's a sort of hierarchical, and a spatial removal - of the lower caste.
- You keep the distance.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
presumably, they could also, sort of they were observing what's going on, I guess.
Yes, what they forgot was that musicians have ears as well as fingers, and whilst they're playing they can hear conversations that are going on.
And it's no surprise that musicians often found themselves in a sort of secondary employment in the field of espionage.
As well as acting as spies, minstrels were also expected to act as propagandists, supposedly recording the deeds of battle and then producing a sort of end of the match rePort.
And of course, they'd better make damn sure whoever's paying them is chosen as man of the match.
Medieval minstrels were the PR men of their day.
They'd embark on well-planned tours reciting their poems to publicize the latest achievements of their bosses.
simon de Montfort is mighty and strong He loves to do right and he hates to do wrong Of course, the minstrels didn't let the truth stand in the way of a good story any more than the sPin doctors of today do.
Take this account.
It's by a herald-cum-minstrel in the entourage of the Black Prince, and it tells how the Prince wiped the floor with the entire spanish navy.
The battle was fierce, the battle was grim But God let fortune smile on him And through his courage, skill and might The spaniards all were killed outright But they weren't.
And the victory was by no means as decisive as the minstrel's claim.
on the continent, they weren't even sure that the English had won.
Facts? What facts? Minstrels in the service of a great lord would be entitled to wear the lord's uniform or livery.
A minstrel without a livery was a bit like a rock band without a record contract.
Livery indicated a minstrel had both status and a regular income.
course, when he wasn't entertaining his own master it was all the easier to get those classy gigs.
Mark you, the entertainment these great lords demanded was reassuringly downmarket.
Even in the royal courts.
Henry II's favorite minstrel, for example, went by the name of Roland Le Peteur.
Henry rewarded Roland with 30 acres of land for his great master work, described as a leap, a whistle and a fart.
It appears that Roland's great musical talent lay in farting tunes.
These were not highbrow entertainers.
Have a look at what's going on here - everyone's looking at everyone else.
These guys are looking at these guys and they're looking at the king, who's counting down, one, two, three, wait for it Whoo! Whoo! WhooPs.
Another act that was, apparently, popular with royalty was a variation of sticking your head in the lion's mouth.
Only this involved a minstrel who spread honey on his member and then brought in a performing bear.
What the bear actually performed isn't mentioned but, I bet it doesn't figure in Winnie-the-Pooh.
Maybe it's not surprising that some disaPProved of the way the wealthy encouraged low comedy.
Here is John of Salisbury writing in the 12th century.
''Even those whose exposures are so indecent ''they make a cynic blush are not debarred ''from distinguished houses.
''They're not even turned out when with more a hellish tumult, ''they defile the air and more shamelessly disclose ''that which in shame they should have concealed.
'' But minstrels were woven into the fabric of everyday life.
The town of Beverley in East Yorkshire was a major center for Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages.
And minstrels would stand here on the steps of the north porch of the Minster as a sort of permanent welcoming committee for arriving tourists.
In fact, the whole town was crawling with minstrels.
And when they decorated the inside of the Minster, they filled it with minstrels.
The Beverly figures offer us a unique glimPse into the world of the medieval minstrel.
Here we come face to face with musicians whose humble lives went otherwise unrecorded.
These figures provide us with a veritable encycloPedia of minstrelsy.
They show us what instruments minstrels played, they show us how those instrument worked.
They show us what minstrels wore and even what some people thought about minstrels.
players of wind instruments seem to have been regarded as rather vulgar.
perhaps because the blowing distorted their features.
The church itself had an ambivalent attitude to minstrels.
on the one hand, there were the heavenly minstrels, angels who played celestial music.
But on the other, there were minstrels who encouraged dancing and ribaldry, and were therefore, servants of the devil.
In England, the fortunes of the minstrels probably reached their zenith in the reign of Edward II.
Edward, whose father tended to be away rather a lot, was brought uP by a nanny whose other job just happened to be a court minstrel.
Maybe this explains why Edward grew up as one of the biggest fans minstrels ever had.
I went to the public Records office to riffle through some 6OO-year-old documents in search of evidence of Edward's minstrel craze.
Here, for example, is the treasury roll for his coronation.
It a list of expenses for his coronation, and it lists here all the minstrels at the coronation, 154 of them.
You can see there's, er, five trumpeters of the boy Prince, Thomas the harpist, William the harper, Henry the flautist, Tanian the organist, and here we've got little William, organist of the Countess of Hereford.
Sounds all very lavish but conventional.
But then, the coronation was a state occasion.
In private, however, it seems that Edward enjoyed something a little more spicy.
This is the wardrobe account, in which the king's personal expenditure was kept.
Here we can see that on the anniversary of the death of Piers Gaveston, his intimate friend, and perhaps lover, he emPloyed a certain Bernard the Fool and his 54 naked dancers.
While the English nobility were still getting their kicks out of stories about who killed who and how far their brains were spread around in the process, down in the South of France, a new kind of song was evolving.
It was subtle, soPhisticated and sexy.
The pioneer of this new style of poetry was not a professional musician.
He was an aristocrat, the gloriously randy Duke William IX of Aquitaine.
And his palace was here in Poitiers.
If not the most rampant of French noblemen, Duke William was certainly the most upfront about it.
He talked of opening an abbey for prostitutes near his castle and confessed that he pursued women with but one objective in mind.
(French accent) I'll end up wiz my 'and up her cloak.
He was the first of a new breed of court entertainer, aristocratic and educated - the troubadours.
And by the 12th century the court here at Poitiers was the most important cultural center in France.
It was here that Duke William changed forever the story of the minstrel.
He invented a new kind of poetry that raved about his favorite subjects - love and sex.
His style was irreverent, witty and made fun of everything, including himself.
(French accent) I made these verses just for fun Not for myself nor anyone Nor of great deeds that knights have done Nor of lovers true I made them riding in the sun And my horse, he helped too (Neighing) The troubadours revolutionized the way people thought about the sexes.
They accorded women superiority over men and they made love a suitable subject for fiction.
UP to this time, it had been punishable by death to address a love song to a married woman.
It was regarded as the equivalent of casting a sPell on her.
But the most revolutionary thing about the troubadours was that they did all this in the everyday language of the man in the street.
And it just so happened that the troubadours lived in the region of France where instead of oui for yes, they said oc.
It was known as the land of the oc, the Pays d'oc, and the language spoken was occitan.
(RaPPing in Occitan ) The French rap artists Les Fabulous Troubadours, inspired by these medieval poets, are spearheading a revival in occitan poetry.
(Rapping in Occitan ) so what was so important about the fact they were doing this in Occitan? For the troubadours, all the literature is in Latin, understood only by the aristocratic people.
But when they sing and when you write in Occitan, everybody can understand.
They make poetry in the common language common language of the people.
The people, the language people speak in the street.
Yes.
The troubadours used the language of the man in the street for dazzlingly soPhisticated intellectual games.
Like this verbal jousting match in which the two poets try to outwit each other with their rhymes and verbal dexterity.
The soPhistication of the writing is very important, and the sophistication of the music also is very important for this period.
And did this poetry have an influence on Europe? This poetry has a big impact in Europe because it's the first time they sing, ''Make love, not war.
''Make music, not war, ''make tournament of poetry, not war.
'' In Middle Ages, occitan is a sign of sophistication.
Merci beaucoup.
Merci beaucoup.
The sophisticated culture of the troubadours and the fashion for writing and composing poetry in the native language spread across the courts of Europe.
The whole nature of court entertainment was revolutionized.
Kings and Princes now saw that their realm was no longer defined by simple geographical boundaries, but that they also ruled over an intellectual territory.
The territory of literature and song.
And a new breed of court poet began to replace the old rough-and-ready minstrels.
The new court poets were decidedly sniffy about the old minstrels.
In France, for example, Eustace Deschamps said ''The artificial music of the minstrels could be learned by le plus rude homme du monde.
'' By the most uncouth man in the world.
In a way, the situation was a bit like the mid-2oth century, when the musical comedians, with their repertoire of hand-me-down material, found themselves displaced by the university educated satirists of the television age, coming up with something fresh every week.
(Arrow flies, screaming) The English court finally caught up with the rest of Europe during the reign of Richard II, and the star of Richard's court was the greatest of medieval English poets, Geoffrey chaucer.
chaucer helped to put Richard's court on a par with the great sophisticated courts of France and Italy.
In one of his poems, he describes how a goddess commands him to finish his book and then give it to Richard's Queen Anne.
''Go now thy way and when this book is made, give it the queen ''on my behalf at Eltham, or at sheen.
'' Eltham was one of the king and queen's favorite palaces and chaucer actually supervised the rebuilding of it in the 1390s to make it a fit venue for Richard's fashion-conscious court.
Ironically, it has itself become a victim of fashion, having had an art deco makeover at the start of the last century.
only one room gives any idea of its medieval past.
The great hall here at Eltham dates from the 147os.
Richard II's hall would have been smaller.
Nonetheless, it must have been here on this very spot that Geoffrey Chaucer would have read out for the first time many of his famous poems to the king and his court, just as he is in this 15th-century painting.
To be present when poets like this read out from their latest work must have been a hugely exciting exPerience.
A sort of medieval equivalent of attending a movie premiere.
The old-style minstrels began to find they were no longer fashionable.
They had to go downmarket.
They did indeed become wandering minstrels, traipsing around the land in search of an audience.
Adultery is wrong, fornication is wrong Eking out a living in fairs and at street corners wherever they could find a crowd.
The upside was that they no longer had to fill the role of propagandist for rich patrons.
In fact, quite the reverse.
The unemployed minstrels could easily turn into sort of medieval Billy Braggs, sort of popular political agitators.
I heard men on earth make much lamentation how they are injured in their work.
Do you remember that hit song from 1315 with that catchy title, The Evils Of Taxation? You know, it was written after the great famine.
And the writer complains that he's being taxed ten times over so he has to sell his seed corn and he's going to end up a beggar.
I can no longer live with my gleaning Yet there is more grievous cuts to the bone For every four penny must go to the king Good years and corn are both gone No one cares to listen to stories or sing songs Well, I suppose when money's tight, no one's gonna waste it on minstrels.
The power of minstrels to spread dissent was something that couldn't be ignored.
In Wales, for example, during the rebellion of owen Glendower, minstrels were banned throughout the principality.
But even for the court poets, life could be precarious, as chaucer may have found out to his cost.
Richard's court seems to have encouraged a relaxed, easy-going intellectual atmosphere in which satire and lampoon were allowed to flourish.
Chaucer took advantage of this to satirize the way the Church had become commercialized in the 14th century.
And it could be quite vicious satire.
Try this for size.
An angel takes a friar down to hell.
(Yelling) And the friar looks round and says, ''Oh, I can't see any friars around here, ''does that mean we all go to heaven?'' And the angel says, ''uh-uh, afraid not, ''there are plenty of friars around here.
'' And he takes the friar to satan and accosts satan.
''Hold up thy tail, thou satanas,'' said he, ''show forth thine arse and let the friar see ''Where is the nest of friars in this place ''And ere that half a furlong way of space ''Right so as bees come swarming from a hive ''Out of the devil's arse began to drive ''20,000 friars on a rout ''Throughout hell they swarmed all about ''And came again as fast as they may gone ''And in his arse, they crept in every John.
'' (Buzzing) Chaucer may have felt safe writing this outrageous satire of the Church in Richard II's court in the 1390s.
But, within a few years, that court was to be violently overthrown and Richard murdered.
The whole political scene changed dramatically and Chaucer was caught right in the middle of it.
Richard was ousted by his cousin Henry IV, who colluded with the exiled Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, to seize the throne.
A religious crackdown ensued, with Arundel threatening to burn those who criticized the church.
EsPecially those who did so in plain English that any Tom, Dick or Harriet could understand.
chaucer must have felt he'd been caught with his pants down.
Suddenly, his carefree vernacular satire was political anathema.
And this is where we come to one of the great unnoticed mysteries of history.
Chaucer, the father of English literature, disappears without trace around the time that Archbishop Arundel is trying to limit the use of English in literature.
Chaucer, of course, was one of the most famous men in the kingdom and yet there's no record of his death.
He doesn't leave a will, we don't even know when he died.
All we have to go on is this now illegible inscription on this tomb that was put up over a century and a half after he disappeared, and that, as far as we know, never even contained his body.
Isn't it odd that such an important man should have disappeared so completely? Could it be that he was deliberately disappeared? of course, he could have just fallen off a ladder.
We don't know.
But the happy-go-lucky medieval entertainers of our imaginations don't seem to have been so happy-go-lucky after all.
Literature had came a long way from the days of Taillefer to Chaucer.
But one thing hadn't changed, whether you were a minstrel of the 11th century or a soPhisticated court poet of the 14th.
It could be a dangerous business.
Next time on Terry Jones' Medieval Lives, the golden age of chivalry or was it? I fearlessly uncover the raw truth about the medieval knight.