Shortly after his elevation to the bishopric of Lincoln in 1186, Hugh of Avalon (c. 1140-1200) had a falling-out with Henry of Anjou, king of England (b. 1133, r. 1154-1189). Hugh, a native of Burgundy, was a Carthusian monk who had crossed the Channel in 1179 to become the prior of Witham, a charterhouse in Somerset founded the previous year as part of Henry’s penance for the murder of his former friend and chancellor, Thomas Becket (b.1119-20, r. 1162-1170), hastily canonized in 1173. Although he had not known Henry long, Hugh was a younger contemporary of the king and the two had clearly hit it off in the ensuing years, when Henry often spent time at his hunting manor in nearby Selwood. But now Hugh needed to establish his independence from royal control; and when he excommunicated a royal forester and denied a post to one of the king’s favorites, Henry’s other courtiers urged the king to punish this insolent prelate for his ingratitude.
Summoned to the king’s presence, Hugh found Henry unwilling to speak or even acknowledge him. Instead, the king called for a needle and thread and “began to sew up, with his own right hand, a little scrap of cloth wrapped around an injured finger on his left.” After watching him for a while and considering how to handle the situation, Hugh finally remarked, “How like you are just now to your kinsmen from Falaise.” According to Adam of Eynsham, Hugh’s hagiographer, the king fell about, gasping with laughter. [1] Why? because Hugh had seized on this opportunity--the king’s silent truculence, his rude manners, and his skill in shrouding a wound--to allude in very familiar terms (using the informal second person singular) to Henry’s matrilineal descent from a Norman undertaker in Falaise, where William the Bastard had been born. [2] For unlike both his great-grandfather the Conqueror and his grandfather Henry, Henry II was known to be a man who loved a joke, even at his own expense.
Although I have been tickled by this anecdote for decades, I only came to appreciate its true audacity and richer contexts thanks to this original and illuminating book, which discusses it more succinctly (112, 146; the translation here is my own). Peter J. A. Jones reveals how it exemplifies the dynamics of Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century, especially within Henry’s courtly circle. While Hugh was an “aristocratic socialite” who “enjoyed an unusually free-speaking relationship with the king” (161), he was also a relative newcomer to the realm and was attempting to uphold the independence of the English Church: an initiative for which Archbishop Thomas had recently paid with his life. For Hugh to know enough about his interlocutor to be able to gauge the effects of a well-timed and well-barbed quip speaks to the degree to which Henry’s associates, and those who recorded their banter, “drew on--and contributed to--deeper twelfth-century shifts in laughter’s imagined power” (149). On the one hand, Hugh was taking advantage of a new association between laughter and divine authority which would inform the narratives of Becket’s sanctity; on the other, he was participating in a “courtly code” that deployed “witty” (facete) banter (e.g., 94-95, 147) as “a kind of nuanced political language” (118) that could diffuse fraught situations and also speak truth to power. Henry, for his part, embodied the rex ridens whose authority was expressed through, and upheld by, his capacity for laughter.
This well organized and persuasively argued book places the political culture of Angevin England within a broader context, offering a history of laughter’s intellectual, theological, diplomatic, and practical productivity in the mid- to late twelfth century. Jones is able to show that attitudes toward laughter underwent something of a transformation during this era, especially in Anglo-Norman elite and ecclesiastical circles. Indeed, he argues that Henry II’s laughter, in particular, “was able to supplement the abstract tools of power that otherwise constrained him” (5). The very innovations of written legislation and documentary bureaucracy for which his reign has long been recognized were complemented--and facilitated--by shows of levity that could signal beneficence, finesse, mockery, or malice.
In the first chapter, Jones surveys the interlocking milieus in which laughter came to play these public roles: the scholastic contexts in which Biblical glosses and commentaries were produced, monastic spiritual and didactic writings, philosophical and rhetorical texts, and even medical treatises. In the second, he considers the representation of saintly and royal laughter in twelfth-century revisionist histories of Edward the Confessor and William II Rufus, attending to early romance historiography as well as Latin. Chapter three then shows how these trends were cultivated and brought to fruition at Henry’s court, drawing on the many writings produced by the king’s courtiers (brief biographies of whom are included in an appendix).
Here, Jones begins to develop the most compelling aspect of his thesis: the degree to which “the intense preoccupation with humor at Henry’s court may be understood as a function of social and political tension” and as “[countering] the new processes of order and codification that were coming to define Henry’s regime” (119). Two developments were happening simultaneously. “[A]s written rules and laws were becoming far more prolific and important,” including rules for courtly conduct, “and when courtiers were beginning to be valued more for their literacy and administration than their military prowess or aristocratic blood,” knowing how to grease the wheels of governance or ease the tensions of debate was becoming equally important. In this sense, Henry’s household could be viewed as an early prototype of the princely courts that Malcolm Vale saw as emerging over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and which set the standards that prevailed throughout Europe until World War I. [3]
The final two chapters are paired studies of Thomas Becket and Henry, showing how each came to be figured in later accounts as defined by laughter. In life, they were known as charismatic men for whom humor was an instrument of power; in death, they were transfigured as supernatural beings whose laughter was powerful in itself. In both cases, laughter also served the larger institutional structures they had helped to create, by mediating “between codes and impulses and between bureaucratic procedures and theatrical performances” (147).
This is an extremely satisfying and welcome study, especially when placed within a dour scholarly tradition that has figured the entire Christian Middle Ages as either mirthless and downright “antigelastic” [4] or only belatedly capable of laughter as a tightly controlled moralistic mechanism (6-8). [5] And yet my only reservation about a book which takes satire and humor so seriously (e.g. 37-42, 88-111) is its lack of engagement with theatre and performance studies, apart from a few references to the presence of professional entertainers at Henry’s court (96-97). For example, the long history of Latin intellectuals’ engagement with theatre and the “problem” of comedy would have been highly relevant to the survey in Chapter 1. [6] And given the author’s commitment to using a broad array of sources, it is puzzling that he makes no reference at all to the play texts that can be traced directly to the Angevin empire and which either explicitly discuss laughter and/or implicitly depend on it for their own power. Chief among these are the Anglo-Norman Ordo representacionis Ade (colloquially known as the Jeu d’Adam), which was certainly composed in that realm; and the Latin comedy Babio, composed in England during Henry’s reign and targeting precisely the kind of boorish cleric despised by his courtiers (see 101-102). (Babio is a corrupt, married, parish priest who lusts after his own stepdaughter and who is finally bested by his servant, Fodius: a character in the mold of the cheeky, worldly young men who would have been educated in monastery or cathedral schools, some of them becoming the Paris- or Oxford-trained professional clerks who would have found employment in Becket’s or Henry’s service.) [7]
Conversely, it strikes me as quite significant that the many contemporary sung Latin dramas from the Continent do not depict kings as capable of laughter, which could reinforce Jones’s point about the changing climate of the later twelfth century and also the singularity of Henry II’s association with humor. There are no reges ridentes in the so-called Fleury Playbook of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, the Freising Epiphany play (neither the Magi nor Herod are amused), the Beauvais Danielis ludus, or even in the Tegernsee Ludus de Antichristo datable to 1159 and composed in homage to another king, Frederick II Barbarossa. [8] This may be further evidence that the shift to laughter as a spiritual and political tool had not yet occurred more widely or gained the same purchase beyond Henry’s realm.
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Notes:
1. Adam of Eynsham, Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis, ed. D. L. Douie and D. H. Farmer, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1985), 1:117-18: “suere coepit manu propria lesum panniculoque inuolutum lave sue digitum. [...] ‘Quam similis es modo cognatis tuis de Falesia.’”
2. See Elisabeth M. C. van Houts, “The Origins of Herleva, Mother of William the Conqueror,” The English Historical Review, 101 (1986): 399-404. Insulting references to William the Conqueror’s low maternal origins in many sources have often been (mis)construed to mean that Fulbert of Falaise was a tanner or furrier, weaver or tailor; van Houts shows that these are misreadings of the term pollincter(es) or embalmer(s), as reported by Orderic Vitalis (1075-c. 1142).
3. Malcolm Vale, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe, 1270-1380 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
4. The phrase (“hatred of laughter,” gélos) is that of Stephen Halliwell, Greek Laughter: A Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 518-19.
5. E.g. Jeannine Horowitz and Sophia Menache, L’humeur en chaire: le rire dans l‘Église médiévale (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1994).
6. Carol Symes, “The Performance and Preservation of Medieval Latin Comedy,” European Medieval Drama,7 (2003): 29-50. Donalee Dox, The Idea of the Theater in Latin Christian Thought: Augustine to the Fourteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009); Jody Enders, ed. A Cultural History of Theatre in the Middle Ages (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017).
7. The Ordo representacionis Ade can been dated to the last half of the twelfth century and is preserved in a single thirteenth-century manuscript miscellany from the Aquitaine (now Tours, Bibliothèque municipal 927).Babio survives in an astonishing seven copies, three of which--in Lincoln Cathedral Library MS 105--did such hard service in the schoolroom that they are falling apart: see Carol Symes, “The Medieval Archive and the History of Theatre: Assessing the Written and Unwritten Evidence for Premodern Performance,” Theatre Survey 52 (2011): 29-58 at 37; and Symes, “Ordo representacionis Ade (The Play of Adam)” and “Babio” inThe Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama, ed. Christina M. Fitzgerald and John T. Sebastian (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2012), 10-20 and 23-67.
8. Kyle A. Thomas and Carol Symes, Ludus de Antichristo--The Play about the Antichrist: A Dramaturgical Analysis, Historical Commentary, and Latin Edition with a New English Verse Translation (Berlin: De Gruyter / Medieval Institute Publications, 2023).