UNTIL ABOUT THE middle of the twentieth century, early English drama was often labelled “pre-Shakespearean,” a designation which was unsatisfactory in a number of ways:

First, it tended to define its material as secondary rather than worthy of study in its own right, and to assume a “prophetic” knowledge of what was to come which none of its performers or audiences could possibly have shared. As Peter Happé has memorably put it: “often they were so overpowered by Shakespeare, and indeed so ‘literary’, that they condemned the material before them even as they studied it.”

Secondly, because purpose-built theatres evolved in Elizabethan London, the label “Pre-Shakespearean” imposed a highly centralized view of early performance, dominated by what was happening in the capital and at court, with little analysis of performance elsewhere. Admittedly, it became increasingly difficult to ignore the mystery cycles which were performed in provincial cities such as York and Chester, but recognition of these was often tinged with the patronising assumption that they were the naive work of uneducated tradesmen. Similarly, the gradual discovery of the effectiveness of some morality plays in performance, which began in the 1930s, was too often ignored by scholars who condemned all plays of this genre as irredeemably boring without ever having seen them performed.

Even more seriously, it assumed a view of what drama is which required any performance to have a fictional or historical plot, appropriate scenery and props, impersonated characters wearing costumes suitable to their roles, and a firm separation between performers and audience. This encouraged an anachronistic view of drama as the product of a largely middle-class culture, and excluded many types of performance which were significant in the culture of the time, including liturgy, public ceremonies and processions, performances at weddings and on other celebratory occasions, dramatic and musical performances by resident fools and travelling ministralli, sporting contests, and activities that would nowadays be regarded as circus acts, such as performances by tightrope walkers and those who trained animals. Contemporary records often make no distinction between these different types of performer, and a narrow definition of what we would now regard as “the theatre” fails to understand the large extent to which they flowed into each other.

These attitudes gradually came to seem quaintly outdated, and some critics began to protest against them, though not altogether consistently.

THE RESEARCH ON which this chapter is based originated in a simple question: “Did Shakespeare's company ever go to Hull?” As it turned out, the question was far from simple to answer, and required a widening of perspective to take in the whole of the East Riding in the attempt to address it—which is what this chapter aims to do. More correctly, Hull is Kingston upon Hull, so named after King Edward I purchased the small port of Wyke upon Hull, standing at the point where the River Hull flows into the River Humber, from Meaux Abbey in 1293 and developed it as a royal supply base. “Shakespeare's company” covers both the Chamberlain's Men (1597–1603) and the King's Men from 1603. The question arose from a hint I read, without any reference to a source, that the company had at some point in its existence travelled to Hull, and had either performed there or been turned away. Old histories of Hull contain several unsupported claims for which no evidence can be found, for example that there was a theatre in Whitefriargate in the sixteenth century. But on the face of it, the claim that the Chamberlain’s/King's Men had at least attempted to perform in Hull seemed plausible enough: it was a big and important port through which a great volume of goods was shipped to continental Europe as well as to other parts of Britain by coastal and inland routes. Its size and importance would be likely to attract entertainers in search of large and varied audiences.

Extensive searches through printed sources and surviving Hull town manuscripts, however, proved fruitless: not only was there no evidence for any visit from the Chamberlain's or King's Men, there was very little for any kind of performance rewarded, or indeed recorded, by the town council of Hull in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. There was a band of town waits, recorded over a long period, who were regularly paid and issued with livery chains, badges, and coats, but no surviving records kept by the council record visits (rewarded or otherwise) by companies of travelling players.

Musical activity in the North-East of England in the late medieval and early modern periods is attested by a wealth of surviving documents. Those of York and Newcastle upon Tyne have been published, along with the surviving documentary evidence for drama, dance and other kinds of performance, in the Records of Early English Drama (REED) series. Research on the rest of the North-East region is well underway in the Durham-based project REED North-East. Evidence collected so far for the north-eastern region shows minstrels attached to great households and on tour, as well as bands of waits employed over many years in numerous towns and cities. However, although many other craftspeople in those centres formed occupational guilds from the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, evidence of guilds of minstrels or musicians is harder to find. This chapter examines the documentary evidence for one guild of minstrels, that of Beverley in the East Riding of Yorkshire, with the aim of discovering more about its significance in the wider contexts of urban and musical life in the period.

I shall focus in detail on the 1555 Ordinances of the Minstrels’ Guild of Beverley, particularly their claims for the antiquity and status of the guild, before discussing wider contexts: Tudor Poor Law statutes governing vagabondage, which threatened touring minstrels; the recorded activities of minstrels in Beverley, including the long-established town waits; documentary and sculptural evidence supporting the claim for Beverley as a northern musical centre; and finally the possibility that Beverley was at one time the headquarters of a northern minstrels’ court.

❧ The 1555 Ordinances: Documentary Context

The quotation in the title of this chapter comes from the only surviving copy of the ordinances of the Beverley Guild of Minstrels. This 1555 document can be assumed to be a correct copy; it was carefully recorded by the town governors (Beverley's equivalent of a mayor and council at that period) in their formal book of record, now known as the Great Guild Book from the number of guild ordinances entered in it.

A significant aspect of these ordinances is that no others for the Minstrels’ Guild survive among the extensive town records. The surviving documents, apart from the Great Guild Book, include accounts, minute books of the governors and later mayors, and a fifteenth-century document called the Town Char-tulary (which also records many local guilds’ ordinances).

Among the papers of the Strickland-Constable family of Wassand Hall in the East Riding of Yorkshire, now lodged at the East Riding Archives and Local Studies in Beverley, is a modest little booklet measuring only 20 cm x 15 cm, of paper bound in a piece of recycled parchment, which is listed in the ERA catalogue as ‘Sir John Nevile's memoranda book. 1595’.

The booklet, containing only twenty-eight (unnumbered) folios, in fact appears to be a compilation of memoranda and accounts made mainly for the weddings of Sir John Nevile's children in the 1520s and 1530s, prefaced by a pedigree of the family (Nevile of Chevet, West Riding) up to 1595, which occupies the first half of the booklet; the cover is marked ‘H.N.’ for Henry Nevile, the great-grandson of Sir John. It is not immediately clear how this manuscript ended up in the records of the East Riding family of Strickland-Constable, but it is likely that it passed from family to family when Rosamond Estoft, the granddaughter of this Henry Nevile's grandson Sandford Nevile, married Yarburgh Constable of Wassand (1676–1731).

The Nevile family settled in the West Riding on the marriage of Sir John Nevile in the early sixteenth century to a West Riding heiress, the widowed Lady Tempest, née Elizabeth Bosvile, and Sir John seems to have largely rebuilt the family house at Chevet, which his wife had inherited from her own family. They are known also to have owned property at Mile End in Stepney, Middlesex, but Chevet was evidently the family seat, where it is most likely that family celebrations, including the weddings detailed in the Memoranda Book, took place.

The manuscript contains expense accounts for food and clothes for four Nevile weddings between 1526 and 1533: those of Sir John's daughters Elizabeth (to Roger Rockley, 14 January 1526), Anne (to Thomas Drax) and Mary (to Gervase Clifton), and of his son Henry to Dorothy Dawney, as well as notes on his considerable expenses on a number of other special occasions from 1520 to 1529. All these notes are of interest for what they tell us about Sir John and his sense of the lavish output appropriate to his status, and will be discussed later. However, it is an extra note in the account of Elizabeth's wedding that is the most interesting in the context of entertainment.