The study of historic disability has enjoyed increasing interest among scholars working across the arts and humanities. The role of disability on the early modern stage has drawn particular critical attention, as scholars look to shed further light on some of those ‘thousand natural shocks’ to which Hamlet says all flesh is heir. Richard III's deformity, Gloucester's blindness, Lear's madness, the ubiquitous bodily mutilation in revenge tragedies such as Titus Andronicus, for example – many of these iconic staged ‘impairments’ have featured in recent studies of historic disability. This chapter takes a different tack. Drawing on the substantial evidence offered by the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project, which identifies record references to pre-modern performances across Britain, it ultimately looks at some of the evidence for actual performance by those with physical disabilities, in order to begin to place these examples alongside the well-known fictional representations. Attempting to draw together some of the different kinds of evidence for disability and premodern performance raises a couple of key questions: beyond the much studied literary and artistic examples, what might the evidence offered by REED have to say about the physically disabled body as it played a part in premodern performance? And can records for performers with apparent physical disabilities tell us anything about how they might have been conceptualised, characterised and/or accommodated in premodern British society? This chapter hopes to initiate potential responses to such questions.

Derived from a wider study of the performance of disability in the early British and Irish record,3 this chapter highlights the surviving record evidence in order to reframe how such performers contributed to wider premodern performance culture. The latter part of the chapter presents the evidence that relates specifically to musculoskeletal difference in the Records of Early English Drama. It suggests that the published and forthcoming REED collections can tell us a good deal about those performers whose physical impairment and/or difference affected their conceptualisation as performers. I do not include the references to so-called dwarfs or giants, as focus here is trained solely on performers identified as differently shaped rather than differently sized.

IN THE PARISH register from St. Nicholas's Church in Durham's central Market Place, scribbled below a list of christenings for the year 1569, there is an intriguing and now locally infamous reference to a travelling “performer” in the city:

What the precise nature of the “great, strange and monstrous” serpent may have been is hard to say. Was it some sort of preserved python, crocodile, or the like? Or else something fabricated, such as a mechanical stage dragon—an increasingly common sight in late-medieval civic performances? Regardless of its actual property, it is clear that the parish register's scribe found the creature's “foreignness,” as well as that of its handler, something worthy of comment. The mention of the serpent's Ethiopian origin, from “within the Turke's dominions,” marks the beast's exoticism, connecting it with common conceptions of the wider Levant and probably nodding towards the legend of St. George.

Stage dragons were indeed very popular in entertainments throughout late-medieval Britain, particularly in St. George plays, and there is ample evidence from the region we now refer to as England's northeast and the Scottish borders. In the chamberlains’ accounts from Newcastle upon Tyne, for example, there are records, first from April 1510 and again in May 1511, listing payments to various individuals for contributing and attending to the city's “Dragon” for St. George's Day. Phillip Butterworth suggests that the Newcastle dragon may have been constructed along the lines of those detailed in numerous records surviving in the St. George's Guild accounts from Norwich. He further suggests that the “Rogger brown” who appears in the Newcastle account of 1511 receiving payment “ffor the attendans off the Dragon” may have served as some sort of barker or money collector.

Christ's admonition to his disciples from Matthew 18:3 appears as the opening of the Gloucester boy bishop's sermon in 1558. The sermon was apparently penned by the cathedral's almoner, Richard Ramsey, who as a long-serving member of the monastic community would have had first-hand experience of the annual ceremony, which in this case took place on Holy Innocents’ Day, December 28. Ramsey undoubtedly knew the custom well and was able to compose the speech from a boy's own point of view. A young chorister named John Stubs had been chosen episcopus puerilis for the occasion, a position usually bestowed by the boy's fellow choristers and ratified by the cathedral's canons. Stubs would have been both excited and honoured at being elected: becoming the “boy bishop” promised not only respect from his peers and the wider community but usually came with a pecuniary reward. Most English boy bishop ceremonies took place either on the Feast of St. Nicholas (December 6), on Holy Innocents’ day (December 28) or some combination of the two, and they marked a high point in that liturgical season of social inversion around Christmas, with “last becoming first” as the youth of the community were granted limited mastery over their adult brethren: “Except yow will be convertyd, and made lyke unto lytill childern”—i.e., “made more like us,” Stubs words would have reminded them—“yow shall not entre in to the kyngdom of heaven.”

For centuries a traditional part of the Christmas season in cathedrals and colleges across England, the Gloucester boy bishop ceremony of 1558 came towards the end of that brief return of such customs under Catholic Queen Mary (reigned 1553–1558). Mary herself apparently hosted the St. Paul's boy bishop in St. James's Palace at Christ mastide 1555. However, the return of such colourful ceremonies was only temporary. They had been prohibited by royal edict in 1541 following Henry VIII's turn to Protestantism, and would be suppressed again under Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603).

Over the last few decades, there have been a number of studies of the meaning and politics of the pre-Modern royal welcome. As occasions for displays of civic or courtly power dynamics, the politics of royal and noble entries and the pageantry of royal progress have received valuable critical analysis. Regarding the Tudor and Stuart monarchs, David Bergeron's English Civic Pageantry remains a landmark study of the ‘evolution’ of the pageant's dramatic form. More recently, Alexander Samson has examined the welcome of Philip and Mary to London in 1554, looking in particular at the city's use of images of the royal couple during the event. While the numerous progresses, civic triumphs, and pageant performances of Queen Elizabeth's reign have been particularly well served by modern scholarship, the more recent studies of royal entries have mainly focused on entertainments in London.

Arising from the work of the Records of Early English Drama North-East project, this article considers a relatively neglected incident in the history of English royal visits: the welcome of James I to the North of England during his great progress and visit to Scotland, which lasted from March to September 1617. The early Stuart era is usually perceived as a period of decline of progress pageantry. Unlike his predecessor, James felt uneasy with the crowds and was notoriously impatient during public shows; he preferred instead to centre royal entertainment around his court, which witnessed the flourishing of the masque, the theatrical super-spectacles, which weighed heavy on the Crown's coffers. The reason for a relative neglect of James's progresses by theatre historians is mainly due to the fact that the entertainment offered to the king in the provinces was disappointingly meagre. Bergeron's remarks on James's entry into Edinburgh on 16 May 1617 will serve as an appropriate illustration:

However, unlike his predecessor, whose peregrinations were frequent but rarely strayed outside the home counties, James's Scottish origins necessitated progresses through the North, both on his way to London for coronation in 1603 and for his subsequent visit to Scotland a decade and a half later.

The record book known as the Liber Custumarum—which forms a large part of the Anglo-Norman records of the London Guildhall (Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis) —contains a very interesting reference from ca. 1300 to an apparent measure of cloth, seemingly in the form of a common Gallicism:

The editors of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary contacted us at the Lexis of Cloth and Clothing in Britain project with the hope of shedding some light on this rare technical usage of launce as an apparent unit of measure. The term appears later in the document as well, with less semantic framing.

The quest to identify and contextualise this particular usage has prompted the present study, which uses the resources of the Lexis project database to elucidate lexical items used to name some of the measures of cloth in post-Conquest British documents. It limits itself, for the most part, to the “official” languages of state and bureaucratic record keeping (Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English) and draws data from the various dictionary resources and works on material culture available to the compilers of the Lexis project database. This article attempts to classify, as briefly as possible, some of the primary words for measuring cloth available in official documents from the period and sets out vocabulary by types of material measured, whether numerically prescribed (or not), and by probable source of semantic development (for example: “cloth eponyms”: broad, drap; or, more frequently, “physical object, such as body part, of determined length”: aune/ell/ulna/etc., brace/brachium, foot, launce, etc.).

In the Middle Ages, very much more than today, dress was an identifier of occupation, status, wealth, gender and ethnicity. The textiles in circulation ranged from the opulence of gold racamaz of Lucca and cloth of gold baldekyn d’outremer, through to russet (a grey or brown woollen cloth) and the more utilitarian worsted (smooth wool cloth distinguished commercially from the more expensive woollens). Discussions of dress and textiles in the medieval period took place in a variety of spheres of activity, and it is therefore from a wide range of text types that information is to be obtained about the nature and sources of cloth, the desirability of particular garments and accessories and contemporary thinking about dress. Fashion is revealed by inference in the attempts to restrict the use of particular textiles, furs and ornaments to certain categories of people by means of sumptuary legislation. Fashion is also indicated, again by inference, and negatively, in the many diatribes inveighing against its various manifestations.

The discourses surrounding dress and textiles were constructed by the literate classes, clerical, aristocratic and mercantile, but were of concern across all the social scales. The seven chapters here contain extracts from wills; accounts of the Royal Wardrobe; inventories; moral and satirical works condemning contemporary fashions; sumptuary laws; petitions; an Old English epic; and insular romances. We have included wills dating back to the Anglo-Saxon period which are written in Old English, with the occasional Latin abstract. The Old English will of Æthelgifu (I.4a), a wealthy secular woman, makes several gifts of clothing: ‘selle mon beornwynne minne blæwenan cyrtel is neaþene unrenod J hire betstan heafodgewædo J selle man lufetat J ælgifu godwife. hire .iii. godwebbenan cyrtlas. J wulfgife selle mon oðera hire dunnan cyrtla’ (my blue gown which is untrimmed at the bottom and her best head-dresses are to be given to Beornwynn. And her three purple gowns are to be given to Lufetat and Ælgifu and Godwif, and Wulfgif is to be given some of her other, dun-coloured gowns). This will, in particular, offers us a unique insight into the dress of an eleventh-century woman and her ideas about what might be appropriate for other women to wear.

Introduction

As with the accounts extracted in the previous chapter, rolls of inventories, livery and other forms of medieval business writing provide an excellent source for the detailed naming of medieval clothing and textiles. Often the intent in such record-keeping is not just to keep an accurate record of who possessed or who received what, but to provide a precise description of the item or garment in question.

The three extracts which open the chapter are all drawn from the very detailed inventories of the medieval cathedral of St Paul in London, dating from the middle and later part of the thirteenth century and from the beginning of the fifteenth. The descriptive detail they provide of vestments, altar cloths, cathedral plate and so forth is exceptionally descriptive for the text type, and gives us a very vivid account of the cloth and clothing in the cathedral’s possession at the times of the inventories.

These are followed by a collection of extracts taken from the middle of a roll of liveries of Edward III for 1347–9. The extracts are noteworthy because they contain various items of dress and accoutrements for royal tournaments and celebrations, including some of the first references to the uniforms of the Order of the Garter, as well as costumes for ludi (pageants, entertainments) celebrated at Christmas.

Extracts from the inventories Three inventories of St Paul’s Cathedral

Inventories compiled in 1245, 1295 and 1402 list the treasures, including metalwork, books, vestments and soft furnishings, belonging to St Paul’s Cathedral, London. They testify to the vast quantities, the richness of fabric and the gold and jewelled ornament of the textiles owned by the cathedral. The first two inventories coincide with a period of expansion of the Norman cathedral (‘old St Paul’s’), the fourth to be built on the site, which was, by its completion in 1314, one of the largest in Europe, with a 400-foot spire and a magnificent rose window. In the 1530s King Henry VIII would begin confiscating church wealth and dissolving monasteries. About the same time more austere approaches to worship were advocated as a result of the Protestant Reformation, rendering outdated the medieval Church’s relics in their magnificent shrines, opulent furnishings and sumptuous vestments.

Introduction

The documents collected by Whitelock in Anglo-Saxon Wills (1930) give rise to a number of issues. Writing in the General Preface to her volume, Hazeltine suggests that the documents it contains are not wills but documents providing evidence of an oral contract (1930: vii–viii). In a discussion of the origins of property, however, Hudson observes that in the Anglo-Saxon period, provided specific and limited public dues were fulfilled, possession was secure. Land was transmissible, alienability and heritability had been established and were both subjected to and protected by royal authority (1994: 201). The writing in English of documents that we recognise as wills appears to have begun in Kent in the first half of the ninth century; there are no examples from other parts of England until the next century, though this knowledge is based on the chance survival of texts and cartularies from a few houses (including Canterbury, Rochester, Winchester and Westminster), and several of these supply only a single example (Whitelock et al. 1968: 19). The development of legal practices in the ecclesiastical houses involving the personal will shifted the nature of property and ownership in English law during and after the Conquest, and through the middle years of the thirteenth century the royal courts came to recognise the position of an executor as both the active and passive representative of the testator with acknowledged powers of arbitration (Sheehan 1988: 6). These developments all brought the medieval will closer to the modern model.

Period and language

More than fifty wills survive from the Anglo-Saxon period, although the majority of these are later copies by monastic scribes rather than survivals of contemporary forms (Whitelock 1930: xli). Besides the wills that are extant in the vernacular, Whitelock suggests that there are about a dozen Latin documents in medieval cartularies which are probably translations or abstracts of Old English wills. As an example, we include the Latin abstract of the will of Æthelgifu (4b) – although compared with the vernacular original, the Latin abstract is somewhat uninformative. Documentary evidence from the succeeding centuries is much rarer. A handful of thirteenth-century ornamenta or mortuaries may be found, although these are more properly inventories detailing the fabric and effects of particular bishops or ecclesiastical magnates, made at the time of death for the benefit of the successor.

Introduction

Little first-hand evidence of sumptuary legislation in England survives from before the preserved enrollments of parliamentary proceedings, which were kept from the end of the thirteenth century. Following a brief proscription of items of dress worn by the crusaders and pilgrims to the Holy Land in 1188 (part of the introduction of the so-called ‘Saladin Tithe’ of 1188; extracted as no. 1 below), there is little recorded evidence of centralised attempts to regulate dress in Britain. Localised sumptuary laws appear early in southern European towns and cities (in Italy dating back to ancient Rome), and precedent for many of the individual details of the English sumptuary laws may be found in earlier laws from Italy, France and other continental sources (Newton 1980: 131–2).

France has records of socially categorised restrictions on dress dating from as early as 1279 and 1294. The French laws are intimately concerned to regulate the display of the ranks of the secular and clerical elite. Sarah-Grace Heller has observed how these thirteenth-century laws differ from those that follow in England and France in the later centuries, in that they do not dictate particular fashions, and ‘are more concerned with stabilizing how much a person could consume and display relative to his or her income rather than with prohibiting dubious attire’ (Heller 2004: 313–25). In England, this differs markedly from the sumptuary legislation of the later-medieval and Tudor periods.

In England in 1313, Edward II’s government passed a law forbidding the wearing of arms or armour in parliament (Luders et al. 1810: I.10 – 1313, 7th Edw. II). This obviously had more to do with fear of violence or rebellion in the chamber than any broad, social or economic anxieties informing traditional sumptary law. Then in 1337, Edward III’s government passed a law forbidding the importation of cloth or clothing from lands outside England, Ireland, Scotland or Wales, or the exportation of domestic wool (Luders et al. 1810: I.280–1). It has been suggested that this statute, and the sumptuary restrictions accompanying it, were protectionist measures for the domestic wool trade (Bell and Ruse 1972: 23). The restriction on imports was repealed in 1362 following pressure from the merchants (Luders et al. 1810: I.374), but various trade restrictions on cloth and clothing appear frequently in legislation from later parliaments (Hunt 1996: 299–302).

Introduction

Clothing in epic is, as one might expect, mainly concerned with armour, though details about that are found in romances as well. Clothing in romance fulfils a number of functions, some conventional, some less so. One of its purposes is to define expectations associated with class and gender: we may note the costly garments offered to Gawain at Bertilak’s castle in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:

In Lay le Freine, before Le Freine’s mother leaves her by a convent, she takes

and fastens a gold ring to her arm by a silk thread in order that those who find the baby will see that she comes from a noble family (‘nee de bone gent’, 121–34, as Marie de France has it). Clothes often feature in lists of gifts signifying the wealth and generosity of the giver: Degrevant, for example,

Launfal, too,

When poverty descends on Launfal, Arthur’s nephews abandon him, saying

The importance of dress and textiles varies widely even within narratives telling all or parts of the same stories. Unlike the versions of the Constance story in the Vita Duorum Offarum, Trivet’s Anglo-Norman Chronicle, the English version of the Gesta Romanorum, Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, and Gower’s Confessio Amantis, the narrative in Emaré is propelled by an object, an elaborately worked cloth, the gift of the king of Sicily to the emperor, Emaré’s father, and subsequently, in the form of a robe, a gift from the emperor to his daughter. Particular objects such as these appear in so many Breton lays that they are considered a defining element of the genre (Hopkins 2000: 71): when Le Freine gives up her embroidered cloth, she unknowingly prepares the way for her mother to reclaim her.

Introduction

The collection of Public Records Office (National Archives) documents classified as ‘SC 8’ include 347 manuscript bundles (or ‘files’), containing in total 17,621 petitions addressed variously to king, council and parliament. Collectively known as ‘Ancient Petitions’, they represent the medieval legal process of petitioning for grace, favour and restitution that became a primary feature of English royal and parliamentary legal processes from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries.

The earliest petitions survive from Henry III’s reign. It was during the reign of Edward I, however, when the practice of petitioning really came into prominence, initiated by an apparent shift in government policy in the 1270s which allowed the king more involvement in local affairs whilst giving the king’s subjects greater access to royal favour or judgement (Dodd 2007: 19). The policy allowed aggrieved parties to hire a properly trained clerk to produce a petition, addressed directly to the king, to his parliament or his advisors, in order to have restitution for a grievance or have inquiry made into a particular case. English monarchs carried on the practice to greater and lesser extents through the whole of the late-medieval period.

Private vs. ‘public’ petitions

So-called ‘private’ petitions from individuals, local groups, communities and religious houses were often used when the courts of the county, hundred, borough or vill were thought to be insufficient for achieving satisfaction. Most of the petitions extracted here are ‘private’ in nature. Almost all were also ‘un-enrolled’, in that they were not recorded in any systematic way on the records of the rolls of parliament.

During the early years of Edward I’s reign, such so-called ‘private’ petitions began to be left off the parliamentary rolls, whilst enrolment was reserved solely for petitions concerning ‘public’ business. The distinction between them is often far from clear. In general, ‘private’ petitions resulted in a ruling that only affected the petitioner or petitioners, rather than resulting in general legislation (Dodd 2007: 2, 127, 157). The petitions transcribed and edited here may be considered ‘private’.

During Edward II’s reign one begins to see petitions addressed directly to the commons rather than the king or council. By the fifteenth century, many private petitions – often addressed to the commons – were again being enrolled directly in parliamentary records, and many of these were subsequently printed in the Rotuli Parliamentorum (Strachey et al. 1783).