PEERS AND PERFORMERS IN THE REIGN OF HENRY VI

The ongoing volumes of the University of Toronto’s Records of Early English Drama ( REED ) and the online REED Patrons and Performances provide information concerning performance activities from about half of medieval and early modern England: 17 counties, 9 municipalities. It also includes Wales. When augmented by information found in other sources, like Ian Lancashire’s Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain , the Malone Society’s Plays and Players in Norfolk and Suffolk , and others, the data reveal thousands of performances in large and small communities throughout the kingdom. A survey and analysis of these records during the reign of Henry VI has revealed an unusual increase in payments to travelling and visiting performers, unmatched in the surviving record evidence from before or after his reign. This paper presents an exploration of this striking pattern. For purposes of analysis I use a master spreadsheet created from data in the REED volumes and various other sources. The spreadsheet lists travelling performers from one of the earliest records, King Edward I’s ystrioni at Christ Church Priory (1277), until the end of the reign of James I (1625). At present it contains over 9,000 entries from most areas of medieval and early modern England. The spreadsheet includes: performers identified by patron or place of origin, types of performers, dates and places of performances, and payments to performers if such were recorded. The terms performers or entertainers are used to cover a variety of activities. The terminology in the records is often very loose. Until records began to be written in English rather than Latin (c.1525), dramatic records refer to histriones , mimi , luditores , and lusitores . Histriones and mimi could designate ‘actors’ of some sort, and luditores and lusitores are generic terms for ‘players’ (which could mean game players and/or actors). Performers designated as minstrels , which dominate the records examined here, were most often musicians but could be actors, dancers, or all of these. Entertainers such as bearwards, keepers of animals in the royal menageries, jugglers, and jesters are usually specified, and musicians are sometimes identified as trumpeters, pipers, harpists, drummers, or waits. Therefore for the following discussion and tables, in the absence of more specific designation, the Latin terms histriones , mimi , and luditores are all translated as ‘entertainers’ or ‘performers’.

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