A medieval comedy act has been discovered in first-ever find, researcher says | Hacker News Reader

A medieval comedy act has been discovered in first-ever find, researcher says

vice.com

122 pointsisaacfrond50 comments

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I was expecting to read the text. :(

It's vice, any expectation is too high for them

Even solvency, apparently.

Some better information in this article: https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/homenews/23557334.librar...

The manuscript itself seems to be available here: https://digital.nls.uk/early-manuscripts/browse/archive/1336...

I freely admit I cannot read it :)

Interesting. The table of contents is rewritten in modern cursive, though I can't read everything even there.

  Contents
  The Hunttinge of the Hare.
  A Mock Sermon.
  ...

From there we can flip forward to the actual content and ... yep, can't read it. Honestly the only reason I know it says "huntinge of the hare" centred at the top is because I read it in the table of contents.

I can tell it's English, but that's about all I can tell, and that only because I can read some of the words, but not all of them. :) Maybe I can send the image to GPT-4 for transcription and translation. (lol)

Looks like a Gothic font with spelling differences, I think the first line translated is something like:

> (something) tale I will now tell

Except the spelling is like:

> (something) take y wyll yow tell

I can also read what seems to be "me to blame" on the 6th line.

Here's the best I can do with the first bit, several edits later:

  A letyll tale y wyll yow tell
  y troye hit wyll lyke yow well 
  þat ye shall habe gud game ooooo
  Bot were(?) it was y dar? not say
  for appyr.??ly a nod? day
  hit myght t?ne me to blame ooooooo
  ?ow take gud hede evrython(?)
  how a yomon come rydyng alon
  hafull fayre way he fond ooooooo
  he lokud be syde hym lyght glydand
  he fond a hare full fayr syttand
  a pon a falow lond ooooooooo
  he markyd wyll wher the fatt þ
  þkyd to the town as fast as he myght go
  þ way þen con he ha? ooooooo
  þ fyrst mon þt he mett wt all
  was a husbond hyght honkyn of þ hall
  a gud mon and a twwe(?) oooooooo
  ...

We have letyll = little, wyll = will, troye = trust(?), hit = it, lyke = like, yow = you, habe = have, gud = good, yomon = yeoman, rydyng = riding, lokud = looked, be syde = beside, hym = him, fayr = fair, syttand = seated/sitting, etc.

I think the y with dot over is "I", while the þ with a dot is "the" or "thou" etc. I'm not entirely sure what all the abbreviations are supposed to be.

* * *

Edit: there's apparently a full transcription at http://doi.org/10.1515/angl.2010.009 though it's not easy to accurately transcribe something like this so full of abbreviations, old spellings based on old pronunciations, archaic glyphs like ſ and þ, letters like u and v which have since diverged, etc.

Any idea why so many lines end in ooooooo?

You can look at the manuscript. I don't think it's really supposed to be letters – more like a decorative doodle – but I'm not sure what the deal is: https://digital.nls.uk/early-manuscripts/browse/archive/1341...

Perhaps "pause for audience laughter"?

It's every third line in this poem/song so maybe you're right about leaving a gap for the music or something.

Maybe its literal, like a bunch of people saying OOOOOohhhhhh..

The paper is archived here: https://sci-hub.ru/https://doi.org/10.1515/angl.2010.009

The first three stanzas translated by gpt4:

A little tale I will tell you,

I trust it will please you well,

At it, you shall have good fun.

But where it was I dare not say,

Perhaps another day,

It might turn me to blame.

Now pay good heed everyone,

How a yeoman came riding along,

He found a very fair way.

He looked beside him light gliding,

He found a hare very fair sitting,

Upon a fallow land.

He marked well where she sat then,

He rode to the town as fast as he could,

The way then did he pursue.

The first man that he met with,

Was a husband named Howkin of the hall,

A good man and a true.

The yeoman said with laughing cheer,

'Does any gentleman dwell here,

Good man, as God save you?

Over there I have found a hare sitting,

If you have any greyhounds, bring them with you,

A chase there shall you have.'

I think the table of content is modern. It says "rebound in 1964" after all.

This is what seems to be the first page of the text https://digital.nls.uk/early-manuscripts/browse/archive/1341...

I recognize latin characters in what my classmates called "gothic font" in highschool. But I can't recognize the language.

It's definitely English (modulo several centuries of spelling and words that have fallen away). Many words are recognizable but I can't read a whole sentence either - except maybe "But myself tho me to blame". Lots of conventions have changed: you really would need to study and practice to be able to make it through this, but not to the extent of learning a whole other language from scratch.

If you take a screen capture then paste it into google image search then select the text or translate button - it also detects the English characters, but still makes very little sense to me.

"What's the deal with Hare Hunting?" funky hurdy gurdy bass line

The academic paper has quite a bit more detail. The link to it in the Vice article seems to be broken, but it's available (open access!) on the journal website.

https://academic.oup.com/res/advance-article/doi/10.1093/res...

Open access analysis and full transcription:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236869902_'The_Hunt...

This is no surprise. There's a lot of Monty Python style in Shakespeare, and he was definitely influenced by earlier sources, such as medieval morality plays, etc.

Perhaps we should say that Monty Python draws on Shakespearean comedy, given the relative times and the fact that we know that most, if not all of the Pythons studied Shxpr.

It was clearly Shakespeare who got the inspiration for his plays from Monty Python sketches. After all they're timeless.

I saw a medieval comedy with a killer rabbit when i was a kid…by some troupe known as “Monty Python”

That film is stuffed full of jokes about British history. People wanting more might like to pick up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1066_and_All_That

In medieval England people joked about killer rabbits. Must be a direct ancestor of Monty Python's rabbit - connection!

In medieval England there was a sketch about "Robin Hood, jousting bears, and partying pigs" yet there's no mention of Walt Disney.

I'd say it's a load of hogwash but I'm sure somewhere Becky Ferreira has written about how medieval Britons used to bathe their swine.

Neat. Wikipedia even lists some of the antecedents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_of_Caerbannog#Anteceden... , including specifically "The idea for the rabbit in the movie was taken from the façade of the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris."

What if the killer rabbit bit proves this is a tongue-in-cheek modern forgery

I feel for the poor researcher that wrote "Until then, Heege’s work survives as a “vestige of medieval life lived vibrantly: the good times being as good as they ever have been, and probably ever will,” according to the study."

They so want to live in medival times bless them

And thus it was proved true that an artists value isn't known until they are dead.

In this case, it took six centuries for somebody to get their jokes.

   and for those who don't get *my* humor, it's a play on words about 'getting' jokes, physically, in written form

Got me thinking... what is the oldest, preserved joke? Is it still funny?

The oldest recorded joke[0], as recorded on a Sumerian tablet somewhere between 1900 and 2300 BC:

    Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart on her husband’s lap.

[0]https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2017/09/oldest-know...

    An intellectual was told by someone: “your beard is now coming in.” So he went to the rear-entrance and waited for it. Another intellectual asked what he was doing. Once he heard the whole story, he said: “I’m not surprised that people say we lack common sense. How do you know that it’s not coming in by the other gate?”

Most of them suck by today's standards, but that one is genuinely still funny today!

> A student dunce went swimming and almost drowned. So now he swears he’ll never get into water until he’s really learned to swim.

This one is funny and deep at the same time.

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/04/24/earliest-gag/

https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/proverbs/t.6.1.05.html#t6105.p...

    73-75. A dog entered a tavern and said: "I can't see a thing. I'll open this one!"

It's not, but probably because this is a mistranslation.

Here I am thinking, "but we already know about Jim Davidson and Andrew Dice Clay"

is there a link to the actual manuscript?

Here's the Hunting of the Hare (starts on the page marked 113 and it's in Middle English, but there's a glossary after): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236869902_'The_Hunt...

IN BRITAIN!

I think some of the posts on here are very anglo-centric. I like that HN is a place that serves no one particlar nation or people.

As a noob asking from a place of curiosity, does “Medieval” mean anything outside of the Europe sphere of influence? Medieval evokes a certain imagery in my mind, rather than a time period. It feels weird and Eurocentric to refer to Asian countries in ~1200 as “Medieval” for example.

The general term is the Post-classical Era.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-classical_history

"Medieval" can sometimes be applied to places like China or India, but it's not used that way by historians. In general historians don't use the terms "Medieval" or "Dark Ages" much anymore, and if they do it's with qualifiers. For Europe "Post-Classical," "Early Middle Ages" or "Late Antiquity" are more often used refer to the earlier Middle Ages.

"Medieval" is certainly still used.[0] "Dark Age" is no longer used interchangeably with Medieval, however. This is because many now see the period starting from the High Middle Ages in Europe as directly leading to the modern period. Refering to the entire Medieval period as a Dark Age is to take a side in that argument.

[0]https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=Medieval&scisbd=1

When this came up a couple week ago, I found examples of people using "medieval Arabic", "Medieval Africa", and even more specifically "Medieval Somalia". See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35984909 for links.

These are used in modern scholarly writing, like "The Medieval Archaeology of Somaliland" from 2002 at https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.566 and "China in medieval Indian imagination: “China”-inspired images in medieval South Asia" from 2021 at https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479591421000176 .

However, as others have commented, just because people do use them isn't enough to say if that's the primary form to refer to that period of time.

Medieval refers to a specific European time period, I’m not sure what you expected.

> Minstrels were fixtures of European life in the Middle Ages, but though countless references to these entertainers exist in literature from this era, no clear records of an actual minstrel’s “repertoire,” meaning their act or set, has been identified—until now.

What’s not to like?

Also most of Europe had similar jokes both from books and trovadours.

He wrote, in French.

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