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Fools and Jesters at the English Court . By John Southworth. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998. Pp. 216 + illus. £20 Pb.

This is not as scholarly a work as was the earlier book, The English Medieval Minstrel, although there is here enough material to have achieved this aim; and the opening, which provides new information on the roles of fools during the obscure years of the Saxon and early Norman periods, is promising. The fools Southworth focuses on here were men who accompanied their masters on hunting and fighting expeditions, but these were more scapegraces than the scapegoats we have come to expect from the example of Tamun, in the Tain. Southworth's further information on minstrels also provides useful clarification of the multiple roles of court entertainers throughout the Middle Ages. However, on other complex subjects, Southworth is less certain. His classification of the allowed innocent and the condemned artificial fool is confused and contradictory. At one moment (51) he asserts that innocent fools are used to illustrate Psalm 13, a condemnatory Psalm and, at the next, he considers the cleric revellers at the Feast of Fools, innocents: 'the message that the Feast of Fools was primarily intended to deliver was a spiritual one; and it deserves respect as a genuine expression of liturgical drama' (53). If so, it is curious that medieval Church authorities did not notice this. With no evidence to support him, Southworth further asserts that fool figures in the margin of Bodley MS 264—a Romans d'Alexandre which was executed in England—were members of a 'fool society' (55). The thesis in this book is driven by the writer's whimsy and determination to be original at all costs: a desire which is happy to elbow others out of the way and to use fiction as factual evidence as, for example: 'The incurably insane were supported by the community [but] those, like Amadas [from Amadas and Ydoine], who had escaped the physical restraints joined the ranks of the vagrants'. (49) Southworth's final foray is into fool's costume. Here there is a case to be made (and others have made it before him) for arguing that the usual English fool costume was a hood with a liripipe, rather than with ears or coxcomb. However, contrary to his assertions, it was not exclusive; the ears and coxcomb were known, particularly in the sixteenth century: so too was the bauble. Two lines from John Redford's 1531 play, Wit and Science, include all three: 'Ignorance cote hoode eares ye by the masse/ kokscome &. all I lak but a bable' (fol. 23r). Following his hobby-horse, Southworth also totally misinterprets the role of the Lord in Christmas at St John's College, Cambridge, although details on it have been published twice.