Why this subject is slippery
Popular images of medieval life often include dancing around the maypole, village mummers in costume, and ancient rituals handed down unchanged since pagan times. Some of these things did happen in some form. But the evidence is thin and often late, and many “traditions” described in books from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were reconstructed from fragments, or from customs recorded centuries after the Middle Ages. This article sticks to what medieval sources reasonably support and points out where historians disagree.
Customs also varied enormously between regions, and what happened in an English village might have had no parallel in a Polish or Spanish one.
Fairs and markets as social occasions
Many fairs were held on a saint’s day or around a church feast, and they mixed trade with entertainment. People came to buy and sell, but also to meet, eat, drink, watch performers and hear news. The commercial role of trade fairs is a subject of its own. In terms of tradition, they were occasions when villagers who rarely left their parish met people from other places, and when jugglers, musicians, acrobats and peddlers had an audience.
Church ales and parish gatherings
In England and some other regions, parishes held “church ales”, where ale was brewed and sold or shared to raise money for the church, with games and dancing. The records, usually churchwardens’ accounts, mostly come from the later fifteenth century onward, so they show late medieval practice more than early. They are good evidence that the village community regularly organized festivals around its church, and that religious and social life overlapped. Similar feasts honoring the parish’s patron saint, sometimes called wakes, are known in many places.
May games and summer festivities
Spring celebrations are often imagined as one coherent ancient festival. The surviving evidence is more varied. Medieval sources record May Day activities such as gathering greenery and flowers, choosing a May king and queen or lord and lady in some places, and plays and dances. By the late Middle Ages in England, “Robin Hood games” were part of summer entertainments in some towns and parishes, raising money through performances and collections. The maypole as a decorated pole around which people danced is attested in England, but detailed medieval descriptions are scarcer than the popular image would suggest, and the more elaborate ribbon dances are generally considered much later.
Whether such activities grew out of pre-Christian ritual is a question historians cannot answer with certainty. Some scholars see continuity; others stress that evidence for specific pre-Christian customs is almost absent and that spring festivities are natural occasions for celebration in any society.
Mummers and disguising
“Mumming” in the Middle Ages generally meant disguised visits, in which masked or costumed people came to a house, often at Christmas or the days around it, and played games, danced or gambled. Records of mumming at the courts and in towns survive from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In some cases they were formal entertainments for the king or a noble household, with costume and verse.
The “mummers’ play” that many people picture, with St. George, a dragon, a doctor who revives a slain figure, is recorded mainly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Whether it has medieval roots is unclear, and the claim of an unbroken tradition from the Middle Ages is usually considered unproven.
Role reversal: boy bishops and misrule
One of the best-documented customs is the Boy Bishop. In many cathedrals and some parish churches, around the feast of St. Nicholas (December 6) or Holy Innocents (December 28), a choirboy was chosen to act as bishop and lead parts of the service. Records suggest it was widespread in medieval Europe, and it was later suppressed. A related tradition, sometimes called the Feast of Fools, allowed lower clergy to invert normal order with parody and noise, and church authorities repeatedly complained about it, which is part of how we know of it.
Households and towns appointed a “Lord of Misrule” or similar figure to run the Christmas revels. Historians generally see these customs as controlled release, in which authority was mocked in a playful way for a short period. How far they truly challenged the social order, as opposed to reinforcing it, is debated. They sit alongside the court jester and other forms of licensed mockery.
Rough music and community justice
Communities also policed behavior informally. Noisy processions with pots, pans and horns, later known in France as charivari, were directed at people seen as violating social norms, such as unequal marriages or remarriage soon after bereavement. These are documented in the later Middle Ages, particularly in France, and their medieval extent is hard to measure.
Processions and the shape of the parish
Rogation processions around the parish boundaries, sometimes called “beating the bounds” in later English use, combined prayer for crops with a communal record of where the parish ended. Everyone walking the line meant that the boundary was remembered. Guild and parish processions through towns at Corpus Christi and other feasts had a similar role in displaying a community to itself.
What to take away
Medieval communal life was rich in festivals, but the sources favor towns, courts and churches, whose records survive, over small rural communities. Much of what we call “tradition” is a mixture of documented medieval practice, later reconstruction and romantic assumptions. A careful reading says that communities did gather, play and parody, and that the details are often lost.