Chapter 2 - “All Fools to Christ”: The Patronage of Fools in English Monasteries

Summary

In The Priory bursar's account for the great medieval cathedral priory of Durham, for the year 1356/7, there is an intriguing payment recorded “in sepultura Thome ffatui & necessarijs Expensis circa corpus eiusdem per manus eiusdem” (“for the burial of Thomas Fool and the necessary expenses for the body of the same”). This odd payment for the funeral and burial of Tom, at the prior's own expense, follows a string of regular payments made to Tom, or for his maintenance, running through the tenures of no less that two of later medieval Durham's most celebrated priors: William de Cowton (1321–1341) and John Fossor (1341–1374). The fact that such prominent monastics felt compelled to keep a household fool amongst their entourage raises a number of questions about the patronage of such “entertainers” (fatui, fol, ioculatori, stulti) by the cloistered religious. Of course, the rationale behind such apparent license was biblically sanctioned, most pointedly in the identification made in St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians, that “nos stulti propter Christum”—“we are all fools to Christ” (1 Cor. 4:10). The relationship of a fool to the monastic house in which he was maintained, however, remains an unexplored area of enquiry and one this chapter seeks to address. Following on from the previous chapter, this requires reconsideration of those designations of the fool as either artificial (and therefore more entertainer) or “natural” (more case for charity), as well as the aptness of such terminology in relation to a figure like Tom. It also requires consideration of some of the major arguments and antecedents underpinning clerical license for Tom-foolery in the medieval cloister. Overall, the evidence demonstrates their increasing popularity amongst the religious in the early Tudor period.

Following the previous discussion of potentially intellectually disabled performers in “secular” settings, this chapter discusses the appearance of household or “kept” fools in Britain's late-medieval monastic houses. Analyzing the evidence for mid-fourteenthcentury Durham Priory's Thomas Fatuus, it uses Tom to towards a wider consideration of the monastic or church-supported fool in the run-up to the Reformation. The presence of such figures in REED is slight, but nonetheless intriguing. Careful contextualization of the monastic fool has the potential to speak to the local church's support of the ostensibly intellectually differentiated. It can also help deepen understanding of the corresponding relationship between medieval charity and socially constructed behaviour.