For another #FarcesFriday, we’re looking at the context for our plays: what was happening in France in the latter half of the 15th century?

It’s an unfortunate fact of academia that the further along you go, the narrower your world gets. If you compress time, one minute you’re deciding you want to study history, maybe European history, for example, and the next minute your entire world is “mystery plays- summer of 1951- England outside of London”. Now, having a specialism is great! You really fall in love with the specific event that you’re working on. But you miss out on so much else. 

Working on the French farces really brings this home, because they’re still within “medieval drama”, already a very niche field, yet they were totally new ground for me. In fact, I realised that my knowledge of French history altogether is tragically limited, and only surfaces when it bumps up against English history. And I found that sometimes, when you’re looking at a different country or culture from within an academic space, it can be challenging to find the broader events and themes. Thus, I suspect someone who studies French history in depth may take issue with the moments I’m highlighting here, and feel that I’ve missed out on a much wider narrative! If that’s you- let’s talk! I know I have a lot more to learn. But for now, a highlight (or lowlight) reel of what was happening before and during the time our plays were being staged for the first time:

First, let me start by saying that France as you and I know it, isn’t the France that they knew. Calais, the northern port city, had been captured by the English in 1347, and they wouldn’t give it back until the mid-16th century; thus the English had a solid economic toehold on a major trading point. The area surrounding it, as well as an area around Dijon, were considered the Duchy of Burgundy, which was technically part of the kingdom of France, but was ruled by its own wealthy and powerful ducal family. Confusingly, next to that was Burgundy, a part of the Holy Roman Empire rather than part of the French Kingdom. Southeastern France was also part of the HRE, or some of the small states affiliated with Italy. 

France today is known for being fiercely defensive of its language. But in the late medieval period, more people spoke dialects than “proper” French. This puts Pathelin’s scene of feigning madness by speaking in several different dialects into an interesting light: though one ordinary peasant probably wouldn’t have been so multilingual, the country taken as a whole was. 

Without a common language, one thing which may have bound the French together was the turmoil of the previous century. The plague, which had depleted Europe’s population by a quarter to fifty percent, was as far in the past to Pathelin’s time as Queen Victoria’s death is to ours; inevitably its legacy must have lingered, particularly in an ongoing, depleted population. Additionally, as Europe headed into the Little Ice Age, more years saw crop failures that resulted in food scarcity as a semi-regular occurrence.

But, apart from the plague, the thing that probably shaped the era the most was war. The English and French royal families had been connected by marriage and descent ever since William the Conqueror, with lands throughout the geographic body of France actually under English rule. This was always a source of tension, but it came to a head in  1328, when Charles IV of France died without a (male) heir: his closest male relative was Edward III, King of England. The French nobles couldn’t stomach the idea of an English monarch, and instead they gave their crown to Philip VI, a cousin outside of the inheritance patterns but with the required French identity. But the dispute between monarchs, one with the legal right to inherit and the other with the nationality to do so, touched off a disagreement between the two countries that would carry on, in phases and waves, for just over a century, with various parts of France changing hands along the way. Many of the battles celebrated in English history- Crecy, Agincourt- date from this prolonged conflict. The Hundred Years’ War is also famous for the brief but dramatic career of Joan of Arc, an ordinary peasant girl who claimed that visions from God demanded that she help liberate French lands from the English. Joan was executed for heresy in 1431, less than half a century before our plays. And though the final “official” battle of this long was, at Castillon, was in 1453, the Treaty of Picquigny, which formally ended it, wasn’t until 1475- right at the date suggested for Pathelin‘s writing. 

That wasn’t the only significant national crisis of the time, either. Charles VI, who became King of France at age 11, didn’t just offer the country instability because of his young age: he also suffered from periodic mental illness, including the bizarre belief that he was made of glass and could shatter at any moment. Although he died in 1422, well before our plays, his delusions must have contributed to a general sense that the world was a chaotic place. Nor was the war with England the only dispute of the times- the Armagnac-Burgundian Civil War, in which two of the French noble families fought with one another from 1407-1435- added one more dispute to the pile. In 1477, the Duke of Burgundy died and the division of his lands between the king of France and the Hapsburgs of the Holy Roman Empire made for even more minor but unsettling wars. 

Even religion couldn’t be counted on to be a wholly stabilising thing. From 1378 to 1417, there was a dispute between the Roman papacy and a succession of rival popes in Avignon.

Altogether, this “crisis of the late Middle Ages”, as it’s been termed, must have had some impact on ordinary people. I find it fascinating that this was also the period when the practice of law in France was becoming such a prominent career- and that it was also when the writing of farces, particularly by those law students, became so widespread. Did people seek out legal stability where their world felt out of control? Did law students, who may have been especially well informed about political matters, find solace from that world by writing comedy that was in some cases absurd, and in other cases subtle commentary? With so much discord, maybe Jaquinot and his wife’s bickering is just a smaller scale event among larger ones, and perhaps Pierre’s chicanery reflects the feeling that the rules of society were being violated all over the place. I don’t know any of this with any certainty, and it’s fair to add that life was no easier or more stable in England, where conflict with the French sat alongside what we now call the Wars of the Roses (1455-1487), yet we have no tradition of farce in England.

How would this tumultuous century and its predecessor have been perceived by our characters? Jaquinot and his wife are fairly young, so they wouldn’t have the deep memories of all that had transpired, but as we see in our own times, growing up when chaos is the norm can make life very difficult to navigate and one might argue that their squabbling owe something to mental health that’s taken many hits. Jaquinot’s mother-in-law is probably the oldest character in either of our plays, so she’s lived through some things; is part of her egging on her daughter, against her son-in-law, her way of saying, “You have to fight for things in this world if you want to survive”? Most of the characters in Pathelinhave a carefree quality- they’re cynical, jaded cheats, but one gets the sense that they cheat one another almost as a form of entertainment for themselves, with even Guillemette’s pleas about their poverty not truly coming across as desperate. Aignelet, the shepherd-cum-sheep-thief, is the most exposed to desperation, his sheep-eating an act of necessity, but his glee in putting one over on Pierre Pathelin gives him a joyful quality as well. Once again, the characters of our farces are ourselves: we all react differently to living in a world that seems to be falling apart, and how an actor chooses to read their character may or may not reflect the historical moment in which they were created, or the one in which they are being performed.