close connection between these poems and the German genre is self-evident. Of course, the basic idea of listing animal or natural impossibilia was so widespread that it would have been known to English writers from many other sources too; but those other sources, and their English imitators, generally used it in a non-nonsensical way, as a rhetorical device to fortify satire or complaint – usually about the impossibility of female constancy. (One well-known example is a fifteenth-century poem which begins: ‘Whane nettuls in wynter bryng forth rosys red’; the end-line of each stanza is: ‘Than put women in trust and confydens.’)15 Humorous-miraculous narratives were not unknown either, the most famous being the early fourteenth-century poem ‘The Land of Cockaygne’.16 But that poem is a straightforward narrative description of extraordinary things; it lacks the density, energy and chaotic intermingling of different kinds of impossibilia which mark out the German poems and the small group of English poems which follow them so closely.
Finally, one other type of impossibilia cultivated by the German genre should also be mentioned, since it seems to have given rise to another short English poem: this type has been described as ‘the subcategory of adynata [i.e. impossibilia] in which incapacitated persons act as if they had full, or even extraordinary possession of their faculties’.17 The lame dance (or, frequently, catch hares), the dumb sing, the naked put things in their pockets, and so on. This idea is taken up by another fifteenth-century English poem:
I saw thre hedles playen at a ball;
On hanles man served them all;
Whyll thre mouthles men lay and low
Thre legles away hem drow.18
I saw three headless men playing ball;
One handless man served them all;
While three mouthless men lay and laughed
Three legless men drove him away.
This looks like a small fragment extracted from a Lügendichtung and turned into a free-standing pseudo-gnomic poem, which might then have entered the stock of orally transmitted folk poetry. The only other genre in medieval English literature which cultivated impossibilia for their own sake was that of the mock-recipe or mock-prescription: this genre, one instance of which was available in print to seventeenth-century readers, will be discussed in the next chapter.
Apart from these two examples, it is doubtful whether any of the small number of medieval English nonsense poems which have come down to us were known to writers of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries.19 The torch of nonsense poetry seems to have been more or less extinguished in England after its brief flaming in the fifteenth century. When it was re-lit by Hoskyns in 1611, he may well have been writing under the influence of continental nonsense genres; if so, seventeenth-century English nonsense poetry was in part the final product of a more circuitous transmission, in which literary nonsense had travelled in relays from Germany, first to France, and then to Italy.
The earliest French nonsense poetry which has come down to us was written in northern France (in Artois and the Île-de-France region) during the second half of the thirteenth century. Known as ‘fatrasies’, these early poems survive in two main collections, one by the poet Philippe de Rémi, sieur de Beaumanoir (1250–96), and the other, a group of poems called ‘Les Fatrasies d’Arras’, by an unknown writer (or writers).20 One example from the latter group will give the flavour of the genre:
Vache de pourcel,
Aingnel de veël,
Brebis de malart;
Dui lait home bel
Et dui sain mesel,
Dui saiges sotart,
Dui emfant nez d’un torel
Qui chantoient de Renart,
Seur la pointe d’un coutel
Portoient Chastel Gaillart.21
Cow born of a pig,
Lamb born of a calf,
Sheep born of a duck;
Two ugly handsome men
And two healthy lepers,
Two wise idiots,
Two children born of a bull,
Who sang about Reynard,
Carried Château Gaillard
On the point of a knife.
The precise origins of this type of poetry are obscure. One modern scholar has tried to show that these poems were riddles with specific personal and political meanings.22 It is possible that they developed in connection with some kind of literary game, perhaps involving the parodying of gnomic or over-elaborate courtly poetry; this may have been the work of Philippe de Rémi, whose verses are probably earlier than those of the Arras collection.23 These French nonsense poems have a distinctive character: they lack the unifying narrative structure of the German poems, and their impossibilia are generally less visual or physical, less energetic and not so densely packed. But on the other hand the basic similarity with the German poems of the thirteenth century is inescapable. The very idea of putting together strings of impossibilia, not for their traditional rhetorical purpose but simply for the effect of comic absurdity which they produced on their own, is fundamental to both the German and the French poems, and it is very unlikely that this idea was just invented independently on two occasions, within the same century, in two neighbouring countries.24 Literary influences flowed to and fro between the French and German vernaculars throughout the Middle Ages (as the complex development of the Roman de Renart shows). The universities of northern France were frequented by large numbers of German students; one fourteenth-century German lament for the decay of Orléans University says that the sound of the German language was once so loud in the streets of Orléans that one would have thought oneself in the Fatherland.25 It is highly likely that an ingenious new style of poetry invented by German Minnesingers, even though it may have been a minor experimental genre known only through a few examples, should eventually have percolated into French poetic culture too.
As the genre developed in France during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (in a slightly different verse-form, known as the ‘fatras’), it was treated simply as a form of humorous poetry, and described also as a ‘frivole’ or ‘folie’. Not all of the ‘fatras’ were nonsense poems putting together impossible collocations of ideas; such versions of the ‘fatras’ died out in the early fifteenth century.26 Nonsense poetry thus enjoyed a much shorter continuous history in France than it did in Germany. But something of the spirit of the ‘fatras’ was revived in the sixteenth century by the poet Clément Marot, in a form of his own invention known as the ‘coq-à-l’âne’.27
The French literary historian Paul Zumthor has made a useful distinction between ‘relative’ and ‘absolute’ nonsense poetry.28 In relative nonsense, each line or couplet makes sense in itself, and it is only the juxtaposition of them in the verse that is without meaning; whereas in absolute nonsense the transgressions of sense occur within the smallest units of the poetry. As the example given above makes clear, the ‘fatrasie’ was capable of thorough-going absolute nonsense. Other types of French medieval poetry exploited the techniques of relative nonsense: foremost among them was the ‘resverie’, which put together a pointless sequence of personal statements, sententious remarks or fragments of conversation.29 Each statement was a distich of unequal length, linked to the next by rhyme (ab, bc, cd, etc.): this strongly suggests that the form had its origin in a dialogue-game between two poets. Thus, for example:
Nul ne doit estre jolis
S’il n’a amie.
J’aime autant crouste que mie,
Quant j’ai fain.
Tien cel cheval par le frain,
Malheüreus! …30