What was storytelling like in this place and time?
England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland each had distinct traditions of professional storytellers.
We associate Irish oral tradition with the bards. This was an authentic tradition, and it was still important in the 1600s. There was considerable overlap among stories, poems, songs, and history. Irish bards in earlier centuries were divided into classes, specializing in different branches of oral art.
By the time of Elizabeth, England had effectively conquered Ireland and installed military rulers. The Irish were actively resisting the English. Traditional Irish bards, singers, and storytellers were an important part of the resistance. The songs and stories were of heroic fighters, and called on modern Irish to emulate them and remove the English from Ireland.
Elizabeth seems to have appreciated the artistic value of the bards, but regulated them severely as part of her policy to pacify the Irish. Her seneschal Henry Harrington in 1579 proclaimed "No idle person, vagabond or masterless man, bard, rymor, or other notorious malefactor, remain within the district on pain of whipping after eight days, and of death after twenty days." Another seneschal in Kildare promised "to punish by death, or as otherwise directed, harpers, rhymers, bards, idlemen, vagabonds, and such horse-boys as have not their master's bill to show whose men they are."
Edmund Spenser advocated the bards be completely exterminated. Instead, Elizabeth held the lords responsible for what their bards said.
In 1600, English visitors report every lord had both a poet and a storyteller in his household. By 1800 these were gone, but they had been replaced by travelling storytellers. Robert Bell reports that if a traveller came to town, and was a good storyteller, the cottages would vie with each other to host him. [Zimmerman]
Wales in this era had become much more assimilated to English rule than Ireland. The old Welsh bardic tradition was coming apart. Here, Elizabeth actively tried to preserve and reform it.
The College of Bards traditionally held periodic congresses, or Eisteddfods, to certify and sanction new bards. The College had little activity in the 1500s, and a new generation of bards emerged without the rigorous training of their ancestors. On the English side of the border, Welsh bards were the subject of parody. Elizabeth gave royal sponsorship to an Eisteddfod at Caerwys in 1568. Her commission authorizing the event complained of "vargraunt and idle persons naming theim selfes mynstrelles Rithmers and Barthes" The Eisteddfod recognized a chief bard and gave degrees to 55 new bards, including 20 harpers. [Eisteddfod]
This was the last time an Eisteddfod was held by royal commission. The Welsh harpers are reported as part of the household of large houses in the 1800s. The professional writers, poets, musicians of Ireland and Wales have survived into our age of commercial art.
England did not have a formal profession of storytelling. However, we do find records of individuals who made it their career. At the end of the 1600s, William Preece was famous in Shropshire. His fans called him Scoggen, after the name of a famous jester of Edward IV. We also find singers travelling England in the 1500s. [Fox] But most storytelling in England appears to have been folk telling.
The smaller role of professional storytelling has an analog in the smaller body of literature in the early period. Although we have Roman records, the Saxons and Angles ushered in a period of fewer written works. We have many fragments of Welsh poetry from the 5th century. The earliest surviving written English poetry is from at least several and possibly 6 centuries later. Literature blossomed again in England from around 1200 onward.
The Picts left no recognizable literature beyond inscriptions. We know very little of the original Pictish language or its stories. This, even though the Pictish culture did not completely die out until after the Scots unified the Pictish and Scottish kingdoms around 1000.
When the Irish tribe of Scot settled in Argyle, they did not introduce the bardic class. It is not certain how formal bardry was at that time (500s-600s, approximately the same time as the introduction of Christianity to Ireland). The Irish fili did not appear until after this period, so there may not have been a strong professional tradition to travel with the immigrants.
John Campbell, writing in the 1800s, remembered traveling storytellers in Scotland in his youth. A visitor was assured of lodging if he was a good teller. The village would gather in the evening at the host's house. Traditionally, the host told the first story, then the visitor was required to tell all night long. [Campbell]
Traveling storytellers persisted into the 1900s, but their social standing changed. In the 20th century they are called "travelers". They typically made their living as tinkers, and although known for their stories did not make their living from them. The travelers are something of a lower class, often called or lumped with gypsies. This tradition, however, is distinct from the Romany people. A family tradition of travelers is documented among Clan Robertson (probably not an unusual finding, since the Robertsons are possibly Scotland's largest clan and a large enough population to find examples of every way of life).
Where there was an oral profession, its stories tended to get written down. A much larger body of stories was never written down because it was told by nobody special — which is to say, by everybody. References to stories and to informal storytelling are frequent enough that it was clearly present everywhere.
The Social Context of Storytelling
There is a clear dichotomy between literature and folk stories in this period. We have
| Literary stories | Folk stories |
|---|---|
| valued and praised | denigrated |
| ... in both cases, by writers, who were predominantly educated males | |
| domain of men | old wives' tales |
| taught in schools | passed on orally, fragmentary hints in written works |
| preserved - widely copied and later published | much was lost before the first collectors |
The dominant layer of society treated folk stories as fit only for children. They were left to women to tell and pass on. They were not valued, except by those who told them. Those who wrote made no effort to write down the folk stories. We hear references to fairy tales, but we have the full texts recorded of only a few.
John Aubrey writing in 1673 said in his youth before the English Civil War, it was the old wives who told around the fire. [Fox] Obidiah Walker, in the same year, says "Some are so well stocked with their trade as to be able to answer any question, or parallel any case by a story. Robert Burns says it was his nurse who filled him with ghosts, goblins, and witches. [Burns]
In Northeast England, though, we have records of entire families telling around the fire. In the 1620s Robert Burton lists storytelling as a winter recreation. [Fox] Compare this to many American Indian cultures, who explicitly reserved storytelling for the winter, when it would not interfere with summer chores.
Some stories were for the society beyond the family hearth. Every town had stories of its own past, or to explain unusual local features. Many sources describe a specialization here, with old men as the tellers of historical stories. But Daniel Defoe in the early 1700s, looking for historical stories, says it was always the women who could tell him. In Elizabethan Wales, people of a village climbed to a local mountain top to hear their war stories. [Fox]
The Mideval mystery plays continued as an oral community gathering until Elizabeth supressed them; the Coventry mystery play was suppressed in 1579. [PBS] These also provided plots for the playwrights, as plays became a favored upper class art form. In Shakespeare's time they had become popular among all classes of society. Samuel Pepys records frequent visits to the theater, and jokes people told him, but rarely mentions stories. He does not mention finding storytellers in the street. [Pepys]
Stories were a primary means of education for the unschooled. Note that even though the upper class discount the stories of the commoners, they themselves were taught the same stories. Most upper class families hired lower class nurses for the early rearing of their children. One of the common complaints of Elizabethan writers about folk stories is that they foster superstition. Yet many of the same writers seem to believe those superstitions. [Fox] Cavendish mentions Cardinal Wolsey's use of soothsayers. [Cavendish]
The romantic movement of the 1700s brought a nostalgia for an imagined rustic past, where natural nobility could be found in a simple people untouched by literate civilization. These romantics began to value the folk traditions. The first folklorists began to record stories, songs, and folkways. These early collectors believed they were saving a pure oral tradition that was passing away. The cause of its passing, they believed, was the coming of civilization, which they feared would erase cultural diversity and impose a single transnational literature.
John Aubrey writing in 1673 complained that books have chased away oral storytelling. In the early 1800s, WIlliam Motherwell claimed that the old storytelling was disappearing. [Fox] In the mid 1800s John Campbell said he was saving a tradition that was practiced in his youth, but had already died in his lifetime. [Campbell]
In fact, written culture had influenced oral tradition even before the beginning of printing. Most of the stories we know as folk tales have some parentage in the classic literature that was always preserved by the elite. In the 1640s Sir Thomas Browme said "There is scarce any tradition or popular error but stands also delivered by some good author."
More people than is commonly thought were able to read and be influenced by those authors. Literacy was relatively widespread in the late Middle Ages. Written records began to be common in England in the 1200s. [Fox] In Elizabeth's reign, largely because of her fear of religious unrest, she instituted a large government beauracracy that kept records about a large portion of the populace. This provides a large volume of information about individual lives. [PBS] In the 1470s about half the commoners in London wrote well enough to sign their names to documents. This is both an indication of literacy and of beauacracy — half the commoners of London had something they had to sign. Scholars estimate another 50%, which makes 75% of the commoner population in the capital, could read. The literacy rate in the countryside is smaller. In the Diocese of York (including both city and countryside) about 15% of the wills are signed. [Fox] Elizabeth wanted to convert the young generation to Protestantism by educating it. She opened 160 new schools. Shakespeare's generation was the most literate in English history up to its date. [PBS]
The readers also had reading material. Cheap printed broadsides were circulating widely from the time of Henry VIII. Some cost less than a penny. Bookshop records show they sold many, often clumped in the records as "cheap books", so it appears many households had them. Anne Boleyn in her letters mentions printed religious tracts she brought from France. These and other works circulated widely. Hand copies of works that were originally printed have been found in households that had readers but no money.
All of this reading heavily influenced both stories and tellers. An oral tradition did exist, but it was created and passed down by tellers who incorporated things they had read. The last pure, primitive, non-literate culture in Britain passed away with the first introduction of writing.