Abstract

Abstract The last fifteen years have seen a fruitful investigation into the symbiotic relationship between seasonal festivity and peasant rebels who adopted mock king titles, organizing their defiance of government into festive patterns. The questions and answers which have resulted have radically altered critical views as to the ‘safety valve’ theory of festive games. The other well-known way of looking at these customs is in the tradition of Mikhail Bahktin, in which the mock king is seen as part of a saturnalian impulse, the roi pourrire in medieval carnival who, in Rabelais, was the essence of the indestructible world of folk humour, and who, C. L. Barber perceived, was part of a ritualized disorder which led to social regeneration in some Shakespearean comedy. The two areas of study are concerned with mock kings as they appear either in festive games or as leaders of peasant rebellions. However, E. L. G. Stones’s article on fourteenth-century robber barons makes clear that they too adopted a mock king style. These were men from a different social class, and it seems as improbable that they copied their inferiors as that the association was pure coincidence.

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