This mediæval love of parody was not unfrequently displayed in a more popular form, and in the language of the people. In the _Reliquæ Antiquæ_ (i. 82) we have a very singular parody in English on the sermons of the Catholic priesthood, a good part of which is so written as to present no consecutive sense, which circumstance itself implies a sneer at the preachers. Thus our burlesque preacher, in the middle of his discourse, proceeds to narrate as follows (I modernise the English):--
"Sirs, what time that God and St. Peter came to Rome, Peter asked Adam a full great doubtful question, and said, 'Adam, Adam, why ate thou the apple unpared?' 'Forsooth,' quod he, 'for I had no wardens (pears) fried.' And Peter saw the fire, and dread him, and stepped into a plum-tree that hanged full of ripe red cherries. And there he saw all the parrots in the sea. There he saw steeds and stockfish pricking 'swose' (?) in the water. There he saw hens and herrings that hunted after harts in hedges. There he saw eels roasting larks. There he saw haddocks were done on the pillory for wrong roasting of May butter; and there he saw how bakers baked butter to grease with old monks' boots. There he saw how the fox preached," &c.
The same volume contains some rather clever parodies on the old English alliterative romances, composed in a similar style of consecutive nonsense. It is a class of parody which we trace to a rather early period, which the French term a _coq-à-l'âne_, and which became fashionable in England in the seventeenth century in the form of songs entitled "Tom-a-Bedlams." M. Jubinal has printed two such poems in French, perhaps of the thirteenth century,[57] and others are found scattered through the old manuscripts. There is generally so much coarseness in them that it is not easy to select a portion for translation, and in fact their point consists in going on through the length of a poem of this kind without imparting a single clear idea. Thus, in the second of those published by Jubinal, we are told how, "The shadow of an egg carried the new year upon the bottom of a pot; two old new combs made a ball to run the trot; when it came to paying the scot, I, who never move myself, cried out, without saying a word, 'Take the feather of an ox, and clothe a wise fool with it.'"--
