in Beverley Minster, we have a monkey riding upon a
hare--a bedridden goat, with a monkey acting as doctor; and at
Winchester a boar is playing on the fiddle, while a young pig is
dancing.[47] Even scenes of drunkenness and immorality are not always
excluded. But the principal representations attributed human actions to
birds and beasts--people who could laugh at stories of this kind, could
also at depictions of them. It may be maintained that men were then
highly emotional, and demanded but little complexity or truth in humour,
so that they could see something amusing in a boar playing upon the
bagpipes, or in such a device as a monster composed of two birds, with
the head of a lion, or another with a human head on a lion's body! But
there must have been something more than this--some peculiar estimation
of animals to account for such numerous representations. They were
common in the secular ornamentation of the day, for instance, in a MS.
copy of Froissart of the fifteenth century, there is a drawing of a pig
walking upon stilts, playing the harp, and wearing one of the tall
head-dresses then in fashion.

This love of the comic seems to have been fostered by the leisure and
the lively turn of some ecclesiastics. In the injunctions given to the
British Church in the year 680, no bishop is to allow tricks or
jocosities (ludos vel jocos) to be exhibited before him, and later we
read of two monks, near Oxford, receiving a man hospitably, thinking he
was a "jougleur," and could perform tricks, but kicking him out on
finding themselves mistaken. We find some of the monks amusing
themselves with "cloister humour," consisting principally of logical
paradoxes; while others indulged in verbal curiosities, such as those of
Tryphiodorus, the lipogrammatist, who wrote an Odyssey in twenty-four
books without once using the letter A. Some were more fond of pictorial
designs, and carved great figures on the chalk downs, such as the Giant
of Cerne Abbas, in Dorsetshire, and the Long Man of Wilmington, in
Sussex.

As we found reason to believe that the earliest kind of laughter was
that of pleasure, so in this revival of civilization, we often see
humour regarded as having no influence beyond that of ministering to
amusement. The mind was scarcely equal to regarding things in more than
one light. A jest was often viewed as entirely unimportant, its levity
and depreciatory character being altogether overlooked. To this and to
the host