Let me tell you a medieval joke:

“Been married?” says one man to another. The reply: “Aye. Thrice. But each woman hanged herself from a tree in my garden.” “Well, bless my balls!” says the first man. “A magic tree!”

By today’s standards, not very funny. But there we have it.

It seems as though a great deal of medieval humour was concerned with misogyny, adultery and lewdness. Women were quite often the butt of the joke – as were the men who were foolish enough to be tricked by them. The idea of cuckoldry was considered hilarious, and we don’t need to look any further than Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales for proof of this. You can imagine the gathered-together revellers rolling around the floor when, in The Merchant’s Tale, poor old Januarie has his sight magically restored, only to see his pretty, young wife at it with another man halfway up a tree.

And what about The Reeve’s Tale? This one, which is sourced from a popular fabliau (which also provided the inspiration for Boccaccio’s Sixth Story of the Ninth Day), has a pair of students bed-swapping with a miserly miller’s wife and daughter.

That this kind of behaviour was found so amusing is hardly surprising in a society which had its sexual activity so tightly controlled by the ruling powers. The Church was able to punish those found guilty of fornication, adultery and all the other types of bawdiness – and they did so regularly. They even imposed restrictions on the way people could have sex. Albertus Magnus, a typically grouchy Dominican friar and Church theologian, ranked five sexual positions from least to most sinful – starting with missionary, then side-by-side, sitting, standing, and – the worst of all – a tergo (that is to say, from behind). It’s difficult to say what’s more astounding here, that the Church wholeheartedly agreed with this list, or that Albertus could only think of five positions in the first place.

Either way, it really isn’t hard to see the comedy in all of this. It certainly wasn’t missed by the people who were most affected by this kind of oppression and they took every opportunity to subvert these every day issues in their humour.

These days we might consider sarcasm as the lowest form of wit, but to the medieval audience it was one of the very highest. A good sarcastic comment might have the whole neighbourhood sniggering for weeks – even the nobility found it a hoot: Edward II, in particular, was known for his cutting wit and ironic replies, particularly in moments that might’ve required slightly more regal responses.

People also enjoyed a good practical joke. You might be walking along the street one evening when, suddenly, your foot is caught in a cunningly laid noose and you’re hoisted up off the ground and left dangling for everyone to laugh at – and you wouldn’t be cut down until you’d paid your assailants a ransom fee. Very amusing. Of course, this kind of thing isn’t just a one-off moment of jollity – it’s called hocking and was perfectly acceptable and happened relatively often.

Unfortunately, and as you may have guessed, medieval humour did feature a lot more cruelty than our modern-day sensibilities would deem appropriate. Physical pain was often laughed at (though, let’s be honest, who hasn’t laughed at someone falling over in a funny way – even if you feel bad about it afterwards?), as was cruelty towards animals and people with disabilities or deformities. As unpleasant as all this is, it’s all bundled up with contemporary perceptions of the world and the understanding of the people living in it. Pain was a far more obvious subject then than now – capital punishment and public torture were relatively commonplace. Through a general lack of understanding and knowledge, a certain distrust of anything, or anyone, different was allowed to propagate. It would be hard, I suppose, to sympathise with someone with mental health issues when you can only believe those issues are caused by maleficent and supernatural powers. In the face of fear, you laugh. It is not so much a show of our ancestors’ lack of humanity, rather their lack of simple understanding – which is an encouraging thought.

Lastly, farts.

There’s no escaping the fact that medieval humour is intensely scatological. There are really far too many excellent examples to choose from – but with Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale which has the crafty clerk, Nicholas, let fly a fart right into poor, old Absolom’s face, and the Facetiae by Poggio Bracciolini* which is just full of similarly amusing fart jokes, we can get a real whiff of what the medieval mind found funny. Even the exemplary Dante, in the Divine Comedy, couldn’t resist it: “ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta” – which is, “the demon used his arse as a trumpet.” As far as comedy is concerned, this type of thing has an astoundingly rich heritage – the Romans were making fart jokes long before Chaucer did. There must be something intrinsically funny, something lodged deep in our shared subconscious that makes it so, about farting. Whatever the reason, I find it incredibly pleasing to think that someone living almost seven hundred years ago would find something so juvenile as funny as I do.

In fact, for a people who inhabited a world that was so vastly different to ours, medieval people certainly seem to have had a startlingly similar sense of humour. It’s actually somewhat reassuring to think that we haven’t come so far from our forebears – more so, that we might remember that they were people just like us, who shared the same laughs amidst far worse adversity and every day horror. It presents the enduring spirit of us, as people, who – even when the world is looking particularly bleak – can still find the time to crack a smile.

*Let’s end with the best of them:

A man and woman notice a ram rutting the sheep. The woman asks how the ram chooses his mate, to which the man replies that the ram chooses the sheep that farts. She asks if this is the same for men and he tells her that, yes, it is. Immediately, the woman lets out a fart and the two have sex. A little while later she farts again, with the same result. When the woman farts for a third time the man, who is by now exhausted, exclaims: “I’m not making love to you again, even if you were to blow out your very soul.”