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It is sometimes expedient to all the people to play the fool and make merry, lest by holding them in with too great a rigour, we put them in despair.
The sixteenth century was an age of court and domestic fools and this tradition was so rich and pervasive that even the household of Sir Thomas More had its own fool, Henry Patenson. 2 From a twentieth century perspective we might well ask, though, why More would need a domestic fool. Given More's character and talents, and his ordered and intellectually motivated family life, Patenson's role could suggest a paradox. As More was as much a man of the medieval period, out of which the tradition of fools came, as he was of the Renaissance, the answer to this paradox lies in the medieval pleasure derived from unsophisticated carnival-type humour, which was also a release mechanism. More could well have agreed with a fifteenth-century defender of fools who 'explained that wine barrels break if their bungholes are not occasionally opened to let in the air.'3
The word fool in this context can be taken in general terms to mean an entertainer. Though in this sense there are a number of distinctions that need to be made within the two clear categories that can be established, the "natural" and the "artificial". The natural fool can be classed as a simpleton, slow, feebleminded, even an idiot in the technical sense of being severely subnormal. The artificial fool was one of the following, or a combination of, buffoon or clown, whose talent lay in uninhibited slapstick, a comic who indulged in extempore slick verbal wit, or a jester who offered more contrived light-hearted entertainment. Both kinds were employed as court and domestic fools, the first category as much laughed at for their mental, and even physical, deficiencies as for their antics. Wolsey's Patch fits into the natural group, while Henry VIII's Will Somers, depicted as having characteristics of shrewdness and intuition, belongs to the artificial. On the evidence available, Henry Patenson too can be put in the latter class.
Sources of information about the character and activities of Patenson are much more limited than those concerning other famous fools of his era. Sandra Billington's enthusiastic statement that information...