Jesters, COURT, persons who were kept in the households of princes and lesser dignitaries to furnish amusement by their real or affected folly, and hence commonly called Court Fools. At what time they were introduced into European courts has not been precisely ascertained, but there is reason to suppose that they existed in England during the period of our Saxon history, and certainly in the reign of William the Conqueror, since an almost contemporary historian, Maitre Wace, has left a curious account of the preservation of William's life, when he was only Duke of Normandy, by his fool Goles. Other fools whose names have descended are the Hitard of Edmund Ironside, the Will Somers of Henry VIII., Archie Armstrong, who lost his office for jests which the petty-minded Land could not endure; and in France Caillet and Triboulet in the time of Francis I., and Clicot in the reign of Henry III. Triboulet figures in Rabelais, and is the hero of Hugo's Le roi s'amuse and of Verdi's Rigoletto. The last private person to keep a fool in England was Lord Suffolk, whose jester, Dicky Pierce, was buried at Berkeley in 1728. In Douce's Illustrations of Shakespeare (1807) there is a dissertation on clowns and fools, with an account of their peculiar dress, the motley coat, the tight breeches with legs of different colours, the cowl bearing asses' ears and crested with a cockscomb, and the bauble, a short staff with a ridiculous head. Douce divides them into nine classes, and finds the parent of the Shakespearean stage clown in the 'vice' of the mysteries and moralities.
In the East the office of jester existed in the 8th century, and probably much earlier in India. The famous Calif Haroun al-Raschid had a jester named Bahalûl, some of whose sayings and doings have been preserved by Arabian writers. He appears to have possessed vivacity, wit, and observation, which were, however, often concealed under a mask of simplicity, and he was permitted to take great liberties with the calif's courtiers. 'I wish,' said Haroun to him one day, 'I wish you would procure me a list of all the fools in Bagdad.' 'That would be difficult, O Commander of the Faithful,' replied the jester; 'but if you desire to know the wise men, the catalogue may soon be completed.' This found its way—mutatis mutandis—into English jest-books in the 16th century. One day Bahalûl was discovered seated on the calif's throne, for which Haroun awarded him a whipping; then said the jester, 'O Commander of the Faithful, I sat in this seat only half an hour and have been whipped for doing so; what do you deserve who sit in it every day?' The jester doubtless thought the slight scourging he received was amply compensated by the bag of gold pieces which Haroun ordered to be given to him for his witty remark.
From the practical jokes popularly ascribed to Ramakistnam, he may be styled the Scogin of Madras. A collection of his jests in the Tamil language was translated into English and Telugu by Nairan Sawmy, and published at Madras in 1839, and not a few of them are almost identical with tales ascribed to European court jesters, such as our English Scogin and the Italian Gonella. This almost unknown little book explains how he was endowed with so much wit that he became the greatest jester in the world, and by the exercise of this wit at the court of a rājā, was able to maintain himself and family. Like the European court jesters, Ramakistnan's too ready wit frequently roused his royal master's wrath; but though sometimes condemned to death he always evaded it, and was again and again received with favour through his irresistible drollery. His jests, however, have none of the coarseness which is the chief characteristic of his western brethren; for example, in his counterpart to the well-known jest of Scogin, when the king commanded him never to show his face in the royal presence again, he saves propriety and carries out his jest by entering with a large pot over his head and down to his shoulders. See Dr Doran's History of Court Fools (1858).