Feats in balancing
These kings of jugglers exercised a supreme authority over the art of jugglery and over all the members of this jovial fraternity. It must not be imagined that these jugglers merely recited snatches from tales and fables in rhyme; this was the least of their talents. The cleverest of them played all sorts of musical instruments, sung songs, and repeated by heart a multitude of stories, after the example of their reputed forefather, King Borgabed, or Bédabie, who, according to these troubadours, was King of Great Britain at the time that Alexander the Great was King of Macedonia. The jugglers of a lower order especially excelled in tumbling and in tricks of legerdemain. Feats in Balancing.--Fac-simile of a Miniature in a Manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (Thirteenth Century).
Fight between a horse and dogs
The love for hunting wild animals, such as the wolf, bear, and boar (see chapter on Hunting), from an early date took the place of the animal combats as far as the court and the nobles were concerned. The people were therefore deprived of the spectacle of the combats which had had so much charm for them; and as they could not resort to the alternative of the chase, they treated themselves to a feeble imitation of the games of the circus in such amusements as setting dogs to worry old horses or donkeys, &c.
Fireworks on the water
Fireworks could not fail to be attractive at the Court of the Valois, to which Catherine de Médicis had introduced the manners and customs of Italy. The French, who up to that time had only been accustomed to the illuminations of St. John's Day and of the first Sunday in Lent, received those fireworks with great enthusiasm, and they soon became a regular part of the programme for public festivals. Fireworks on the Water, with an Imitation of a Naval Combat.--Fac-simile of an Engraving on Copper of the "Pyrotechnie" of Hanzelet le Lorrain: 4to (Pont-à-Mousson, 1630).
La Gaillard
-The Dance called "La Gaillarde."--Fac-simile of Wood Engravings from the "Orchésographie" of Thoinot Arbeau (Jehan Tabourot): 4to (Langres, 1588).
Somersaults
Somersaults.--Fac-simile of a Woodcut in "Exercises in Leaping and Vaulting," by A. Tuccaro: 4to (Paris, 1599).
Sword Dance
Sword-dance to the sound of the Bagpipe.--Fac-simile of a Manuscript in the British Museum (Fourteenth Century).
The Springboard
THe Spring-board Most of the bourgeois and the villagers played a variety of games of agility, many of which have descended to our times, and are still to be found at our schools and colleges. Wrestling, running races, the game of bars, high and wide jumping, leap-frog, blind-man's buff, games of ball of all sorts, gymnastics, and all exercises which strengthened the body or added to the suppleness of the limbs, were long in use among the youth of the nobility
Village Feast
Village Feast Notwithstanding the miseries to which they were generally subject, the rural population had their days of rest and amusement, which were then much more numerous than at present. At that period the festivals of the Church were frequent and rigidly kept, and as each of them was the pretext for a forced holiday from manual labour, the peasants thought of nothing, after church, but of amusing themselves; they drank, talked, sang, danced, and, above all, laughed, for the laugh of our forefathers quite rivalled the Homeric laugh, and burst forth with a noisy joviality.