The Bellows

The Bellows

 

I have mastered the fundamentals of the art

Of promoting the belch and augmenting the fart:

For there are more gluttons, rakes and drunks

Amongst a choir of holy monks

Than anywhere else in Christendom.

 

Stop braying a moment and listen:

Do me the favour of bending down

And wipe away that mulish frown:

 

I used a monkish tincture

To anaesthetise your sphincter,

For devils galore – God rot ‘em

Have possession of your bottom.

 

God knows, there’s no cure for despair

But enemas of cleansing air,

So hold your breath, prepare your gorge

For hot wind from a blacksmith’s forge.

 

And put a brave face on it, I say

Or half a millennium from today,

Folks will tilt their heads, and say,

“Good gracious, what is it, pray?

A demon exorcised by gas

Or nothing but a windy Ass?”

 

Poem by Giles Watson, 2011. Most authorities state that this fourteenth century misericord from Great Malvern Priory represents a monk expelling a demon by blowing air up a man’s bottom with a pair of bellows. This seems a rather unsatisfactory explanation, given that the man clearly has the ears of an ass. Either the man is himself a demon, or – and this conclusion seems much more sensible – he is an ancestor of Shakespeare’s Bottom. This hypothesis is supported by textual and iconographic evidence. The word “fool” is derived from Old French, meaning "madman; insane person; idiot; rogue; jester," but also "blacksmith's bellows." The ultimate derivations are the Latin “follis” ("bellows, leather bag"), which came to mean a "windbag, or empty-headed person", and the Sanscrit "vatula" ("insane," literally "windy, inflated with wind.") More compelling still is the iconographic evidence of a pair of sixteenth century painted wood corbels from Goslar, Germany, which depict a demon fool (with a face in his bottom, webbed feet, and a coxcomb on his head), preparing to insert a pair of bellows up the bottom of a woman who pauses at her work with a pestle and mortar to lift her skirts and expose her buttock. (See Ana Maria Gruia, ‘Fools, Devils and Alchemy: Secular Images in the Monastery’, Studia Patzinaka 6, 2008, Fig 10: www.patzinakia.com/STUDIAPATZINAKA/Number06/06-GRUIA-Fool... ) This would suggest that the image of the bellows inserted up the anus was an accepted visual shorthand for the transference of foolishness. The question may be asked why such an image would be deemed acceptable in the heart of the liturgical space of a priory church. The answer is simply that even the mediaeval religious did not regard such coarse humour as taboo, and self-irony was not beneath them. The carving may even have served as a warning, couched in humorous terms, to the faithful brothers: don’t fill each other up with the hot air of idle gossip, or you will merely pass your foolishness on to others.

 

 

 

Done