Celtic Humor

Welsh Harper and English Bagpiper

Last Sunday I came--a man whom the Lord God made--to the double-dealing, skinny, tottering town of Flint, may I see it all aflame! A wedding was there, with but little mead--English clearly, an English feast! and I promised myself I should earn a shining solid reward for my harper's art. So I began, with ready speed, to sing an ode to the kinsmen; but all I got was mockery, spurning of my song, and grief. It was easy for hucksters of barley and corn to buffet all my skill, and they laughed at my artistry, my well-prepared panegyric so precious to me; John of the Long Smock began to jabber of peas, and another about dung for his land. They all called for William the Piper to come to the table, a low fellow he must be. He came forward as though claiming his usual rights, though he did not look like a privileged man, with a groaning bag, a load of bare guts, at the end of a stick between chest and arm. He grimaced and bulged his eyes, making startling roars, a horrid noise, from the swollen paunch; he twisted his body here and there, and puffed his two checks out, playing with his fingers on a bell of hide--unsavoury conduct, fit for the unsavoury banqueters. He hunched his shoulders, amid the rout and dragged at his cloak like a miserable minstrel; he snorted away, and bowed his head until it was on his breast, the very image of a kite with mimble zeal preening its feathers. The crab puffed, making an outlandish cry, blowing out the bag with a loud howl; it sang like the buzzing of a hornet, that devilish bag with the stick in its head, like a nightmare howl, fit to kill a mangy goose, like a sad bitch's hoarse howl in its hollow kennel; a harsh paunch with monotonous cry, throat-muscles squeezing out a song, like the voice of a crane, long shrieking, like a stabbed goose screeching aloud. There are voices in that hollow bag like the ravings of a thousand cats; it has a cry like a wounded ailing pregnant goat--fair pay for its hire. After it ended its wheezing note, that cold songstress whom love would shun, Will got his fee, namely bean-soup and pennies (if they paid) and sometimes small halfpennies, not the largesse of a princely hand; while I was sent away in high vexation from the silly feast all empty-handed. I solemnly vow, I do forswear wretched Flint and all its children; may it and its English people and its piper fall into a wide hellish furnace! That they should be slaughtered is all my prayer, my curse in their midst and on their children; sure, if I go there again, may I never return alive! --Welsh; Lewis Glyn Cothi; fifteenth century.