10 Medieval Jesters Whose Jokes Changed Royal History

A court fool could say out loud what a duke would hang for. That single privilege put jesters in rooms where real decisions were made: Kunz von der Rosen talked his way past the guards of a locked prison to reach Emperor Maximilian I; Triboulet turned one last joke into a full pardon from a royal death sentence; Will Sommers aimed his wit at Thomas Cromwell's spending while Henry VIII listened; Patch the Fool passed from Cardinal Wolsey to the king himself as if he were property; Stanczyk read a court better than the men paid to advise it; and the Fool of Sluys was the only man at the French court willing to tell Philip VI how badly the fleet had been destroyed. We also look at Gonella of Ferrara, whose own chroniclers cannot agree which lord he served, at the Feast of Fools, where cathedrals handed a boy the bishop's chair for a day, at Roland the Farter, who held an English manor by serjeanty for one performance a year, and at Rahere, an entertainer at the court of Henry I who founded a hospital in Smithfield that is still treating patients nearly nine hundred years later.
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