What kinds of things were considered entertainment in the middle ages?

Answer 1

Like all things, this changed with time.

Games and Sports

Some of the entertainment was sports. Tournaments are famous, and included all sorts of Martial Arts, in addition to jousting. but there were games of various types. [1] There was a sort of football, called medieval football, and it was pretty much soccer mixed with rugby and minus almost all rules. The type called mob football did not even restrict how many players were on each side. [2] Archery was practiced, and archery competitions were very important, though the nobility were usually only spectators. Games included chess [3], nine men's Morris [4], checkers or draughts [5], backgammon [6], and various games of dice [7]. There is a link below to a related question on sports.

Poetry and Written Literature

We do not know a lot about the specifics of entertainment of the Early Middle Ages. We do know, however, that members of the nobility had bards and poets working for them, telling stories, reciting poems, and singing. Some poems from this period still exit, describing battles or praising dead heroes. One poem, probably written around 600 AD in vernacular Irish, was a praise of St. Columba. [8] Beowulf is a well known example in Old English. [9] Most of these poems were written down in vernacular languages, and with the passing of time, people began to read more and more, making it unnecessary to hear all poetry. [10]

In time, people became less interested in battles and heroes. The Arthurian legends increasingly were told with attention to a woman's point of view. [11] Eventually, the Code of Chivalry and Courtly Love became important issues in literature. [12][13]. And shortly later, the lives of ordinary people became interesting to poets, Langland's Piers Plowman [14], and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales [15], being examples of such literature. The religious aspects of these pieces were undeniably important, and even more so in Dante's Divine Comedy [16].

Music

Music has been an important entertainment since prehistoric times, and certainly was so in the Middle Ages. An early form of musical notation that we can decipher, using what were called "neumes", dates from about the ninth century [17]. These provide us with our oldest record of such things as the Gregorian chants [18]. We know that chants varied from place to place, and were in use all through the church, but to go from that to what music for entertainment was like entails a very unsatisfactory back construction.

Performance of the time, from about 800 AD to 1100 AD, was done by bards, in Britain, or their continental equivalents [19]. It seems even the secular music at that time was chant like. It was performed in a single voice, which is to say, a melody without accompaniment. It was also performed in organum, which usually means a melody with a parallel close harmony, possibly with a drone [20]. I read once that the Lombards sang organum in parallel seconds, with an interval of a single step, like playing a melody on only the white keys of a piano, but with the next higher white key also played as well. Their singing was said to have sounded like the howling of wolves [wish I could give a link].

There is an interesting passage in Itinerarium Cambriae,written in about 1190 by Gerald of Wales [21], in which he says that when the Welsh people gather together, as they often do, they sing their traditional songs, and when they sing, they do not sing as the people of the rest of the world do, in a single voice, but in many voices, as many voices as there are people. What this is describing is a bunch of people singing a tune together, but each improvizing his own way [22]. This is particularly interesting because the passage predates the supposed invention of counterpoint, but can only be describing music being improvised contrapuntally by ordinary Welsh peasants.

However it developed, counterpoint came along, starting from organum and progressing through successively more complicated forms of polyphony [23]. In counterpoint, one melody is performed along with another, which is designed to to with it, or, in the case of a canon or round, one part of a melody is performed against another part [23][24]. The earliest English Round, Sumer is Icumen In, is thought to date from about 1260 [25]. This allowed music that was enormously complex compared with what had gone before it, and by comparison could only have been quite exciting.

Contemporaneously with the introduction of counterpoint, there was an enormous interest in musical entertainment from troubadours, minstrels, jongleurs, and minnesingers. Early troubadours were usually high born nobles. Later on, anyone could be one. There is a large literature of music from these people, and their music was usually settings of secular texts of contemporary literature [26][27][28].

Musicians were accompanied by harps; bagpipes; various other kinds of pipes, such as hornpipes and shawms; flutes such as recorders; such horns as the wooden cornetti and serpent, which had holes like recorders; drums; and a variety of fiddles [29].

Theater

Theater developed along the same lines at the same time. Throughout the Middle Ages, plays derived from pagan times, called mummings, were performed. Church based plays, morality plays, mystery plays, and miracle plays, were put on at churches. With the passing of time, people became less interested in religious themes and more interested in secular things of a type called manner plays, which were more like Shakespeare and less like the Bible on Stage. There were few, if any, indoor theaters in Western Europe of the Middle Ages, and productions were usually done outdoors, often using wagons for stages [30].

Circus, Acrobatics, and Juggling

Juggling was an entertainment that is mentioned, as are the antics of court jesters. The jesters were licenced fools, which is to say they were given licence to do anything and were technically allowed to get away with anything. They could joke, or juggle, sing, tell stories, or make comments about the failures of whoever employed them [31].

Dance

We have pictures of people dancing in the Middle Ages, but no choreography, and the information is very incomplete. We know people danced in lines and in circles, but we do not have much information [32].

Answer 2

AnswerMedieval Entertainment:

violence swords and wine etc

Well... on top of that they had the circus, dog hunts (especially hunting wild horses), and dancing.

Plague. Well, it probably wasn't very entertaining but it was pretty much everywhere!

AnswerThe 13th century was one of the most exciting in the history of entertainment, or at least I think so. And indeed the answer above is not incorrect. Tournaments with jousting, Archery contests, merry drinking at weddings and other celebrations, hunting, hawking, and so on were there, but there was more, also.

The musical and poetic entertainment 13th century was about courtly love, troubadours, minstrels, minnesingers, who sang and played for the people, high and low, across Europe. They sang about King Arthur and Guinevere, Lancelot, Sir Gawain, Galahad. These are names that have not been forgotten. Imagine hearing about them for the first time from people who sang popular music of the day.

The Niebelunglied was new in the 13th century. People like Walter von der Vogelweide and Wolfram von Eschenbach were writing music and poetry. And Dante was entertaining us with visions of Hell.

The theater was moving away from purely liturgical themes and purely moralizing to drama of "manners," meaning secular theater. The musical comedy, Jeu de Robin et Marion, by Adam de la Halle, dates from this time.

The entertainment of the 13th century had something that earlier entertainment of the Middle Ages was lacking by comparison, which was new and exciting material - lots of it.

There are links below.

Answer 3

in the 10th century the entertainment was someone telling a story or could have been a bit of music

Answer 4

tournaments, jousts, fairs, animals fighting

Answer 5

yes there was

entertainment included bear baiting, acrobatics and performing monkeys

Answer 6

jesters/jokers/royal fool's