That Rabbit's Got a Mean Streak a Mile Wide!

Killer Rabbits

So, a Medieval historian were looking threough a manuscript, and found a 440 year joke list among the text.

The humor was somewhat ribald (no big surprise), including things like incontinence (no big surprise), binge drinking (again, no big surprise), and killer rabbits. 

Killer Rabbits?  What in the name of Monty Python?

Were the members of Monty Python a part of some sort of secret comedy society that has existed in the shadows at at Oxbridge for over 500 years?

Seriously, this is the only explanation:

It’s around the year 1480, and a wandering English bard walks into a bar. What does he say to the crowd of drunken peasants gathered inside?

A series of irreverent jokes about incontinence, killer rabbits and binge drinking, according to new literary research. The study, published in the Review of English Studies on Wednesday, found that a medieval tome known as the Heege manuscript is no ordinary notebook, but actually includes the comedy script of an unnamed traveling entertainer, otherwise known as a minstrel. The revelation means the manuscript provides, perhaps for the first time, a direct glimpse into the long-forgotten oral tradition of English minstrel acts.

These comedy routines are the medieval equivalent of late-night talk shows, said James Wade, the Cambridge University expert behind the study. The manuscript was probably transcribed around 1480 in England’s Midlands region by Richard Heege, a family tutor; literary experts previously considered its contents to be of uncertain origin.

“It gives us a glimpse into live comedy and entertainment in the Middle Ages that would otherwise be lost,” Wade said, noting some of the similarities between the minstrel’s jokey style and comedy that remains popular today.

………

The performer’s jokes paint a lively picture of late-medieval English humor, inverting everyday scenes for comic effect and frequently showing peasants and kings being stung by their own stupidity or greed.

In one pamphlet, titled “The Hounding of the Hare,” dimwitted peasants set out to hunt rabbits. In the chaos and confusion of the chase, the hunters end up preying on each other instead. The scene is so topsy-turvy that one of the peasants becomes terrified that the rabbit will murder him, rather than the other way around.

At one point, the tale goes like this (all stories here translated by Wade from Middle English):

Jack Wade was never so sad as when the hare trod on his head in case she would have ripped out his throat.

(emphasis mine) 

This is F%$#ing spooky.