What is a mummer? Is it like a wandering minstrel?

Question

I am reading this book, set in the 1300's and it is kinda like "A Knight's tale" and in the first chapter, it says " The mummers and minstrels had set up their booths and the air was heavy with the scent of meat pastries and burnt sugar."

so, I ask, what is a mummer?

Answer 1

there is an annual mummer's parade on new year's day in philadelphia. based on that, they are people who get very drunk, dress up in extremely ornate and flamboyant costumes, play music, and generally have a better time than anyone else around.

don't know the historical definition but i can see it fitting the context of that era.

Answer 2

Mummers are a sort of street actors who perform allegorical plays, usually broadly comic and in rhymed couplets at Christmas time or Easter. In fact, the tradition continues today, now associated with sword dancers and morris dancers. Later, mumming evolved into a door-to-door means of collecting donations, like caroling or maybe more like trick-or-treating because the agricultural laborers (who commonly did it) might threaten to plough up the house if not paid. Hence one of the many later names for mummers was 'ploughboys'. Another name, 'guisers', derives from the fact that mummers might wear blackface makeup or obscuring headgear so as not to be recognized while basically out begging-- and particularly if they should have to make good their threats! In fact, the term ‘mummer’ seems to derive from early High German ‘vermummen’ (to wrap up, to disguise, to mask one’s faces.)

There is little evidence of the original mumming plays, but later plays included stock characters like the Quack Doctor who brings certain characters back to life, perhaps the hero who might be named Saint George and who might have been fighting a Turkish knight. Other stock characters might be Father Christmas who might narrate or Beelzebub who would demand money from the audience. Nowadays mummers generally collect for charities and not for themselves. They may go door-to-door or perform at public houses or in the street.