The texts contain the earliest recorded use of "red herring" in English, extremely rare forms of medieval literature, as well as a killer rabbit worthy of Monty Python. The discovery changes the way we should think about English comic culture between Chaucer and Shakespeare.

Throughout the Middle Ages, minstrels traveled between fairs, taverns and baronial halls to entertain people with songs and stories. Fictional minstrels are common in medieval literature but references to real-life performers are rare and fleeting. We have first names, payments, instruments played and occasionally locations, but until now virtually no evidence of their lives or work.

Dr. James Wade, from Cambridge University's English Faculty and Girton College, came across the texts by accident while researching in the National Library of Scotland. He then had a "moment of epiphany" when he noticed the scribe had written: "By me, Richard Heege, because I was at that feast and did not have a drink."

"It was an intriguing display of humor and it's rare for medieval scribes to share that much of their character," Wade says. That made him investigate how, where and why Heege had copied out the texts.

Wade's study, published today in The Review of English Studies, focuses on the first of nine miscellaneous booklets in the "Heege Manuscript". This booklet contains three texts and Wade concludes that around 1480 Heege copied them from a now lost memory-aid written by an unknown minstrel performing near the Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire border.