‘Aux premières vêpres, le chantre commençait par entonner au milieu de la nef: Lux hodie, lux laetitiae, etc.... À laudes rien de particulier que le Benedictus et son répons farcis. Les laudes finies on sortait de l’église pour aller trouver l’âne qui attendait à la grande porte. Elle était fermée. Là, chacun des chanoines s’y trouvant la bouteille et le verre à la main, le chantre entonnait la prose: Kalendas ianuarias solemne Christe facias. Voici ce que porte l’ancien cérémonial: dominus cantor et canonici ante ianuas ecclesiae clausas stent foris tenentes singuli urnas vini plenas cum cyfis vitreis, quorum unus cantor incipiat: Kalendas ianuarias, etc. Les battants de la porte ouverts, on introduisait l’âne dans l’église, en chantant la prose: Orientis partibus. Ici est une lacune dans le manuscrit jusque vers le milieu du Gloria in excelsis.... On chantait la litanie: Christus vincit, Christus regnat, dans laquelle on priait pour le pape Alexandre III, pour Henri de France, évêque de Beauvais, pour le roi Louis VII et pour Alixe ou Adèle de Champagne qui était devenue reine en 1160; par quoi on peut juger de l’antiquité de ce cérémonial. L’Évangile était précédé d’une prose et suivi d’une autre. Il est marqué dans le cérémonial de cinq cents ans que les encensements du jour de cette fête se feront avec le boudin et la saucisse: hac die incensabitur cum boudino et saucita.’
Dom Grenier gives as the authority for his last sentence, not the Officium, but the Glossary of Ducange, or rather the additions thereto made by certain Benedictine editors in 1733-6. They quote the pudding and sausage rubric together with that as to the drinking-bout, which occurs in both the Officia, as from a Beauvais manuscript. This they describe as a codex ann. circiter 500[1017]. It seems probable that this was not an Officium at all, but something of the nature of a Processional, and that it was identical with the codex 500 annorum from which the same Benedictines derived their amazing account of a Beauvais ceremony which took place not on January 1 but on January 14[1018]. A pretty girl, with a child in her arms, was set upon an ass, to represent the Flight into Egypt. There was a procession from the cathedral to the church of St. Stephen. The ass and its riders were stationed on the gospel side of the altar. A solemn mass was sung, in which Introit, Kyrie, Gloria and Credo ended with a bray. To crown all, the rubrics direct that the celebrant, instead of saying Ite, missa est, shall bray three times (ter hinhannabit) and that the people shall respond in similar fashion. At this ceremony also the ‘Prose of the Ass’ was used, and the version preserved in the Glossary is longer and more ludicrous than that of either the Sens or the Beauvais Officium.
On a review of all the facts it would seem that the Beauvais documents represent a stage of the feast unaffected by any such reform as that carried out by Pierre de Corbeil at Sens. And the nature of that reform is fairly clear. Pierre de Corbeil provided a text of the Officium based either on that of Beauvais or on an earlier version already existing at Sens. He probably added very little of his own, for the Sens manuscript only contains a few short passages not to be found in that of Beauvais. And as the twelfth-century Beauvais manuscript seems to have closely resembled the thirteenth-century one still extant, Beauvais cannot well have borrowed from him. At the same time he doubtless suppressed whatever burlesque ceremonies, similar to the Beauvais drinking-bout in the porch and censing with pudding and sausage, may have been in use at Sens. One of these was possibly the actual introduction of an ass into the church. But it must be remembered that the most extravagant of such ceremonies would not be likely at either place to get into the formal service-books[1019]. As the Sens Officium only includes the actual service of January 1 itself, it is impossible to compare the way in which the semi-dramatic extension of the feast was treated in the two neighbouring cathedrals. But Sens probably had this extension, for as late as 1634 there was an annual procession, in which the leading figures were the Virgin Mary mounted on an ass and a cortège of the twelve Apostles. This did not, however, at that time take part in the Mass[1020].
The full records of the Feast of Fools at Sens do not begin until the best part of a century after the probable date of its Officium. But one isolated notice breaks the interval, and shows that the efforts of Pierre de Corbeil were not for long successful in purging the revel of its abuses. This is a letter written to the chapter in 1245 by Odo, cardinal of Tusculum, who was then papal legate in France. He calls attention to the antiqua ludibria of the feasts of Christmas week and of the Circumcision, and requires these to be celebrated, not iuxta pristinum modum, but with the proper ecclesiastical ceremonies. He specifically reprobates the use of unclerical dress and the wearing of wreaths of flowers[1021].
A little later in date than either the Sens or the Beauvais Officium is a Ritual of St. Omer, which throws some light on the Feast of Fools as it was celebrated in the northern town on the day of the Circumcision about 1264. It was the feast of the vicars and the choir. A ‘bishop’ and a ‘dean’ of Fools took part in the services. The latter was censed in burlesque fashion, and the whole office was recited at the pitch of the voice, and even with howls. There cannot have been much of a reformation here[1022].
A few other scattered notices of thirteenth-century Feasts of Fools may be gathered together. The Roman de Renard is witness to the existence of such a feast, with jeux and tippling, at Bayeux, about 1200[1023]. At Autun, the chapter forbade the baculus anni novi in 1230[1024]. Feasts of Fools on Innocents’ and New Year’s days are forbidden by the statutes of Nevers cathedral in 1246[1025]. At Romans, in Dauphiné, an agreement was come to in 1274 between the chapter, the archbishop of Vienne and the municipal authorities, that the choice of an abbot by the cathedral clerks known as esclaffardi should cease, on account of the disturbances and scandals to which it had given rise[1026]. The earliest mention of the feast at Laon is about 1280[1027]; while it is provided for as the sub-deacons’ feast by an Amiens Ordinarium of 1291[1028]. Nor are the ecclesiastical writers oblivious of it. William of Auxerre opens an era of learned speculation in his De Officiis Ecclesiasticis, by explaining it as a Christian substitute for the Parentalia of the pagans[1029]. Towards the end of the century, Durandus, bishop of Mende, who drew upon both William of Auxerre and Belethus for his Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, gave an account of it which agrees closely with that of Belethus[1030]. Neither William of Auxerre nor Durandus shows himself hostile to the Feast of Fools. Its abuses are, however, condemned in more than one contemporary collection of sermons[1031].
With the fourteenth century the records of the Feast of Fools become more frequent. In particular, the account-books of the chapter of Sens throw some light on the organization of the feast in that cathedral[1032]. The Compotus Camerarii has, from 1345 onwards, a yearly entry pro vino praesentato vicariis ecclesiae die Circumcisionis Domini. Sometimes the formula is varied to die festi fatuorum. In course of time the whole expenses of the feast come to be a charge on the chapter, and in particular, it would appear, upon the sub-deacon canons[1033]. In 1376 is mentioned, for the first time, the dominus festi, to whom under the title of precentor et provisor festi stultorum a payment is made. The Compotus Nemorum shows that by 1374 a prebend in the chapter woods had been appropriated to the vicars pro festo fatuorum. Similar entries occur to the end of the fourteenth century and during the first quarter of the fifteenth[1034]. Then came the war to disturb everything, and from 1420 the account-books rarely show any traces of the feast. Nor were civil commotions alone against it. As in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, so in the fourteenth and fifteenth the abuses which clung about the Feasts of Fools rendered them everywhere a mark for the eloquence of ecclesiastical reformers. About 1400 the famous theologian and rector of Paris University, Jean-Charlier de Gerson, put himself at the head of a crusade against the ritus ille impiissimus et insanus qui regnat per totam Franciam, and denounced it roundly in sermons and conclusiones. The indecencies of the feast, he declares, would shame a kitchen or a tavern. The chapters will do nothing to stop them, and if the bishops protest, they are flouted and defied. The scandal can only be ended by the interposition of royal authority[1035]. According to Gerson, Charles the Sixth did on one occasion issue letters against the feast; and the view of the reformers found support in the diocesan council of Langres in 1404[1036], and the provincial council of Tours, held at Nantes in 1431[1037]. It was a more serious matter when, some years after Gerson’s death, the great council of Basle included a prohibition of the feast in its reformatory decrees of 1435[1038]. By the Pragmatic Sanction issued by Charles VII at the national council of Bourges in 1438, these decrees became ecclesiastical law in France[1039], and it was competent for the Parlements to put them into execution[1040]. But the chapters were obstinate; the feasts were popular, not only with the inferior clergy themselves, but with the spectacle-loving bourgeois of the cathedral towns; and it was only gradually that they died out during the course of the next century and a half. The failure of the Pragmatic Sanction to secure immediate obedience in this matter roused the University of Paris, still possessed with the spirit of Gerson, to fresh action. On March 12, 1445, the Faculty of Theology, acting through its dean, Eustace de Mesnil, addressed to the bishops and chapters of France a letter which, from the minuteness of its indictment, is perhaps the most curious of the many curious documents concerning the feast[1041]. It consists of a preamble and no less than fourteen conclusiones, some of which are further complicated by qualificationes. The preamble sets forth the facts concerning the festum fatuorum. It has its clear origin, say the theologians, in the rites of paganism, amongst which this Janus-worship of the Kalends has alone been allowed to survive. They then describe the customs of the feast in a passage which I must translate:
‘Priests and clerks may be seen wearing masks and monstrous visages at the hours of office. They dance in the choir dressed as women, panders or minstrels. They sing wanton songs. They eat black puddings at the horn of the altar while the celebrant is saying mass. They play at dice there. They cense with stinking smoke from the soles of old shoes. They run and leap through the church, without a blush at their own shame. Finally they drive about the town and its theatres in shabby traps and carts, and rouse the laughter of their fellows and the bystanders in infamous performances, with indecent gestures and verses scurrilous and unchaste[1042].’
There follows a refutation of the argument that such ludi are but the relaxation of the bent bow in a fashion sanctioned by antiquity. On the contrary, they are due to original sin, and the snares of devils. The bishops are besought to follow the example of St. Paul and St. Augustine, of bishops Martin, Hilarius, Chrysostom, Nicholas and Germanus of Auxerre, all of whom made war on sacrilegious practices, not to speak of the canons of popes and general councils, and to stamp out the ludibria. It rests with them, for the clergy will not be so besotted as to face the Inquisition and the secular arm[1043].
The conclusiones thus introduced yield a few further data as to the ceremonies of the feast. It seems to be indifferently called festum stultorum and festum fatuorum. It takes place in cathedrals and collegiate churches, on Innocents’ day, on St. Stephen’s, on the Circumcision, or on other dates. ‘Bishops’ or ‘archbishops’ of Fools are chosen, who wear mitres and pastoral staffs, and have crosses borne before them, as if they were on visitation. They take the Office, and give Benedictions to the readers of the lessons at Matins, and to the congregations. In exempt churches, subject only to the Holy See, a ‘pope’ of Fools is naturally chosen instead of a ‘bishop’ or an ‘archbishop.’ The clergy wear the garments of the laity or of fools, and the laity put on priestly or monastic robes. Ludi theatrales and personagiorum ludi are performed.