cum melodis organo,
cum chordis et tympano.
4. veneremur Tityrum,
qui nos propter baculum
invitat ad epulum.
The reforms of the council of Basle were adopted for Germany by the Emperor Albrecht II in the Instrumentum Acceptationis of Mainz in 1439. In 1536 the council of Cologne, quoting the decretal of Innocent III, condemned theatrales ludi in churches. A Cologne Ritual preserves an account of the sub-deacons’ feast upon the octave of Epiphany[1130]. The sub-deacons were hederaceo serto coronati. Tapers were lit, and a rex chosen, who acted as hebdomarius from first to second Vespers. Carols were sung, as at Mosburg[1131].
John Huss, early in the fifteenth century, describes the Feast of Fools as it existed in far-off Bohemia[1132]. The revellers, of whom, to his remorse, Huss had himself been one as a lad, wore masks. A clerk, grotesquely vested, was dubbed ‘bishop,’ set on an ass with his face to the tail, and led to mass in the church. He was regaled on a platter of broth and a bowl of beer, and Huss recalls the unseemly revel which took place[1133]. Torches were borne instead of candles, and the clergy turned their garments inside out, and danced. These ludi had been forbidden by one archbishop John of holy memory.
It would be surprising, in view of the close political and ecclesiastical relations between mediaeval France and England, if the Feast of Fools had not found its way across the channel. It did; but apparently it never became so inveterate as successfully to resist the disciplinary zeal of reforming bishops, and the few notices of it are all previous to the end of the fourteenth century. It seems to have lasted longest at Lincoln, and at Beverley. Of Lincoln, it will be remembered, Pierre de Corbeil, the probable compiler of the Sens Officium, was at one time coadjutor bishop. Robert Grosseteste, whose attack upon the Inductio Maii and other village festivals served as a starting-point for this discussion, was no less intolerant of the Feast of Fools. In 1236 he forbade it to be held either in the cathedral or elsewhere in the diocese[1134]; and two years later he included the prohibition in his formal Constitutions[1135]. But after another century and a half, when William Courtney, archbishop of Canterbury, made a visitation of Lincoln in 1390, he found that the vicars were still in the habit of disturbing divine service on January 1, in the name of the feast[1136]. Probably his strict mandate put a stop to the custom[1137]. At almost precisely the same date the Feast of Fools was forbidden by the statutes of Beverley minster, although the sub-deacons and other inferior clergy were still to receive a special commons on the day of the Circumcision[1138]. Outside Lincoln and Beverley, the feast is only known in England by the mention of paraphernalia for it in thirteenth-century inventories of St. Paul’s[1139], and Salisbury[1140], and by a doubtful allusion in a sophisticated version of the St. George play[1141].
A brief summary of the data concerning the Feast of Fools presented in this and the preceding chapter is inevitable. It may be combined with some indication of the relation in which the feast stands with regard to the other feasts dealt with in the present volume. If we look back to Belethus in the twelfth century we find him speaking of the Feast of Fools as held on the Circumcision, on Epiphany or on the octave of Epiphany, and as being specifically a feast of sub-deacons. Later records bear out on the whole the first of these statements. As a rule the feast focussed on the Circumcision, although the rejoicings were often prolonged, and the election of the dominus festi in some instances gave rise to a minor celebration on an earlier day. Occasionally (Noyon, Laon) the Epiphany, once at least (Cologne) the octave of the Epiphany, takes the place of the Circumcision. But we also find the term Feast of Fools extended to cover one or more of three feasts, distinguished from it by Belethus, which immediately follow Christmas. Sometimes it includes them all three (Besançon, Viviers, Vienne), sometimes the feast of the Innocents alone (Autun, Avallon, Aix, Antibes, Arles), once the feast of St. Stephen (Châlons-sur-Marne)[1142]. On the other hand, the definition of the feast as a sub-deacons’ feast is not fully applicable to its later developments. Traces of a connexion with the sub-deacons appear more than once (Amiens, Sens, Auxerre, Beverley); but as a rule the feast is held by the inferior clergy known as vicars, chaplains, and choir-clerks, all of whom are grouped at Viviers and Romans under the general term of esclaffardi. At Laon a part is taken in it by the curés of the various parishes in the city. The explanation is, I think, fairly obvious. Originally, perhaps, the sub-deacons held the feast, just as the deacons, priests, and boys held theirs in Christmas week. But it had its vogue mainly in the great cathedrals served by secular canons[1143], and in these the distinction between the canons in different orders—for a sub-deacon might be a full canon[1144]—was of less importance than the difference between the canons as a whole and the minor clergy who made up the rest of the cathedral body, the hired choir-clerks, the vicars choral who, originally at least, supplied the place in the choir of absent canons, and the chaplains who served the chantries or small foundations attached to the cathedral[1145]. The status of spiritual dignity gave way to the status of material preferment. And so, as the vicars gradually coalesced into a corporation of their own, the Feast of Fools passed into their hands, and became a celebration of the annual election of the head of their body[1146]. The vicars and their associates were probably an ill-educated and an ill-paid class. Certainly they were difficult to discipline[1147]; and it is not surprising that their rare holiday, of which the expenses were met partly by the chapter, partly by dues levied upon themselves or upon the bystanders[1148], was an occasion for popular rather than refined merry-making[1149]. That it should perpetuate or absorb folk-customs was also, considering the peasant or small bourgeois extraction of such men, quite natural.
The simple psychology of the last two sentences really gives the key to the nature of the feast. It was largely an ebullition of the natural lout beneath the cassock. The vicars hooted and sang improper ditties, and played dice upon the altar, in a reaction from the wonted restraints of choir discipline. Familiarity breeds contempt, and it was almost an obvious sport to burlesque the sacred and tedious ceremonies with which they were only too painfully familiar. Indeed, the reverend founders and reformers of the feast had given a lead to this apishness by the introduction of the symbolical transference of the baculus at the Deposuit in the Magnificat. The ruling idea of the feast is the inversion of status, and the performance, inevitably burlesque, by the inferior clergy of functions properly belonging to their betters. The fools jangle the bells (Paris, Amiens, Auxerre), they take the higher stalls (Paris), sing dissonantly (Sens), repeat meaningless words (Châlons, Antibes), say the messe liesse (Laon) or the missa fatuorum (Autun), preach the sermones fatui (Auxerre), cense praepostere (St. Omer) with pudding and sausage (Beauvais) or with old shoes (Paris theologians). They have their chapter and their proctors (Auxerre, Dijon). They install their dominus festi with a ceremony of sacre (Troyes), or shaving (Sens, Dijon). He is vested in full pontificals, goes in procession, as at the Rabardiaux of Laon, gives the benedictions, issues indulgences (Viviers), has his seal (Lille), perhaps his right of coining (Laon). Much in all these proceedings was doubtless the merest horseplay; such ingenuity and humour as they required may have been provided by the wicked wit of the goliardi[1150].