The Mediaeval Stage, Volume 1 (of 2)

by E. K. Chambers

Now I would point out that this inversion of status so characteristic of the Feast of Fools is equally characteristic of folk-festivals. What is Dr. Frazer’s mock king but one of the meanest of the people chosen out to represent the real king as the priest victim of a divine sacrifice, and surrounded, for the period of the feast, in a naïve attempt to outwit heaven, with all the paraphernalia and luxury of kingship? Precisely such a mock king is the dominus festi with whom we have to do. His actual titles, indeed, are generally ecclesiastical. Most often he is a ‘bishop,’ or ‘prelate’ (Senlis); in metropolitan churches an ‘archbishop,’ in churches exempt from other authority than that of the Holy See, a ‘pope’ (Amiens, Senlis, Chartres). More rarely he is a ‘patriarch’ (Laon, Avallon), a ‘cardinal’ (Paris, Besançon), an ‘abbot’ (Vienne, Viviers, Romans, Auxerre)[1151], or is even content with the humbler dignity of ‘precentor,’ ‘bacularius’ or ‘bâtonnier’ (Sens, Dijon). At Autun he is, quite exceptionally, ‘Herod.’ Nevertheless the term ‘king’ is not unknown. It is found at Noyon, at Vienne, at Besançon, at Beverley, and the council of Basle testifies to its use, as well as that of ‘duke.’ Nor is it, after all, of much importance what the dominus festi is called. The point is that his existence and functions in the ecclesiastical festivals afford precise parallels to his existence and functions in folk-festivals all Europe over.

Besides the ‘king’ many other features of the folk-festivals may readily be traced at the Feast of Fools. Some here, some there, they jot up in the records. There are dance and chanson, tripudium and cantilena (Noyon, Châlons-sur-Marne, Paris theologians, council of Basle). There is eating and drinking, not merely in the refectory, but within or at the doors of the church itself (Paris theologians, Beauvais, Prague). There is ball-playing (Châlons-sur-Marne). There is the procession or cavalcade through the streets (Laon, Châlons-sur-Marne, &c.). There are torches and lanterns (Sens, Tournai). Men are led nudi (Sens); they are whipped (Tours); they are ceremonially ducked or roasted (Sens, Tournai, Vienne, les Gaigizons at Autun)[1152]. A comparison with earlier chapters of the present volume will establish the significance which these points, taken in bulk, possess. Equally characteristic of folk-festivals is the costume considered proper to the feasts. The riotous clergy wear their vestments inside out (Antibes), or exchange dress with the laity (Lincoln, Paris theologians). But they also wear leaves or flowers (Sens, Laon, Cologne) and women’s dress (Paris theologians); and above all they wear hideous and monstrous masks, larvae or personae (decretal of 1207, Paris theologians, council of Basle, Paris, Soissons, Laon, Lille). These masks, indeed, are perhaps the one feature of the feast which called down the most unqualified condemnation from the ecclesiastical authorities. We shall not be far wrong if we assume them to have been beast-masks, and to have taken the place of the actual skins and heads of sacrificial animals, here, as so often, worn at the feast by the worshippers.

An attempt has been made to find an oriental origin for the Feast of Fools[1153]. Gibbon relates the insults offered to the church at Constantinople by the Emperor Michael III, the ‘Drunkard’ (842-67)[1154]. A noisy crew of courtiers dressed themselves in the sacred vestments. One Theophilus or Grylus, captain of the guard, a mime and buffoon, was chosen as a mock ‘patriarch.’ The rest were his twelve ‘metropolitans,’ Michael himself being entitled ‘metropolitan of Cologne.’ The ‘divine mysteries’ were burlesqued with vinegar and mustard in a golden cup set with gems. Theophilus rode about the streets of the city on a white ass, and when he met the real patriarch Ignatius, exposed him to the mockery of the revellers. After the death of Michael, this profanity was solemnly anathematized by the council of Constantinople held under his successor Basil in 869[1155]. Theophilus, though he borrowed the vestments for his mummery, seems to have carried it on in the streets and the palace, not in the church. In the tenth century, however, the patriarch Theophylactus won an unenviable reputation by admitting dances and profane songs into the ecclesiastical festivals[1156]; while in the twelfth, the patriarch Balsamon describes his own unavailing struggle against proceedings at Christmas and Candlemas, which come uncommonly near the Feast of Fools. The clergy of St. Sophia’s, he says, claim as of ancient custom to wear masks, and to enter the church in the guise of soldiers, or of monks, or of four-footed animals. The superintendents snap their fingers like charioteers, or paint their faces and mimic women. The rustics are moved to laughter by the pouring of wine into pitchers, and are allowed to chant Kyrie eleison in ludicrous iteration at every verse[1157]. Balsamon, who died in 1193, was almost precisely a contemporary of Belethus, and the earlier Byzantine notices considerably ante-date any records that we possess of the Feast of Fools in the West. A slight corroboration of this theory of an eastern origin may be derived from the use of the term ‘patriarch’ for the dominus festi at Laon and Avallon. It would, I think, be far-fetched to find another in the fact that Theophilus, like the western ‘bishops’ of Fools, rode upon an ass, and that the Prose de l’Âne begins:

‘Orientis partibus,

adventavit asinus.’

In any case, the oriental example can hardly be responsible for more than the admission of the feast within the doors of the church. One cannot doubt that it was essentially an adaptation of a folk-custom long perfectly well known in the West itself. The question of origin had already presented itself to the learned writers of the thirteenth century. William of Auxerre, by a misunderstanding which I shall hope to explain, traced the Feast of Fools to the Roman Parentalia: Durandus, and the Paris theologians after him, to the January Kalends. Certainly Durandus was right. The Kalends, unlike the more specifically Italian feasts, were co-extensive with the Roman empire, and were naturally widespread in Gaul. The date corresponds precisely with that by far the most common for the Feast of Fools. A singular history indeed, that of the ecclesiastical celebration of the First of January. Up to the eighth century a fast, with its mass pro prohibendo ab idolis, it gradually took on a festal character, and became ultimately the one feast in the year in which paganism made its most startling and persistent recoil upon Christianity. The attacks upon the Kalends in the disciplinary documents form a catena which extends very nearly to the point at which the notices of the Feast of Fools begin. In each alike the masking, in mimicry of beasts and probably of beast-gods or ‘demons,’ appears to have been a prominent and highly reprobated feature. It is true that we hear nothing of a dominus festi at the Kalends; but much stress must not be laid upon the omission of the disciplinary writers to record any one point in a custom which after all they were not describing as anthropologists, and it would certainly be an exceptional Germano-Keltic folk-feast which had not a dominus. As a matter of fact, there is no mention of a rex in the accounts of the pre-Christian Kalends in Italy itself. There was a rex at the Saturnalia, and this, together with an allusion of Belethus in a quite different connexion to the libertas Decembrica[1158], has led some writers to find in the Saturnalia, rather than the Kalends, the origin of the Feast of Fools[1159]. This is, I venture to think, wrong. The Saturnalia were over well before December 25: there is no evidence that they had a vogue outside Italy: the Kalends, like the Saturnalia, were an occasion at which slaves met their masters upon equal terms, and I believe that the existence of a Kalends rex, both in Italy and in Gaul, may be taken for granted.

But the parallel between Kalends and the Feast of Fools cannot be held to be quite perfect, unless we can trace in the latter feast that most characteristic of all Kalends customs, the Cervulus. Is it possible that a representative of the Cervulus is to be found in the Ass, who, whether introduced from Constantinople or not, gave to the Feast of Fools one of its popular names? The Feast of Asses has been the sport of controversialists who had not, and were at no great pains to have, the full facts before them. I do not propose to awake once more these ancient angers[1160]. The facts themselves are briefly these. The ‘Prose of the Ass’ was used at Bourges, at Sens, and at Beauvais. As to the Bourges feast I have no details. At Sens, the use of the Prose by Pierre de Corbeil is indeed no proof that he allowed an ass to appear in the ceremony. But the Prose would not have much point unless it was at least a survival from a time when an ass did appear; the feast was known as the asinaria festa; and even now, three centuries after it was abolished, the Sens choir-boys still play at being âne archbishop on Innocents’ day[1161]. At Beauvais the heading Conductus quando asinus adducitur in the thirteenth-century Officium seems to show that there at least the ass appeared, and even entered the church. The document, also of the thirteenth century, quoted by the editors of Ducange, certainly brings him, in the ceremony of January 14, into the church and near the altar. An imitation of his braying is introduced into the service itself. At Autun the leading of an ass ad processionem, and the cantilena super dictum asinum were suppressed in 1411. At Châlons-sur-Marne in 1570 an ass bore the ‘bishop’ to the theatre at the church door only. At Prague, on the other hand, towards the end of the fourteenth century, an ass was led, as at Beauvais, right into the church. These, with doubtful references to fêtes des ânes at St. Quentin about 1081, at Béthune in 1474, and at Laon in 1527, and the Mosburg description of the ‘bishop’ as asinorum dominus, are all the cases I have found in which an ass has anything to do with the feast. But they are enough to prove that an ass was an early and widespread, though not an invariable feature. I may quote here a curious survival in a ronde from the west of France, said to have been sung at church doors on January 1[1162]. It is called La Mort de l’Âne, and begins:

‘Quand le bonhomme s’en va,

Quand le bonhomme s’en va,

Trouvit la tête à son âne,