The Mediaeval Stage, Volume 1 (of 2)

by E. K. Chambers

I cannot pretend to give a complete account of all the French examples of the Boy Bishop with which I have met, and it is the less necessary, as the feast seems to have been far more popular and enduring in England than the Feast of Fools. I content myself with giving references for its history at Amiens[1219], St. Quentin[1220], Senlis[1221], Soissons[1222], Roye[1223], Peronne[1224], Rheims[1225], Brussels[1226], Lille[1227], Liège[1228], Laon[1229], Troyes[1230], Mans[1231], Bourges[1232], Châlons-sur-Saône[1233], Grenoble[1234]. Not unnaturally it proved less of a scandal to ecclesiastical reformers than the Feast of Fools; for the choir-boys must have been more amenable to discipline, even in moments of festivity, than the adult clerks. But it shared in the general condemnation of all such customs, and was specifically arraigned by more than one council, rather perhaps for puerility than for any graver offence[1235]. Gradually therefore, it vanished, leaving only a few survivals to recent centuries[1236]. As was the case with the Feast of Fools, the question of its suppression sometimes set a chapter by the ears. Notably was this so at Noyon, where the act of his reforming colleagues in 1622 was highly disapproved of by the dean, Jacques Le Vasseur. In a letter written on the occasion he declares that the Boy Bishop had flourished in Noyon cathedral for four hundred years, and brands the reformers as brute beasts masquerading in the robes and beards of philosophy[1237].

I have no special records of the Boy Bishop in Spain except the council decrees already quoted. In Germany he appears to have been more widely popular than his rival of Fools. My first notice, however, is two centuries after the visit of Conrad to the triduum at St. Gall. The chronicle of the monastery of St. Petersburg, hard by Halle, mentions an accident in ludo qui vocatur puerorum, by which a lad was trodden to death. This was in 1137[1238]. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries yield more examples. In 1249 Pope Innocent IV complained to the bishop of Ratisbon that the clerks and scholars of that cathedral, when choosing their anniversary ‘bishop,’ did violence to the abbey of Pruviningen[1239]. In 1357 the Ratisbon feast was stained with homicide, and was consequently suppressed[1240]. In 1282 the feast was forbidden at Eichstädt[1241]. In 1304 it led to a dispute between the municipality and the chapter of Hamburg, which ended in a promise by the scholares to refrain from defamatory songs either in Latin or German[1242]. Similarly at Worms in 1307 the pueri were forbidden to sing in the streets after Compline, as had been the custom on the feasts of St. Nicholas and St. Lucy, on Christmas and the three following days, and on the octave of the Holy Innocents’[1243]. At Lübeck the feast was abolished in 1336[1244]. I have already quoted the long reference to the scholarium episcopus in the Mosburg Gradual of 1360[1245]. He may be traced also at Regensburg[1246] and at Prague[1247]. But the fullest account of him is from Mainz[1248]. Here he was called the Schul-Bischoff, and in derision Apffeln-Bischoff. He was chosen before St. Nicholas’ day by the ludi magister of the schola trivialis. He had his equites, his capellani, and his pedelli. On St. Nicholas’ day, and on that of the Holy Innocents’, he had a seat near the high altar, and took part in the first and second Vespers. In the interval he paid a visit with his company to the palace of the elector, sang a hymn[1249], and claimed a banquet or a donation. The custom was not altogether extinct in Mainz by 1779[1250]. In other German towns, also, it well outlived the Middle Ages. At Cologne, for instance, it was only suppressed by the statutes of Bishop Max Heinrich in 1662[1251].

In England, the Boy Bishop weathered the storms of discipline which swept away the Feast of Fools in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. He was widely popular in the later Middle Ages, and finally fell before an austerity of the Reformation. The prerogative instance of the custom is in the church of Salisbury. Here the existence of the Boy Bishop is already implied by the notice of a ring for use at the ‘Feast of Boys’ in an inventory of 1222[1252]. A century later, the statutes of Roger de Mortival in 1319 include elaborate regulations for the ceremony. The ‘bishop’ may perform the officium as is the use, but he must hold no banquet, and no visitation either within or without the cathedral. He may be invited to the table of a canon, but otherwise he must remain in the common house, and must return to his duties in church and school immediately after the feast of Innocents. The statute also regulates the behaviour of the crowds which were wont to press upon and impede the boys in their annual procession to the altar of the Holy Trinity, and the rest of their ministry[1253]. Two of the great service-books of the Sarum use, the Breviary and the Processional, give ample details as to the ‘ministry’ of the Boy Bishop and his fellows. The office, as preserved in these, will be found in an appendix[1254]. The proceedings differ in some respects from the continental models already described. There is no mention of the Deposuit; and the central rite is still the great procession between Vespers and Compline on the eve of the Holy Innocents. This procession went from the choir either to the altar of the Holy Innocents or to that of the Holy Trinity and All Saints in the Lady chapel, and at its return the boys took the higher stalls and kept them until the second Vespers of the feast. For this procession the boys were entitled to assign the functions of carrying the book, the censer, the candles, and so forth to the canons. Some miscellaneous notices of the Salisbury feast are contained in the chapter register between 1387 and 1473. From 1387 the oblations on the feast appear to have been given to the ‘bishop.’ In 1413 he was allowed a banquet. In 1448 the precentor, Nicholas Upton, proposed that the boys, instead of freely electing a ‘bishop,’ should be confined to a choice amongst three candidates named by the chapter. But this innovation was successfully resisted[1255]. Cathedral documents also give the names of twenty-one boys who held the office[1256]. There is in Salisbury cathedral a dwarf effigy of a bishop, dating from the latter part of the thirteenth century. Local tradition, from at least the beginning of the seventeenth century, has regarded this as the monument of a Boy Bishop who died during his term of office. But modern archaeologists repudiate the theory. Such miniature effigies are not uncommon, and possibly indicate that the heart alone of the person commemorated is buried in the spot which they mark[1257].

The gradual adoption of the use of Sarum by other dioceses would naturally tend to carry with it that of the Boy Bishop. But he is to be found at Exeter and at St. Paul’s before the change of use, as well as at Lincoln and York which retained their own uses up to the Reformation. At Exeter Bishop Grandisson’s Ordinale of 1337 provides an Officium puerorum for the eve and day of the Innocents which, with different detail, is on the same general lines as that of Salisbury[1258]. At St. Paul’s there was a Boy Bishop about 1225, when a gift was made to him of a mitre by John de Belemains, prebendary of Chiswick. This appears, with other vestments for the feast, in an inventory drawn up some twenty years later[1259]. By 1263 abuses had grown up, and the chapter passed a statute to reform them[1260]. They required the election of the praesul and his chapter and the drawing up of the tabula to take place in the chapter-house instead of in the cathedral, on account of the irreverence of the crowds pressing to see. The great dignitaries must not be put down on the tabula for the servers’ functions, but only the clergy of the second or third ‘form.’ The procession and all the proceedings in the cathedral must be orderly and creditable to the boys[1261]. Minute directions follow as to the right of the ‘bishop’ to claim a supper on the eve from one of the canons, and as to the train he may take with him, as well as for the dinner and supper of the feast-day itself. After dinner a cavalcade is to start from the cathedral for the blessing of the people. The dean must find a horse for the ‘bishop,’ and each canon residentiary one for the lad who personates him[1262]. Other statutes of earlier date make it incumbent on a new residentiary to entertain his own boy-representative cum daunsa et chorea et torchiis on Innocents’ day, and to sit up at night for the ‘bishop’ and all his cortège on the octave. If he is kept up very late, he may ‘cut’ Matins next morning[1263]. The Boy Bishop of St. Paul’s was accustomed to preach a sermon which, not unnaturally, he did not write himself. William de Tolleshunte, almoner of St. Paul’s in 1329, bequeathed to the almonry copies of all the sermons preached by the Boy Bishops in his time. Probably he was himself responsible for them[1264]. One such sermon was printed by Wynkyn de Worde before 1500[1265]. Another was written by Erasmus, and exists both in Latin and English[1266]. When Dean Colet drew up the statutes of St. Paul’s School in 1512 he was careful to enact that the scholars should attend the cathedral on Childermass day, hear the sermon, and mass, and give a penny to the ‘bishop[1267].’

The earliest notice of the Boy Bishop at York, or for the matter of that, in England, is in a statute (before 1221), which lays on him the duty of finding rushes for the Nativity and Epiphany feasts[1268]. After this, there is nothing further until the second half of the fourteenth century, when some interesting documents become available. The chapter register for 1367 requires that in future the ‘bishop’ shall be the boy who has served longest and proved most useful in the cathedral. A saving clause is added: dum tamen competenter sit corpore formosus[1269]. This shows a sense of humour in the chapter, for at York, as at Salisbury, Corpore enim formosus es, O fili was a respond for the day. In 1390, was added a further qualification that the ‘bishop’ must be a lad in good voice[1270]. Doubtless the office was much coveted, for it was a very remunerative one. The visitation forbidden at Salisbury by Roger de Mortival was permitted at York, and the profits were considerable. Robert de Holme, who was ‘bishop’ in 1369, received from the choirmaster, John Gisson, who acted as his treasurer, no less a sum than £3 15s. 1¹⁄₂d.[1271] In 1396 the amount was only £2 0s. 6¹⁄₂d. But this was only a small portion of the total receipts. The complete Computus for this year happens to be preserved, and shows that the Boy Bishop made a quête at intervals during the weeks between Christmas and Candlemas, travelling with a ‘seneschal,’ four singers and a servant to such distant places as Bridlington, Leeds, Beverley, Fountains abbey and Allerton. Their principal journey lasted a fortnight. The oblations on Christmas and Innocents’ days and the collection from the dignitaries in the cloister realized £2 15s. 5d. In the city they got 10s. and abroad £5 10s. Out of this there were heavy expenses. The supper given by the ‘bishop’ cost 15s. 6¹⁄₂d. Purchased meals had to supplement hospitality at home and abroad. Horse hire and stable expenses had to be met. There were the ‘bishop’s’ outfit, candles to be borne in procession, fees to the minor cathedral officials, gloves for presents to the vicars and schoolmasters. There was the ‘bishop’s’ own company to be rewarded for its services. The £2 0s. 6¹⁄₂d. represents the balance available for his private use[1272]. The most generous contributor to the quête was the countess of Northumberland, who gave 20s. and a gold ring. This is precisely the amount of the reward prescribed about 1522 for the ‘barne bishop’ of York, as well as for his brother of Beverley in the Household Book of the fifth earl of Northumberland[1273].

The printed service-books of the use of York do not deal as fully with the Feast of Boys as do those of Sarum; but a manuscript missal of the fifteenth century used in the cathedral itself contains some additional rubrics with regard to the functions of the ‘bishop’ and his ‘precentor’ at Mass[1274]. The names of some of the York ‘bishops’ are preserved, and show that the ceremony prevailed up to the Reformation[1275]. And this is confirmed by a list of ornaments for the ‘bishop’ in a sixteenth-century inventory[1276].

I am unable to give such full data for Lincoln as for the cathedrals already named; but regulations of 1300 and 1527 provide for the supply of candles to the ‘bishop’ and the rest of the choir at Vespers on the eve and matins on the day of the Innocents[1277], and an inventory of 1536 mentions a cope for the ‘barne busshop’ with a moral ‘scriptur’ embroidered on it[1278]. Nor can I hope to supply any exhaustive list of localities where the Boy Bishop flourished. These include minor cathedrals such as Hereford[1279], Lichfield[1280], Gloucester[1281], and Norwich[1282], great collegiate churches such as Beverley minster[1283], St. Peter’s, Canterbury[1284], and Ottery St. Mary’s[1285], college chapels such as Magdalen[1286] and All Souls[1287], at Oxford, the private chapels of the king[1288] and the earl of Northumberland[1289], and many parish churches both in London[1290], and throughout the length and breadth of England[1291] and Scotland[1292].

Nor is this all. Unlike the Feast of Fools, the Feast of Boys enjoyed a considerable vogue in religious houses. When John Peckham, archbishop of Canterbury, was drawing up his constitutions for such communities in 1279, he found it necessary to limit the duration of this feast to the eve and day of the Holy Innocents[1293]. Traces of the Boy Bishop are to be found in the archives of more than one great monastery. A Westminster inventory of 1388 gives minute descriptions of vestments and ornaments for his use, many of which appear to have been quite recently provided by the ‘westerer’ or vestiarius, Richard Tonworthe[1294]. There was a mitre with silvered and gilt plates and gems, and the inscription Sancte Nicholae ora pro nobis set in pearls. There was a baculus with images of St. Peter and St. Edward the Confessor upon thrones. There were two pair of cheveril gloves, to match the mitre. There were an amice, a rochet and a surplice. There were two albs and a cope of blood colour worked with gryphons and other beasts and cisterns spouting water. There was another ‘principal’ cope of ruby and blood-coloured velvet embroidered in gold, and with the ‘new arms of England’ woven into it. An older mitre and pair of gloves and a ring had been laid aside as old-fashioned or worn out. Evidently the feast was celebrated with some splendour. Several of the vestments are again inventoried in 1540[1295]. A payment for the feast is recorded in a Computus of 1413-14[1296]. The accounts of the obedientiaries of Durham priory show from 1369 onwards many payments by nearly all these officers to a Boy Bishop of the almonry. He also received a gift up to 1528 from the dependent house or ‘cell’ of Finchale priory. This payment was made at the office of the feretrarius or keeper of Saint Cuthbert’s shrine. The ‘bishop’ is called episcopus puerilis, episcopus eleemosynariae, or the like. In 1405 he was not elected, propter guerras eo tempore. In 1423 and 1434 there was also an episcopus de Elvett or Elvetham, a manor of the priory[1297]. The abbey of Bury St. Edmunds had its episcopus sancti Nicolai in 1418 and for at least a century longer[1298]. At Winchester each of the great monasteries held a Feast of Boys; the abbey of Hyde on St. Nicholas’ day[1299]; the priory of St. Swithin’s on that of the Holy Innocents. Here, too, the accounts of the obedientiaries contain evidence of the feast in payments between 1312 and 1536 for beer or wine sent to the episcopus iuvenum. Nearly all the officers whose rolls are preserved, the chamberlain, the curtarian, the cellarian, the almoner, the sacristan, the custos operum, the hordarian, seem to have contributed[1300]. A Computus of 1441 contains a payment to the pueri eleemosynariae who, with the pueri of St. Elizabeth’s chapel, visited St. Mary’s convent, dressed as girls, and danced, sang and sported before the abbess and the nuns[1301]. We have had some French instances in which the Boy Bishop visited a neighbouring convent. But the nuns were not always dependent on outside visitors for their revel. In some places they held their own feast, with an ‘abbess’ instead of a ‘bishop.’ Archbishop John Peckham, in addition to his general constitution already quoted, issued a special mandate to Godstow nunnery, forbidding the office and prayers to be said per parvulas on Innocents’ day[1302]. Three centuries later, in 1526, a visitation of Carrow nunnery by Richard Nicke, bishop of Norwich, disclosed a custom of electing a Christmas ‘abbess’ there, which the bishop condemned[1303]. Continental parallels to these examples are available. An eighth-century case, indeed, which is quoted by some writers, has probably been the subject of a misinterpretation[1304]. But the visitation-books of Odo Rigaud, archbishop of Rouen (1248-69) record that he forbade the ludibria of the younger nuns at the Christmas feasts and the feast of St. Mary Magdalen in more than one convent of his diocese. One of these was the convent of the Holy Trinity at Caen, in which an ‘abbess’ was still chosen by the novices in 1423[1305]. All the monastic examples here quoted come from houses of the older foundations. The Statutes, however, of the Observant Franciscans made at Barcelona in 1401, expressly forbid the use of secular garments or the loan of habits of the order for ludi on St. Nicholas’ or Innocents’ days[1306]; whence it may be inferred that the irregularities provided against were not unknown.

Mediaeval education began with the song-school: and although the universities and other great seats of learning came to be much more than glorified choirs, they still retained certain traces of their humble origin. Amongst these was the Boy Bishop. The students of Paris regularly chose their Boy Bishops on St. Nicholas’ day. In 1275, indeed, the Faculty of Arts forbade the torchlight processions which took place on that day and on St. Catherine’s, the two great common holidays of the clerks[1307]. But in 1367 such processions were held as of ancient custom, and it would appear that every little group of students gathered together under the protection and in the house of a master of arts considered itself entitled to choose a ‘bishop,’ and to lead him in a rout through the streets. In that year the custom led to a tragic brawl which came under the cognizance of the Parlement of Paris[1308]. The scholars of one Peter de Zippa, dwelling in vico Bucherie ultra Parvum Pontem, had chosen as ‘bishop’ Bartholomew Divitis of Ypres. On St. Nicholas’ eve, they were promenading, with a torch but unarmed, to the houses of the rector of the Faculty and others causa solacii et iocosa, when they met with the watch. Peter de Zippa was with them, and the watch had a grudge against Peter. On the previous St. Catherine’s day they had arrested him, but he had been released by the préfet. They now attacked the procession with drawn swords, and wounded Jacobus de Buissono in the leg. As the scholars were remonstrating, up came Philippus de Villaribus, miles gueti, and Bernardus Blondelli, his deputy, and cried ‘Ad mortem’. The scholars fled home, but the watch made an attack on the house. Peter de Zippa attempted to appease them from a window, and was wounded four fingers from a mortal spot. As the watch were on the point of breaking in, the scholars surrendered. The house was looted, and the inmates beaten. One lad was pitched out on his head and driven into the Seine, out of which he was helped by a woman. Peter de Zippa and twenty-four others were rolled in the mud and then carried off to the Châtelet, where they were shut up in a dark and malodorous cell. Worst of all, the ‘bishop’ had disappeared altogether. It was believed that the watch had slain him, and flung the body into the Seine. A complaint was brought before the Parlement, and a commission of inquiry appointed. The watch declared that Peter de Zippa was insubordinate to authority and, although warned, as a foreigner, both in French and Latin[1309], that they were the king’s men, persisted in hurling logs and stones out of his window, with the result of knocking four teeth out of Peter Patou’s mouth, and wounding the horse of Philip de Villaribus. This defence was apparently thought unsatisfactory, and a further inquiry was held, with the aid of torture. Finally the court condemned the offending watch to terms of imprisonment and the payment of damages. They had also to offer a humble apology, with bare head and bent knee, to the bishop of Paris, the rector of the Faculty, Peter de Zippa, and the injured scholars, in the cloister or the chapter-house of St. Mathurin’s. The case of the alleged murder of the ‘bishop,’ Bartholomew Divitis, was not to be prejudiced by this judgement, and Peter de Zippa was warned to be more submissive to authority in future. The whole episode is an interesting parallel to the famous ‘town and gown’ at Oxford on St. Scholastica’s day, 1353[1310].

Provision is made for a Boy Bishop in the statutes of more than one great English educational foundation. William of Wykeham ordained in 1400 that one should be chosen at Winchester College, and at New College, Oxford, and should recite the office at the Feast of the Innocents[1311]. Some notices in the Winchester College accounts during the fifteenth century show that he also presided at secular revels. In 1462 he is called Episcopus Nicholatensis, and on St. Nicholas’ day he paid a visit of ceremony to the warden, who presented him, out of the college funds, with fourpence[1312]. The example of William of Wykeham was followed, forty years later, in the statutes of the royal foundations of Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge. But there was one modification. These colleges were dedicated to the Virgin and to St. Nicholas, and it was carefully laid down that the performance of the officium by the ‘bishop’ was to be on St. Nicholas’ day, ‘and by no means on that of the Innocents[1313].’ The Eton ‘bishop’ is said by the Elizabethan schoolmaster Malim, who wrote a Consuetudinarium of the college in 1561, to have been called episcopus Nihilensis, and to have been chosen on St. Hugh’s day (November 17). Probably Nihilensis is a scribal mistake for Nicholatensis[1314]. The custom had been abolished before Malim wrote, but was extant in 1507, for in that year the ‘bishop’s’ rochet was mended[1315]. Some Eton historians have thought that the Boy Bishop ceremony was the origin of the famous ‘Montem’; but as the ‘Montem’ was held on the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul (January 25), and as Malim mentions both customs independently, this is improbable[1316].