Smaller schools than Winchester or Eton had none the less their Boy Bishops. Archbishop Rotherham, who founded in 1481 a college at his native place of Rotherham in Yorkshire, left by will in 1500 a mitre for the ‘barnebishop[1317].’ The grammar school at Canterbury had, or should have had, its Boy Bishop in 1464[1318]. Aberdeen was a city of which St. Nicholas was the patron, and at Aberdeen the master of the grammar school was paid by a collection taken when he went the rounds with the ‘bishop’ on St. Nicholas’ day[1319]. Dean Colet, on the other hand, when founding St. Paul’s school did not provide for a ‘bishop’ in the school itself, but, as we have seen, directed the scholars to attend the mass and sermon of the ‘bishop’ in the cathedral.
Naturally the Reformation made war on the Boy Bishop. A royal proclamation of July 22, 1541, forbade the ‘gatherings’ by children ‘decked and apparalid to counterfaite priestes, bysshopps, and women’ on ‘sainte Nicolas, sainte Catheryne, sainte Clement, the holye Innocentes, and such like,’ and also the singing of mass and preaching by boys on these days[1320]. Naturally also, during the Marian reaction the Boy Bishop reappeared. On November 13, 1554, Bishop Bonner issued an order permitting all clerks in the diocese of London to have St. Nicholas and to go abroad; and although this order was annulled on the very eve of the festival, apparently because Cardinal Pole had appointed St. Nicholas’ day for a great ceremony of reconciliation at Lambeth, yet the custom was actually revived in several London parishes, including St. Andrew’s, Holborn, and St. Nicholas Olave, Bread Street[1321]. In 1556 it was still more widely observed[1322]. But upon the accession of Elizabeth it naturally fell again into disuse, and it has left few, if any, traces in modern folk-custom[1323].
I need not, after the last two chapters, attempt an elaborate analysis of the customs connected with the Boy Bishop. In the main they are parallel to those of the Feast of Fools. They include the burlesque of divine service, the quête, the banquet, the dominus festi. Like the Feast of Fools, they probably contain a folk as well as an ecclesiastical element. But the former is chastened and subdued, the strength of ecclesiastical discipline having proved sufficient, in the case of the boys, to bar for the most part such excesses as the adult clerks inherited from the pagan Kalends. On one point, however, a little more must be said. The dominus festi, who at the Feast of Fools bears various names, is almost invariably at the Feast of Boys a ‘bishop[1324].’ This term must have been familiar by the end of the eleventh century for it lends a point of sarcasm to the protest made by Yves, bishop of Chartres, in a letter to Pope Urban II against the disgraceful nomination by Philip I of France of a wanton lad to be bishop of Orleans in 1099[1325]. In later documents it appears in various forms, episcopus puerorum, episcopellus[1326], episcopus puerilis or parvulus, ‘boy bishop,’ ‘child bishop,’ ‘barne bishop.’ In some English monasteries it is episcopus eleemosynariae (‘of the almonry’); in Germany, Schul-Bischof, or, derisively, Apfeln-Bischof. More significant than any of these is the common variant episcopus Nicholatensis, ‘Nicholas bishop.’ For St. Nicholas’ day (December 6) was hardly less important in the career of the Boy Bishop than that of the Holy Innocents itself. At this feast he was generally chosen and began his quête through the streets. In more than one locality, Mainz for instance in Germany, Eton in England, it was on this day as well as, or in substitution for, that of the Innocents that he made his appearance in divine service[1327]. St. Nicholas was, of course, the patron saint of schoolboys and of children generally[1328]. His prominence in the winter processions of Germany and the presents which in modern folk-belief he brings to children have been touched upon in an earlier chapter. It now appears that originally he took rather than gave presents, and that where he appeared in person he was represented by the Boy Bishop. And this suggests the possibility that it was this connexion with St. Nicholas, and not the profane mummings of Michael the Drunkard at Constantinople, which led to the use of the term ‘bishop’ for the dominus festi, first at the Feast of Boys, and ultimately at the other Christmas feasts as well. For St. Nicholas was not only the boys’ saint par excellence; he was also, owing to the legend of his divinely ordered consecration when only a layman as bishop of Myra, the bishop saint par excellence[1329]. However this may be, I think it is a fair guess that St. Nicholas’ day was an older date for a Feast of Boys than that of the Holy Innocents, and that the double date records an instance of the process, generally imperfect, by which, under Roman and Christian influence, the beginning of winter customs of the Germano-Keltic peoples were gradually transformed into mid-winter customs[1330]. The beginning of winter feast was largely a domestic feast, and the children probably had a special part in it. It is possible also to trace a survival of the corresponding beginning of summer feast in the day of St. Gregory on March 12, which was also sometimes marked by the election of a Schul-Bischof[1331].
CHAPTER XVI
GUILD FOOLS AND COURT FOOLS
[Bibliographical Note.—The best account of the Sociétés joyeuses is that of L. Petit de Julleville, Les Comédiens en France au Moyen Âge (1889). Much material is collected in the same writer’s Répertoire du Théâtre comique en France au Moyen Âge (1886), and in several of the books given as authorities on the Feast of Fools (ch. xiii), especially those of Du Tilliot, Rigollot, Leber, and Grenier. Mme. Clément (née Hémery), Histoire des Fêtes civiles et religieuses du Département du Nord (1832), may also be consulted. M. Petit de Julleville’s account of the Sottie is supplemented by E. Picot, La Sottie en France, in Romania, vol. vii, and there is a good study of the fool-literature of the Renascence in C. H. Herford, Literary Relations between England and Germany in the Sixteenth Century (1886). Amongst writers on the court fool are J. F. Dreux du Radier, Histoire des Fous en Titre d’Office, in Récréations historiques (1768); C. F. Flögel, Geschichte der Hofnarren (1789); F. Douce, Clowns and Fools of Shakespeare in Variorum Shakespeare (1821), xxi. 420, and Illustrations of Shakespeare (1839); C. Leber in Rigollot, xl; J. Doran, History of Court Fools (1858); A. F. Nick, Hof-und Volksnarren (1861); P. Lacroix (le bibliophile Jacob), Dissertation sur les Fous des Rois de France; A. Canel, Recherches historiques sur les Fous des Rois de France (1873); A. Gazeau, Les Bouffons (1882); P. Moreau, Fous et Bouffons (1885). Much of this literature fails to distinguish between the stultus and the ioculator regis (ch. iii). There is an admirable essay by L. Johnson on The Fools of Shakespeare in Noctes Shakesperianae (1887).]
The conclusion of this volume must call attention to certain traces left by the ecclesiastical ludi of the New Year, themselves extinct, upon festival custom, and, through this, upon dramatic tradition. The Feast of Fools did not altogether vanish with its suppression in the cathedrals. It had had its origin in the popular celebration of the Kalends. Throughout it did not altogether lack a popular element. The bourgeois crowded into the cathedral to see and share in the revel. The Fool Bishop in his turn left the precincts and made his progress through the city streets, while his satellites played their pranks abroad for the entertainment of the mob. The feast was a dash of colour in the civic as well as the ecclesiastical year. The Tournai riots of 1499 show that the jeunesse of that city had come to look upon it as a spectacle which they were entitled to claim from the cathedral. What happened in Tournai doubtless happened elsewhere. And the upshot of it was that when in chapter after chapter the reforming party got the upper hand and the official celebration was dropped, the city and its jeunesse themselves stepped into the breach and took measures to perpetuate the threatened delightful dynasty. It was an easy way to avert the loss of a holiday. And so we find a second tradition of Feasts of Fools, in which the fous are no longer vicars but bourgeois, and the dominus festi is a popular ‘king’ or ‘prince’ rather than a clerical ‘bishop.’ A mid-fifteenth-century writer, Martin Franc, attests the vogue of the prince des folz in the towns of northern France:
‘Va t’en aux festes à Tournay,
A celles d’Arras et de Lille,
D’Amiens, de Douay, de Cambray,
De Valenciennes, d’Abbeville.