Fidelium devotio,
Est ergo superstitio
Vacare a tripudio.’
In England it is probable that the Beverley Boy Bishop also officiated on St. Nicholas’ Day. A chapter order of Jan. 7, 1313, directs the transfer of the ‘servitium sancti Nicholai in festo eiusdem per Magistrum Scholarum Beverlacensium celebrandum’ to the altar of St. Blaize during the building of a new nave (A. F. Leach, Memorials of Beverley Minster, Surtees Soc. i. 307).
[1328] Tille, D. W. 32; Leach, 130. The connexion of St. Nicholas with children may be explained by, if it did not rather give rise to, either the legend of his early piety, ‘The first day that he was washed and bained, he addressed him right up in the bason, and he wold not take the breast nor the pap but once on the Wednesday and once on the Friday, and in his young age he eschewed the plays and japes of other young children’ (Golden Legend, ii. 110); or the various other legends which represent him as bringing children out of peril. Cf. Golden Legend, ii. 119 sqq., and especially the history of the resurrection of three boys from a pickle-tub narrated by Mr. Leach from Wace. A. Maury, (Croyances et Légendes du Moyen Âge (ed. 1896), 149) tries to find the origin of this in misunderstood iconographic representations of the missionary saint at the baptismal font.
[1329] Leach, 130; Golden Legend, ii. 111.
[1330] Cf. ch. xi. The position of St. Nicholas’ Day in the ceremonies discussed in this chapter is sometimes shared by other feasts of the winter cycle: St. Edmund’s (Nov. 20), St. Clement’s (Nov. 23), St. Catherine’s (Nov. 25), St. Andrew’s (Nov. 30), St. Eloi’s (Dec. 1), St. Lucy’s (Dec. 13). Cf. pp. 349-51, 359, 366-8. The feast of St. Mary Magdalen, kept in a Norman convent (p. 362), was, however, in the summer (July 22).
[1331] Specht, 229; Tille, D. W. 300; Wetze and Welte, iv. 1411. Roman schoolmasters expected a present at the Minervalia (March 18-23); cf. the passage from Tertullian in Appendix N (1).
[1332] Martin Franc, Champion des dames (Bibl. de l’École des Chartes, v. 58).
[1333] Du Tilliot, 87.