[1334] Julleville, Les Com. 241.
[1335] Julleville, Les Com. 193, 256; Du Tilliot, 97. The chief officers of the chapel fous were the ‘bâtonnier’ and the ‘protonotaire et procureur des fous.’ In the Infanterie these are replaced by the emblematical Mère Folle and the ‘Procureur fiscal’ known as ‘Fiscal vert’ or ‘Griffon vert.’ Du Tilliot and others have collected a number of documents concerning the Infanterie, together with representations of seals, badges, &c., used by them. These may be compared in Du Tilliot with the bâton belonging to the Chapel period (1482), which he also gives. The motto of the Infanterie is worth noticing. It was Numerus stultorum infinitus est, and was taken from Ecclesiastes, i. 15. It was used also at Amiens (Julleville, Les Com. 234).
[1336] At Amiens the ‘feste du Prince des Sots’ existed in 1450 (Julleville, Les Com. 233), but the ‘Pope of Fools’ was not finally suppressed in the cathedral for another century. But at Amiens there was an immense multiplication of ‘fool’-organizations. Each church and convent had its ‘episcopus puerorum,’ and several of these show fous on their coins. Rigollot, 77, 105, figures a coin with fous, which he assigns to a confrérie in the parish of St. Remigius; also a coin, dated 1543, of an ‘Evesque des Griffons.’
[1337] Julleville, Les Com. 144.
[1338] The term cornard seems to be derived from the ‘cornes’ of the traditional fool headdress. Leber, ix. 353, reprints from the Mercure de France for April, 1725, an account of a procession made by the abbas cornardorum at Evreux mounted upon an ass, which directly recalls the Feast of Fools. A macaronic chanson used on the occasion of one of these processions is preserved:
‘De asino bono nostro,
Meliori et optimo,
Debemus faire fête.
En revenant de Gravignariâ,
Un gros chardon reperit in viâ;