The New Year customs, all too briefly summed up in the last chapter, are essentially folk customs. They belong to the ritual of that village community whose primitive organization still, though obscurely, underlies the complex society of western Europe. The remaining chapters of the present volume will deal with certain modifications and developments introduced into those customs by new social classes which gradually differentiated themselves during the Middle Ages from the village folk. The churchman, the bourgeois, the courtier, celebrated the New Year, even as the peasant did. But they put their own temper into the observances; and it is worth while to accord a separate treatment to the shapes which these took in such hands, and to the resulting influence upon the dramatic conditions of the sixteenth century.
The discussion must begin with the somewhat startling New Year revels held by the inferior clergy in mediaeval cathedrals and collegiate churches, which may be known generically as the ‘Feast of Fools.’ Actually, the feast has different names in different localities. Most commonly it is the festum stultorum, fatuorum or follorum; but it is also called the festum subdiaconorum from the highest of the minores ordines who, originally at least, conducted it, and the festum baculi from one of its most characteristic and symbolical ceremonies; while it shares with certain other rites the suggestive title of the ‘Feast of Asses,’ asinaria festa.
The main area of the feast is in France, and it is in France that it must first of all be considered. I do not find a clear notice of it until the end of the twelfth century[980]. It is mentioned, however, in the Rationale Divinorum Officium (†1182-90) of Joannes Belethus, rector of Theology at Paris, and afterwards a cathedral dignitary at Amiens. ‘There are four tripudia’ Belethus tells us, ‘after Christmas. They are those of the deacons, priests, and choir-children, and finally that of the sub-deacons, quod vocamus stultorum, which is held according to varying uses, on the Circumcision, or on Epiphany, or on the octave of Epiphany[981].’ Almost simultaneously the feast can be traced in the cathedral of Notre-Dame at Paris, through an epigram written by one Leonius, a canon of the cathedral, to a friend who was about to pay him a visit for the festum baculi at the New Year[982]. The baculus was the staff used by the precentor of a cathedral, or whoever might be conducting the choir in his place[983]. Its function in the Feast of Fools may be illustrated from an order for the reformation of the Notre-Dame ceremony issued in 1199. This order was made by Eudes de Sully, bishop of Paris, together with the dean and other chapter officers[984]. It recites a mandate sent to them by cardinal Peter of Capua, then legate in France. The legate had been informed of the improprieties and disorders, even to shedding of blood, which had given to the feast of the Circumcision in the cathedral the appropriate name of the festum fatuorum. It was not a time for mirth, for the fourth crusade had failed, and Pope Innocent III was preaching the fifth. Nor could such spurcitia be allowed in the sanctuary of God. The bishop and his fellows must at once take order for the pruning of the feast. In obedience to the legate they decree as follows. The bells for first Vespers on the eve of the Circumcision are to be rung in the usual way. There are to be no chansons, no masks, and no hearse lights, except on the iron wheels or on the penna at the will of the functionary who is to surrender the cope[985]. The lord of the feast is not to be led in procession or with singing to the cathedral or back to his house. He is to put on his cope in the choir, and with the precentor’s baculus in his hand to start the singing of the prose Laetemur gaudiis[986]. Vespers, Compline, Matins and Mass are to be sung in the usual festal manner. Certain small functions are reserved for the sub-deacons, and the Epistle at Mass is to be ‘farced[987].’ At second Vespers Laetemur gaudiis is to be again sung, and also Laetabundus[988]. Then comes an interesting direction. Deposuit is to be sung where it occurs five times at most, and ‘if the baculus has been taken,’ Vespers are to be closed by the ordinary officiant after a Te Deum. Throughout the feast canons and clerks are to remain properly in their stalls[989]. The abuses which it was intended to eliminate from the feast are implied rather than stated; but the general character of the ceremony is clear. It consisted in the predominance throughout the services, for this one day in the year, of the despised sub-deacons. Probably they had been accustomed to take the canons’ stalls. This Eudes de Sully forbids, but even, in the feast as he left it the importance of the dominus festi, the sub-deacons’ representative, is marked by the transfer to him of the baculus, and with it the precentor’s control. Deposuit potentes de sede: et exaltavit humiles occurs in the Magnificat, which is sung at Vespers; and the symbolical phrase, during which probably the baculus was handed over from the dominus of one year to the dominus of the next, became the keynote of the feast, and was hailed with inordinate repetition by the delighted throng of inferior clergy[990].
Shortly after the Paris reformation a greater than Eudes de Sully and a greater than Peter de Capua was stirred into action by the scandal of the Feast of Fools and the cognate tripudia. In 1207, Pope Innocent III issued a decretal to the archbishop and bishops of the province of Gnesen in Poland, in which he called attention to the introduction, especially during the Christmas feasts held by deacons, priests and sub-deacons, of larvae or masks and theatrales ludi into churches, and directed the discontinuance of the practice[991]. This decretal was included as part of the permanent canon law in the Decretales of Gregory IX in 1234[992]. But some years before this it found support, so far as France was concerned, in a national council held at Paris by the legate Robert de Courcon in 1212, at which both regular and secular clergy were directed to abstain from the festa follorum, ubi baculus accipitur[993].
It was now time for other cathedral chapters besides that of Paris to set their houses in order, and good fortune has preserved to us a singular monument of the attempts which they made to do so. The so-called Missel des Fous of Sens may be seen in the municipal library of that city[994]. It is enshrined in a Byzantine ivory diptych of much older date than itself[995]. It is not a missal at all. It is headed Officium Circumcisionis in usum urbis Senonensis, and is a choir-book containing the words and music of the Propria or special chants used in the Hours and Mass at the feast[996]. Local tradition at Sens, as far back as the early sixteenth century, ascribed the compilation of this office to that very Petrus de Corbolio who was associated with Eudes de Sully in the Paris reformation[997]. Pierre de Corbeil, whom scholastics called doctor opinatissimus and his epitaph flos et honor cleri, had a varied ecclesiastical career. As canon of Notre-Dame and reader in the Paris School of Theology he counted amongst his pupils one no less distinguished than the future Pope Innocent III himself. He became archdeacon of Evreux, coadjutor of Lincoln (a fact of some interest in connexion with the scanty traces of the Feast of Fools in England), bishop of Cambrai, and finally archbishop of Sens, where he died in 1222. There is really no reason to doubt his connexion with the Officium. The handwriting of the manuscript and the character of the music are consistent with a date early in the thirteenth century[998]. Elaborate and interpolated offices were then still in vogue, and the good bishop enjoyed some reputation for literature as well as for learning. He composed an office for the Assumption, and is even suspected of contributions in his youth to goliardic song[999]. It is unlikely that he actually wrote much of the text of the Officium Circumcisionis, very little of which is peculiar to Sens. But he may well have compiled or revised it for his own cathedral, with the intention of pruning the abuses of the feast; and, in so doing, he evidently admitted proses and farsurae with a far more liberal hand than did Eudes de Sully. The whole office, which is quite serious and not in the least burlesque, well repays study. I can only dwell on those parts of it which throw light on the general character of the celebration for which it was intended.
The first Vespers on the eve of the Circumcision are preceded by four lines sung in ianuis ecclesiae:
‘Lux hodie, lux laetitiae, me iudice tristis
quisquis erit, removendus erit solemnibus istis,
sint hodie procul invidiae, procul omnia maesta,
laeta volunt, quicunque colunt asinaria festa.’