The celebration of the Feast of Innocents by children, which we do not approve, but rather suffer with disapproval, is on no account to be undertaken by those children, nor are they to take any part in it, until after the end of the vespers of St John the Evangelist’s Day; and the nuns are not to retire from the office, but having excluded from the choir all men and women ... they are themselves to supply the absence of the little ones lest (which God forbid) the divine praise should become a mockery[978].
A more specific reference still is found at Carrow in 1526; Dame Joan Botulphe deposed at a visitation that it was customary at Christmas for the youngest nun to hold sway for the day as abbess and on that day (added the soured ancient) was consumed and dissipated everything that the house had acquired by alms or by the gift of friends[979]. The connection between these revels and the Feast of Fools appears clearly in the injunction sent by Bishop Longland to Nuncoton about the same time:
We chardge you, lady priores, that ye suffre nomore hereafter eny lorde of mysrule to be within your house, nouther to suffre hereafter eny suche disgysinge as in tymes past haue bene used in your monastery in nunnes apparell ne otherwise[980].
The admission of seculars dressed up as nuns, and of boys dressed up as women, the performance of interludes and the wild dancing were reason enough for the distaste with which ecclesiastical authorities regarded these festivities. For the nuns clearly did not exclude strangers as Peckham had bidden. Indeed it seems probable that where they did not elect a Girl Abbess, they admitted a Boy Bishop, either from some neighbouring church, or just possibly one of their own little schoolboys. Among the accounts of St Swithun’s monastery at Winchester for 1441 there is a payment
for the boys of the Almonry together with the boys of the chapel of St Elizabeth, dressed up after the manner of girls, dancing, singing and performing plays before the Abbess and nuns of St Mary’s Abbey in their hall on the Feast of Innocents[981];
and the account of Christian Bassett, Prioress of St Mary de Pré, contains an item “paid for makyng of the dyner to the susters upon Childermasday iij s iiij d, item paid for brede and ale for seint Nicholas clerks iij d”[982]. The inventories of Cheshunt and Sheppey at the time of the Dissolution contain further references to the custom and seem to show that nunneries occasionally “ran” a St Nicholas Bishop of their own: at Cheshunt there was found in the dorter “a chisell (chasuble) of white ffustyan and a myter for a child bysshoppe at xx d”[983], and at Sheppey, in a chapel, “ij olde myters for S. Nicholas of fustyan brodered”[984].
These childish festivities sound harmless and attractive enough, and modern writers are sometimes apt to sentimentalise over their abolition by Henry VIII[985]. But in this, as in his injunction of enclosure, Henry was fully in accordance with the best ecclesiastical precedent. For the Boy Bishop was originally a part of the Feast of Fools and the Feast of Fools had an ancient and disreputable ancestry in the Roman Saturnalia. At a very early date a regulation made to curtail such performances at St Paul’s declared that “what had been invented for the praise of sucklings had been converted into a disgrace”[986]. In 1445, at Paris, it was stated by the Faculty of Theology at the University that the performers
appeared in masks with the faces of monsters or in the dresses of women, sang improper songs in the choir, ate fat pork on the horns of the altar, close by the priest celebrating mass, played dice on the altar, used stinking incense made of old shoes, and ran about the choir leaping and shouting[987];
and about the same time the Synod of Basle had specifically denounced the children’s festival in hardly less violent terms as
that disgraceful, bad custom practised in some churches, by which on certain high days during the year some with mitre, staff and pontifical vestments like Bishops and others dressed as kings and princes bless the people; the which festival in some places is called the Feast of Fools or Innocents or Boys, and some making games with masks and mummeries, others dances and breakdowns of males and females, move people to look on with guffaws, while others make drinkings and feasts there[988].