Shepherds and shepherding furnish frequent subjects to the carver.
In a Coventry Corpus Christi play of 1534 one of the three shepherds presents his gloves to the infant Saviour in these words—
“Have here my myttens, to pytt en thi hondis,
Other treysure have I none to present thee with.”
This carving has been called the Good Shepherd. If the artist really meant Christ by this shepherd with a hood over his head and hat over that, with great gloves and shoes, with a round beardless face, with his arms round the necks of two sheep, holding their feet in his hands, it is the finest piece of religious burlesque extant. But it is not to be supposed that the idea even occurred to the sculptor.
The Feast of Fools was a kind of religious farce, a “mystery” run riot. Cedranus, a Byzantine historian, who wrote in the eleventh century, records that it was introduced into the Greek Church A.D. 990, by Theophylact, patriarch of Constantinople. We can partly understand that the popular craving for the wild liberties of the Saturnalia might be met, and perhaps modified, by a brief removal of the solemn constraint of the Christian priest-rule. But licentiousness in church worship was no new thing, and, long before the time of Theophylact, the Church of the West, and probably the Greek Church also, had been rendered scandalous by the laxity with which the church services were conducted. At the Council of Orleans, in A.D. 533, it was found necessary to rule that no person in a church shall sing, drink, or do anything unbecoming; at another in Châlons, in A.D. 650, women were forbidden to sing indecent songs in church. There is in fact every evidence, including the sculptures of our subject, that religion was not, popularly, a thing solemn in itself. Cedranus mentions the “diabolic dances” among the enormities practised at the Feast of Fools, which was generally held about Christmas, though not confined to that festival.
In the twelfth century, the abuse increased; songs of the most indecent and offensive character were sung in the midst of the mock services; puddings were eaten, and dice rattled on the altar, and old shoes burnt as incense.
DANCING FOOLS, BEVERLEY MINSTER.
