In any case, the oriental example can hardly be responsible for more than the admission of the feast within the doors of the church. One cannot doubt that it was essentially an adaptation of a folk-custom long perfectly well known in the West itself. The question of origin had already presented itself to the learned writers of the thirteenth century. William of Auxerre, by a misunderstanding which I shall hope to explain, traced the Feast of Fools to the Roman Parentalia: Durandus, and the Paris theologians after him, to the January Kalends. Certainly Durandus was right. The Kalends, unlike the more specifically Italian feasts, were co-extensive with the Roman empire, and were naturally widespread in Gaul. The date corresponds precisely with that by far the most common for the Feast of Fools. A singular history indeed, that of the ecclesiastical celebration of the First of January. Up to the eighth century a fast, with its mass pro prohibendo ab idolis, it gradually took on a festal character, and became ultimately the one feast in the year in which paganism made its most startling and persistent recoil upon Christianity. The attacks upon the Kalends in the disciplinary documents form a catena which extends very nearly to the point at which the notices of the Feast of Fools begin. In each alike the masking, in mimicry of beasts and probably of beast-gods or ‘demons,’ appears to have been a prominent and highly reprobated feature. It is true that we hear nothing of a dominus festi at the Kalends; but much stress must not be laid upon the omission of the disciplinary writers to record any one point in a custom which after all they were not describing as anthropologists, and it would certainly be an exceptional Germano-Keltic folk-feast which had not a dominus. As a matter of fact, there is no mention of a rex in the accounts of the pre-Christian Kalends in Italy itself. There was a rex at the Saturnalia, and this, together with an allusion of Belethus in a quite different connexion to the libertas Decembrica[1158], has led some writers to find in the Saturnalia, rather than the Kalends, the origin of the Feast of Fools[1159]. This is, I venture to think, wrong. The Saturnalia were over well before December 25: there is no evidence that they had a vogue outside Italy: the Kalends, like the Saturnalia, were an occasion at which slaves met their masters upon equal terms, and I believe that the existence of a Kalends rex, both in Italy and in Gaul, may be taken for granted.

But the parallel between Kalends and the Feast of Fools cannot be held to be quite perfect, unless we can trace in the latter feast that most characteristic of all Kalends customs, the Cervulus. Is it possible that a representative of the Cervulus is to be found in the Ass, who, whether introduced from Constantinople or not, gave to the Feast of Fools one of its popular names? The Feast of Asses has been the sport of controversialists who had not, and were at no great pains to have, the full facts before them. I do not propose to awake once more these ancient angers[1160]. The facts themselves are briefly these. The ‘Prose of the Ass’ was used at Bourges, at Sens, and at Beauvais. As to the Bourges feast I have no details. At Sens, the use of the Prose by Pierre de Corbeil is indeed no proof that he allowed an ass to appear in the ceremony. But the Prose would not have much point unless it was at least a survival from a time when an ass did appear; the feast was known as the asinaria festa; and even now, three centuries after it was abolished, the Sens choir-boys still play at being âne archbishop on Innocents’ day[1161]. At Beauvais the heading Conductus quando asinus adducitur in the thirteenth-century Officium seems to show that there at least the ass appeared, and even entered the church. The document, also of the thirteenth century, quoted by the editors of Ducange, certainly brings him, in the ceremony of January 14, into the church and near the altar. An imitation of his braying is introduced into the service itself. At Autun the leading of an ass ad processionem, and the cantilena super dictum asinum were suppressed in 1411. At Châlons-sur-Marne in 1570 an ass bore the ‘bishop’ to the theatre at the church door only. At Prague, on the other hand, towards the end of the fourteenth century, an ass was led, as at Beauvais, right into the church. These, with doubtful references to fêtes des ânes at St. Quentin about 1081, at Béthune in 1474, and at Laon in 1527, and the Mosburg description of the ‘bishop’ as asinorum dominus, are all the cases I have found in which an ass has anything to do with the feast. But they are enough to prove that an ass was an early and widespread, though not an invariable feature. I may quote here a curious survival in a ronde from the west of France, said to have been sung at church doors on January 1[1162]. It is called La Mort de l’Âne, and begins:

This, like the Sens choir-boys’ custom of calling their ‘archbishop’ âne, would seem to suggest that the dominus festi was himself the ass, with a mask on; and this may have been sometimes the case. But in most of the mediaeval instances the ass was probably used to ride. At Prague, so far as one can judge from Huss’s description, he was a real ass. There is no proof in any of the French examples that he was, or was not, merely a ‘hobby-ass.’ If he was, he came all the nearer to the Cervulus.

It has been pointed out, and will, in the next volume, be pointed out again, that the ecclesiastical authorities attempted to sanctify the spirit of play at the Feast of Fools and similar festivities by diverting the energies of the revellers to ludi of the miracle-play order. In such ludi they found a place for the ass. He appears for instance as Balaam’s ass in the later versions from Laon and Rouen of the Prophetae, and at Rouen he gave to the whole of this performance the name of the festum or processio asinorum[1163]. At Hamburg, by a curious combination, he is at once Balaam’s ass and the finder of the star in a ludus Trium Regum[1164]. His use as the mount of the Virgin on January 14 at Beauvais, and on some uncertain day at Sens, seems to suggest another favourite episode in such ludi, that of the Flight into Egypt. At Varennes, in Picardy, and at Bayonne, exist carved wooden groups representing this event. That of Varennes is carried in procession; that of Bayonne is the object of pilgrimage on the fêtes of the Virgin[1165].

Not at the Feast of Fools alone, or at the miracle-plays connected with this feast, did the ass make its appearance in Christian worship. It stood with the ox, on the morning of the Nativity, beside the Christmas crib. On Palm Sunday it again formed part of a procession, in the semblance of the beast on which Christ made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem[1166]. A Cambrai Ordinarium quoted by Ducange directs that the asina picta shall remain behind the altar for four days[1167]. Kirchmeyer describes the custom as it existed during the sixteenth century in Germany[1168]; and the stray tourist who drops into the wonderful collection of domestic and ecclesiastical antiquities in the Barfüsserkirche at Basle will find there three specimens of the Palmesel, including a thirteenth-century one from Bayern and a seventeenth-century one from Elsass. The third is not labelled with its provenance, but it is on wheels and has a hole for the rope by which it was dragged round the church. All three are of painted wood, and upon each is a figure representing Christ[1169].

The affiliation of the ecclesiastical New Year revelries to the pagan Kalends does not explain why those who took part in them were called ‘Fools.’ The obvious thing to say is that they were called ‘Fools’ because they played the fool; and indeed their mediaeval critics were not slow to draw this inference. But it is noteworthy that pagan Rome already had its Feast of Fools, which, indeed, had nothing to do with the Kalends. The stultorum feriae on February 17 was the last day on which the Fornacalia or ritual sacrifice of the curiae was held. Upon it all the curiae sacrificed in common, and it therefore afforded an opportunity for any citizen who did not know which his curia was to partake in the ceremony[1170]. I am not prepared to say that the stultorum feriae gave its name to the Feast of Fools; but the identity of the two names certainly seems to explain some of the statements which mediaeval scholars make about that feast. It explains William of Auxerre’s derivation of it from the Parentalia, for the stultorum feriae fell in the midst of the Parentalia[1171]. And I think it explains the remark of Belethus, and, following him, of Durandus, about the ordo subdiaconorum being incertus. The sub-deacons were a regular ordo, the highest of the ordines minores from the third century[1172]. But Belethus seems to be struggling with the notion that the sub-deacons’ feast, closing the series of post-Nativity feasts held by deacons, priests and choir-boys, was in some way parallel to the feriae of the Roman stulti who were incerti as to their curia.