On the other hand, it was partially observed as a popular holiday, at least it gave occasion in many places for popular rejoicings,[362] being the day on which the Roman Calendar began a new year. In Ravenna it was marked by dancing and masquerades, against which Peter Chrysologus inveighed in his 155th Sermon. Since he forbids Christians to put in even an appearance at these entertainments, they must have been of an objectionable nature. It was the same in Gaul even in the sixth century and later. The second Council of Tours, and the Councils of Auxerre and Rouen (650) were compelled to forbid these rejoicings. With a view to counteracting their influence, the bishops exhorted the faithful to attend divine service on this day, and appointed somewhat earlier penitential processions (_litaniæ_) to be privately performed in atonement for the sins committed at this season.[363] In Spain, the eleventh canon of the fourth Council of Toledo commanded a strict fast and abstinence for the same object, and the Allelujah was omitted from the psalmody. In 650, a law of the Kings Recceswinth and Erwig made the Kalends of January a festival of obligation.[364] In Rome, in the eighth century, the people spent the nights dancing in the streets to the scandal of pilgrims from the north, as Boniface informed Pope Zacharias. These abuses lingered longest in France though divested of their heathen character. Late on in the Middle Ages, we find a remnant of them in the so-called Feast of Fools, at which ecclesiastical customs were travestied by the election of a Bishop of Fools and by all sorts of misconduct in the churches. Things became so bad that the papal legate, Cardinal Peter, felt compelled to order Odo, Bishop of Paris, to pronounce excommunication on all who took part in such proceedings. The bishop prohibited the abuse in the strongest manner in 1199, but in spite of repeated ecclesiastical censures, it continued on into the fifteenth century, as appears from a report of the theological faculty of Paris in 1444.[365] The 1st January appears as an ecclesiastical festival at Rome for the first time at the beginning of the ninth century, where it is called from the first _Circumcisio Domini_, the name which it bears among the Greeks, Syrians, and Copts.