At the principal banquet there fell out a great flaw and grudge among the Englishmen, for a Frenchman called Bastien devised a number of men formed like satyrs, with long tails and whips in their hands, running before the meat, which was brought through the great hall upon a trim engine, marching, as it appeared, alone, with musicians clothed like maidens, playing upon all sorts of instruments and singing of music. But the satyrs were not content only to clear round, but put their hands behind them to their tails, which they wagged with their hands, in such sort as the Englishmen supposed it had been devised and done in derision of them, daftly {foolishly} apprehending that which they should not seem to have understood.... So soon as they saw the satyrs wagging their tails[17] ... they all sat down upon the bare floor behind the back of the board, that they should not see themselves scorned, as they thought. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [17] It was a mediæval superstition, especially in France, that the English possessed tails, which had been affixed to their persons as a punishment for their ill-treatment of a saint; the names of St. Augustine and St. Thomas of Canterbury were used indifferently in this connection. _Cf._ Mr. George Neilson's "Caudatus Anglicus: A Mediæval Slander." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1566.--December 23. Restoration of the Consistorial Jurisdiction of the Archbishop of St. Andrews. _Laing_, II., 77. _from Privy Seal Record_, bk. 35, fol. 99. A letter made restoring and reproving our sovereign's well beloved and trusty councillor, John, Archbishop of St. Andrews, primate and legate of Scotland, to all and sundry his jurisdictions as well upon the south as north sides of the Forth within the diocese of St. Andrews, which pertained to the Archbishopric of the same, to be used by him and his commissaries in all time coming in the same manner and form of justice as it is now used.... At Stirling, this xxiii day of December, the year of God, 1566 years. [The jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts had been abolished in 1560. It was the Archbishop who pronounced the sentence of divorce between Bothwell and his wife, either in virtue of this general warrant, or by means of a special commission to try the case. On the one side, this restoration of the Consistorial Court is regarded as pointing to Mary's collusion with Bothwell, while controversialists, on the other side, would connect it with the proposal, made at Craigmillar, of a divorce between Mary and Darnley.] _DARNLEY FALLS ILL_ Darnley's Illness. _Buchanan's Detection._