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 Pre, 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].