qui regnat per totam Franciam_, and denounced it roundly in sermons and _conclusiones_. The indecencies of the feast, he declares, would shame a kitchen or a tavern. The chapters will do nothing to stop them, and if the bishops protest, they are flouted and defied. The scandal can only be ended by the interposition of royal authority[1035]. According to Gerson, Charles the Sixth did on one occasion issue letters against the feast; and the view of the reformers found support in the diocesan council of Langres in 1404[1036], and the provincial council of Tours, held at Nantes in 1431[1037]. It was a more serious matter when, some years after Gerson’s death, the great council of Basle included a prohibition of the feast in its reformatory decrees of 1435[1038]. By the Pragmatic Sanction issued by Charles VII at the national council of Bourges in 1438, these decrees became ecclesiastical law in France[1039], and it was competent for the _Parlements_ to put them into execution[1040]. But the chapters were obstinate; the feasts were popular, not only with the inferior clergy themselves, but with the _spectacle_-loving _bourgeois_ of the cathedral towns; and it was only gradually that they died out during the course of the next century and a half. The failure of the Pragmatic Sanction to secure immediate obedience in this matter roused the University of Paris, still possessed with the spirit of Gerson, to fresh action. On March 12, 1445, the Faculty of Theology, acting through its dean, Eustace de Mesnil, addressed to the bishops and chapters of France a letter which, from the minuteness of its indictment, is perhaps the most curious of the many curious documents concerning the feast[1041]. It consists of a preamble and no less than fourteen _conclusiones_, some of which are further complicated by _qualificationes_. The preamble sets forth the facts concerning the _festum fatuorum_. It has its clear origin, say the theologians, in the rites of paganism, amongst which this Janus-worship of the Kalends has alone been allowed to survive. They then describe the customs of the feast in a passage which I must translate: ‘Priests and clerks may be seen wearing masks and monstrous visages at the hours of office. They dance in the choir dressed as women, panders or minstrels. They sing wanton songs. They eat black puddings at the horn of the altar while the celebrant is saying mass. They play at dice there. They cense with stinking smoke from the soles of old shoes. They run and leap through the church, without a blush at their own shame. Finally they drive about the town and its theatres in shabby traps and carts, and rouse the laughter of their fellows and the bystanders in infamous performances, with indecent gestures and verses scurrilous and unchaste[1042].’