This later history of the feast at Sens is fairly typical, as the following chapter will show, of what took place all over France. The chapters by no means showed themselves universally willing to submit to the decree promulgated in the Pragmatic Sanction. In many of them the struggle between the conservative and the reforming parties was spread over a number of years. Councils, national, provincial and diocesan, continued to find it necessary to condemn the feast, mentioning it either by name or in a common category with other _ludi_, _spectacula_, _choreae_, _tripudia_ and _larvationes_[1056]. In one or two instances the authority of the _Parlements_ was invoked. But in the majority of cases the feast either gradually disappeared, or else passed, first from the churches into the streets, and then from the clerks to the _bourgeois_, often to receive a new life under quite altered circumstances at the hands of some witty and popular _compagnie des fous_[1057]. CHAPTER XIV THE FEAST OF FOOLS (_continued_) The history of the Feast of Fools has been so imperfectly written, that it is perhaps worth while to bring together the records of its occurrence, elsewhere than in Troyes and Sens, from the fourteenth century onwards. They could probably be somewhat increased by an exhaustive research amongst French local histories, archives, and the transactions of learned societies. Of the feast in Notre-Dame at Paris nothing is heard after the reformation carried out in 1198 by Eudes de Sully[1058]. The _bourgeois_ of Tournai were, indeed, able to quote a Paris precedent for the feast of their own city in 1499; but this may have been merely the feast of some minor collegiate body, such as that founded in 1303 by cardinal Le Moine[1059]; or of the scholars of the University, or of the _compagnie joyeuse_ of the _Enfants-sans-Souci_. At Beauvais, too, there are only the faintest traces of the feast outside the actual twelfth-and thirteenth-century service-books[1060]. But there are several other towns in the provinces immediately north and east of the capital, Île de France, Picardy, Champagne, where it is recorded. The provision made for it in the Amiens _Ordinarium_ of 1291 has been already quoted. Shortly after this, bishop William de Macon, who died in 1303, left his own _pontificalia_ for the use of the ‘bishop of Fools[1061].’ When, however, the feast reappears in the fifteenth century the _dominus festi_ is no longer a ‘bishop,’ but a ‘pope.’ In 1438 there was an endowment consisting of a share in the profits of some lead left by one John le Caron, who had himself been ‘pope[1062].’ In 1520 the feast was held, but no bells were to be jangled[1063]. It was repeated in 1538. Later in the year the customary election of the ‘pope’ on the anniversary of Easter was forbidden, but the canons afterwards repented of their severity[1064]. In 1540 the