The mediaeval stage, volume 1 (of 2)Chambers, E. K. (Edmund Kerchever)
History
The mediaeval stage, volume 1 (of 2)
Chambers, E. K. (Edmund Kerchever)
Drama, Medieval -- History and criticism; Theater -- History -- Medieval, 500-1500
John Huss, early in the fifteenth century, describes the Feast of Fools
as it existed in far-off Bohemia[1132]. The revellers, of whom, to
his remorse, Huss had himself been one as a lad, wore masks. A clerk,
grotesquely vested, was dubbed ‘bishop,’ set on an ass with his face to
the tail, and led to mass in the church. He was regaled on a platter
of broth and a bowl of beer, and Huss recalls the unseemly revel which
took place[1133]. Torches were borne instead of candles, and the clergy
turned their garments inside out, and danced. These _ludi_ had been
forbidden by one archbishop John of holy memory.
It would be surprising, in view of the close political and
ecclesiastical relations between mediaeval France and England, if the
Feast of Fools had not found its way across the channel. It did; but
apparently it never became so inveterate as successfully to resist
the disciplinary zeal of reforming bishops, and the few notices of it
are all previous to the end of the fourteenth century. It seems to
have lasted longest at Lincoln, and at Beverley. Of Lincoln, it will
be remembered, Pierre de Corbeil, the probable compiler of the Sens
_Officium_, was at one time coadjutor bishop. Robert Grosseteste, whose
attack upon the _Inductio Maii_ and other village festivals served as a
starting-point for this discussion, was no less intolerant of the Feast
of Fools. In 1236 he forbade it to be held either in the cathedral or
elsewhere in the diocese[1134]; and two years later he included the
prohibition in his formal _Constitutions_[1135]. But after another
century and a half, when William Courtney, archbishop of Canterbury,
made a visitation of Lincoln in 1390, he found that the vicars were
still in the habit of disturbing divine service on January 1, in the
name of the feast[1136]. Probably his strict mandate put a stop to the
custom[1137]. At almost precisely the same date the Feast of Fools was
forbidden by the statutes of Beverley minster, although the sub-deacons
and other inferior clergy were still to receive a special commons
on the day of the Circumcision[1138]. Outside Lincoln and Beverley,
the feast is only known in England by the mention of paraphernalia
for it in thirteenth-century inventories of St. Paul’s[1139], and
Salisbury[1140], and by a doubtful allusion in a sophisticated version
of the St. George play[1141].
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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