In any case, the oriental example can hardly be responsible for more than the admission of the feast within the doors of the church. One cannot doubt that it was essentially an adaptation of a folk-custom long perfectly well known in the West itself. The question of origin had already presented itself to the learned writers of the thirteenth century. William of Auxerre, by a misunderstanding which I shall hope to explain, traced the Feast of Fools to the Roman _Parentalia_: Durandus, and the Paris theologians after him, to the January Kalends. Certainly Durandus was right. The Kalends, unlike the more specifically Italian feasts, were co-extensive with the Roman empire, and were naturally widespread in Gaul. The date corresponds precisely with that by far the most common for the Feast of Fools. A singular history indeed, that of the ecclesiastical celebration of the First of January. Up to the eighth century a fast, with its mass _pro prohibendo ab idolis_, it gradually took on a festal character, and became ultimately the one feast in the year in which paganism made its most startling and persistent recoil upon Christianity. The attacks upon the Kalends in the disciplinary documents form a catena which extends very nearly to the point at which the notices of the Feast of Fools begin. In each alike the masking, in mimicry of beasts and probably of beast-gods or ‘demons,’ appears to have been a prominent and highly reprobated feature. It is true that we hear nothing of a _dominus festi_ at the Kalends; but much stress must not be laid upon the omission of the disciplinary writers to record any one point in a custom which after all they were not describing as anthropologists, and it would certainly be an exceptional Germano-Keltic folk-feast which had not a _dominus_. As a matter of fact, there is no mention of a _rex_ in the accounts of the pre-Christian Kalends in Italy itself. There was a _rex_ at the _Saturnalia_, and this, together with an allusion of Belethus in a quite different connexion to the _libertas Decembrica_[1158], has led some writers to find in the _Saturnalia_, rather than the Kalends, the origin of the Feast of Fools[1159]. This is, I venture to think, wrong. The _Saturnalia_ were over well before December 25: there is no evidence that they had a vogue outside Italy: the Kalends, like the _Saturnalia_, were an occasion at which slaves met their masters upon equal terms, and I believe that the existence of a Kalends _rex_, both in Italy and in Gaul, may be taken for granted.