Joannes Belethus, the learned theologian of Paris and Amiens, towards the end of the twelfth century, describes, as well as the Feast of Fools, no less than three other _tripudia_ falling in Christmas week[1173]. Upon the days of St. Stephen, St. John the Evangelist, and the Holy Innocents, the deacons, the priests, the choir-boys, held their respective revels, each body in turn claiming that pre-eminence in the divine services which in the Feast of Fools was assigned to the sub-deacons. The distinction drawn by Belethus is not wholly observed in the ecclesiastical prohibitions either of the thirteenth or of the fifteenth century. In many of these the term ‘Feast of Fools’ has a wide meaning. The council of Nevers in 1246 includes under it the feasts of the Innocents and the New Year; that of Langres in 1404 the ‘festivals of the Nativity’; that of Nantes in 1431 the Nativity itself, St. Stephen’s, St. John’s, and the Innocents’. For the council of Basle it is apparently synonymous with the ‘Feast of Innocents or Boys’; the Paris theologians speak of its rites as practised on St. Stephen’s, the Innocents’, the Circumcision, and other dates. The same tendency to group all these _tripudia_ together recurs in passages in which the ‘Feast of Fools’ is not in so many words mentioned. The famous decretal of Pope Innocent III is directed against the _ludibria_ practised in turns by deacons, priests, and sub-deacons during the feasts immediately following upon Christmas. The _irrisio servitii_ inveighed against in the _Rememoratio_ of Gerson took place on Innocents’ day, on the Circumcision, on the Epiphany, or at Shrovetide. Local usage, however, only partly bears out this loose language of the prohibitions. At Châlons-sur-Marne, in 1570, the ‘bishop’ of Fools sported on St. Stephen’s day. At Besançon, in 1387, a distinct _dominus festi_ was chosen on each of the three days after Christmas, and all alike were called _rois des fous_. At Autun, during the fifteenth century, the _regna_ of the ‘bishop’ and ‘dean’ of Innocents and of ‘Herod’ at the New Year were known together as the _festa folorum_. Further south, the identification is perhaps more common. At Avallon, Aix, Antibes, the Feast of Fools was on Innocents’ day; at Arles the _episcopus stultorum_ officiated both on the Innocents’ and on St. John’s, at Viviers on all three of the post-Nativity feasts. But these are exceptions, and, at least outside Provence, the rule seems to have been to apply the name of ‘Feast of Fools’ to the _tripudium_, originally that of the sub-deacons, on New Year’s day or the Epiphany, and to distinguish from this, as does Belethus, the _tripudia_ of the deacons, priests, and choir-boys in Christmas week.