vent in other of the winter rejoicings. Nor was it the _triduum_ alone which afforded its opportunities. More rarely the performances of the _Pastores_ on Christmas day itself[1198], or the suppers given by the great officers of cathedrals and monasteries, when they sang their ‘_Oes_,’ on the nights between December 16 and Christmas[1199], were the occasions for excesses which called for reprehension. Already, when Conrad visited St. Gall in 911, the third feast of the _triduum_ was the most interesting. In after years this reached an importance denied to the other two. The Vespers procession was the germ of an annual rejoicing, secular as well as ritual, which became for the _pueri_ attached as choir-boys and servers to the cathedrals and great churches very much what the Feast of Fools became for the adult inferior clergy of the same bodies. Where the two feasts were not merged in one, this distinction of _personnel_ was retained. A good example is afforded by Sens. Here, from the middle of the fourteenth century, the chapter accounts show an _archiepiscopus puerorum_ side by side with the _dominus_ of the Feast of Fools. Each feast got its own grant of wine from the chapter, and had its own prebend in the chapter woods. In the fifteenth century the two fell and rose together. In the sixteenth, the Feast of Boys was the more flourishing, and claimed certain dues from a market in Sens, which were commuted for a small money payment by the chapter. Finally, both feasts are suppressed together in 1547[1200]. It is to be observed that the original celebration of the Holy Innocents’ day in the western Church was not of an unmixed festal character. It commemorated a martyrdom which typified and might actually have been that of Christ himself, and it was therefore held _cum tristitia_. As in Lent or on Good Friday itself, the ‘joyful chants,’ such as the _Te Deum_ or the _Alleluia_, were silenced. This characteristic of the day was known to Belethus, but even before his time it had begun to give way to the festal tendencies. Local practice differed widely, as the notices collected by Martene show, but even when John of Avranches wrote, at the end of the eleventh century, the ‘modern’ custom was to sing the chants[1201].