of the obedientiaries of Durham priory show from 1369 onwards many payments by nearly all these officers to a Boy Bishop of the almonry. He also received a gift up to 1528 from the dependent house or ‘cell’ of Finchale priory. This payment was made at the office of the _feretrarius_ or keeper of Saint Cuthbert’s shrine. The ‘bishop’ is called _episcopus puerilis_, _episcopus eleemosynariae_, or the like. In 1405 he was not elected, _propter guerras eo tempore_. In 1423 and 1434 there was also an _episcopus de Elvett_ or Elvetham, a manor of the priory[1297]. The abbey of Bury St. Edmunds had its _episcopus sancti Nicolai_ in 1418 and for at least a century longer[1298]. At Winchester each of the great monasteries held a Feast of Boys; the abbey of Hyde on St. Nicholas’ day[1299]; the priory of St. Swithin’s on that of the Holy Innocents. Here, too, the accounts of the obedientiaries contain evidence of the feast in payments between 1312 and 1536 for beer or wine sent to the _episcopus iuvenum_. Nearly all the officers whose rolls are preserved, the chamberlain, the curtarian, the cellarian, the almoner, the sacristan, the _custos operum_, the hordarian, seem to have contributed[1300]. A _Computus_ of 1441 contains a payment to the _pueri eleemosynariae_ who, with the _pueri_ of St. Elizabeth’s chapel, visited St. Mary’s convent, dressed as girls, and danced, sang and sported before the abbess and the nuns[1301]. We have had some French instances in which the Boy Bishop visited a neighbouring convent. But the nuns were not always dependent on outside visitors for their revel. In some places they held their own feast, with an ‘abbess’ instead of a ‘bishop.’ Archbishop John Peckham, in addition to his general constitution already quoted, issued a special mandate to Godstow nunnery, forbidding the office and prayers to be said _per parvulas_ on Innocents’ day[1302]. Three centuries later, in 1526, a visitation of Carrow nunnery by Richard Nicke, bishop of Norwich, disclosed a custom of electing a Christmas ‘abbess’ there, which the bishop condemned[1303]. Continental parallels to these examples are available. An eighth-century case, indeed, which is quoted by some writers, has probably been the subject of a misinterpretation[1304]. But the visitation-books of Odo Rigaud, archbishop of Rouen (1248-69) record that he forbade the _ludibria_ of the younger nuns at the Christmas feasts and the feast of St. Mary Magdalen in more than one convent of his diocese. One of these was the convent of the Holy Trinity at Caen, in which an ‘abbess’ was still chosen by the novices in 1423[1305]. All the monastic examples here quoted come from houses of the older foundations. The _Statutes_, however, of the Observant Franciscans made at Barcelona in 1401, expressly forbid the use of secular garments or the loan of habits of the order for _ludi_ on St. Nicholas’ or Innocents’ days[1306]; whence it may be inferred that the irregularities provided against were not