It will not have escaped notice that the costume just described, the parti-coloured garments, the hood with its ears, bells and coxcomb, and the _marotte_, is precisely that assigned by the custom of the stage to the fools who appear as _dramatis personae_ in several of Shakespeare’s plays[1389]. Yet these fools have nothing to do with _sociétés joyeuses_ or the Feast of Fools; they represent the ‘set,’ ‘allowed,’ or ‘all-licensed’ fool[1390], the domestic jester of royal courts and noble houses. The great have always found pleasure in that near neighbourhood of folly which meaner men vainly attempt to shun. Rome shared the _stultus_ with her eastern subjects and her barbarian invaders alike; and the ‘natural,’ genuine or assumed, was, like his fellow the dwarf, an institution in every mediaeval and Renascence palace[1391]. The question arises how far the _habit_ of the _sociétés joyeuses_ was also that of the domestic fool. In France there is some evidence that from the end of the fourteenth century it was occasionally at least taken as such. The tomb in Saint Maurice’s at Senlis of Thévenin de St. Leger, fool to Charles V, who died in 1374, represents him in a crested hood with a _marotte_[1392]. Rabelais describes the fool Seigni Joan, apparently intended for a court fool, as having a _marotte_ and ears to his hood. On the other hand, he makes Panurge present Triboulet, the fool of Louis XII, with a sword of gilt wood and a bladder[1393]. A little later Jean Passerat speaks of the hood, green and yellow, with bells, of another royal fool[1394]. In the seventeenth century the green and yellow and an eared hood formed part of the fool’s dress which the duke of Nevers imposed upon a peccant treasurer[1395]. But in France the influence of the _sociétés joyeuses_ was directly present. I do not find that the data quoted by Douce quite bear out his transference of the regular French _habit de fou_ to England. Hoods were certainly required as part of the costume for ‘fools,’ ‘disards,’ or ‘vices’ in the court revels of 1551-2, together with ‘longe’ coats of various gay colours[1396]; but these were for masks, and on ordinary occasions the fools of the king and the nobles seem to have worn the usual dress of a courtier or servant[1397]. Like Triboulet, they often bore, as part of this, a gilded wooden sword[1398]. A coxcomb, however, seems to have been a recognized fool ensign[1399], and once, in a tale, the complete _habit_ is described[1400]. Other fool costumes include a long petticoat[1401], the more primitive calf-skin[1402], and a fox tail hanging from the back[1403]. The two latter seem to bring us back to the sacrificial _exuviae_, and form a link between the court fool and the grotesque ‘fool,’ or ‘Captain Cauf Tail’ of the morris dances and other village revels.