The decrees of the two bishops already cited do not stand alone. About 1250 the University of Oxford found it necessary to forbid the routs of masked and garlanded students in the churches and open places of the city[334]. These appear to have been held in connexion with the feasts of the ‘nations’ into which a mediaeval university was divided. Articles of visitation drawn up in connexion with the provisions of Oxford in 1253 made inquiry as to several of the obnoxious _ludi_ and as to the measures adopted to check them throughout the country[335]. Prohibitions are upon record by the synod of Exeter in 1287[336], and during the next century by the synod of York in 1367[337], and by William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, in 1384[338]; while the denunciations of the rulers of the church find an unofficial echo in that handbook of ecclesiastical morality, Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s _Handlyng Synne_[339]. There is, however, reason to suppose that the attitude thus taken up hardly represents that of the average ecclesiastical authority, still less that of the average parish priest, towards the _ludi_ in question. The condemnatory decrees should probably be looked upon as the individual pronouncements of men of austere or reforming temper against customs which the laxer discipline of their fellows failed to touch; perhaps it should rather be said, which the wiser discipline of their fellows found it better to regulate than to ban. At any rate there is evidence to show that the village _ludi_, as distinct from the _spectacula_ of the minstrels, were accepted, and even to some extent directed, by the Church. They became part of the parochial organization, and were conducted through the parochial machinery. Doubtless this was the course of practical wisdom. But the moralist would find it difficult to deny that Robert Grosseteste and Walter de Chanteloup had, after all, some reason on their side. On the one hand they could point to the ethical lapses of which the _ludi_ were undoubtedly the cause--the drunkenness, the quarrels, the wantonings, by which they were disgraced[340]. And on the other they could--if they were historically minded--recall the origin of the objectionable rites in some of those obscure survivals of heathenism in the rustic blood, which half a dozen centuries of Christianity had failed to purge[341]. For if the comparative study of religions proves anything it is, that the traditional beliefs and customs of the mediaeval or modern peasant are in nine cases out of ten but the _detritus_ of heathen mythology and heathen worship, enduring with but little external change in the shadow of an hostile creed. This is notably true of the village festivals and their _ludi_. Their full significance only appears when they are regarded as fragments of forgotten cults, the naïve cults addressed by a primitive folk to the beneficent deities of field and wood and river, or the shadowy populace of its own dreams.