282 THE GERMAN PASSION-PLA Y 



with heathen festivals. The capitularies continually 

 returned to these practices, and most stringently forbid 

 them. "It is not permissible for choruses of laymen 

 and girls to sing songs and prepare banquets in the 

 church," runs a statute of 803 ; while another of the 

 same century forbids any presbyter to take part in or 

 allow in his presence unseemly clapping, laughing, or 

 foolish stories at funerals, or singing, or shameful games 

 with the bear or with female gymnasts, or the wearing 

 of masks of demons, for " all this is devilish/' Other 

 records of a similar date speak of the monks mumming 

 as wolves, foxes, or bears and of other " diabolical " 

 masquerades, which were clearly remnants of the old 

 heathen festivals. Even in the fifteenth century the 

 Church had not freed itself from these strange per- 

 formances. The ( feast of fools' had become an established 

 institution. A fool-bishop having been chosen with 

 many absurd ceremonies, monks and priests conducted 

 him to the cathedral. With faces smeared with ochre 

 or hidden by hideous masks, clad as women, as beasts, 

 or as jugglers, these clerical mummers proceeded singing 

 and dancing to the very altar-steps. The fool-bishop 

 read the service and gave his benediction, while his 

 bacchanalian following threw dice and ate sausages on 

 the altar itself. The burning of dung and old bits of 

 shoe-leather took the place of incense, and the utmost 

 license and disorder prevailed both inside and outside 

 the sacred building. 1 It is clear that the very clergy 



1 See Mone, B, ii. p. 367, and Flogel, Geschichte des Grotesk-Komischen, pp. 

 225, 460. Among the Statuta Sinodalia in diocesi ffavelbergensis, printed at 

 the end of the Breviarius Havelbergensis, 1511, we find a " Statutum Tiderici in 

 quo prohibetur ludibria lavarum et alias abusiones in ecclesiis fieri sub pena 



