en deacons. Institutions of
this nature, even more numerous than the historian has usually recorded,
and varied in their mode, seem to surpass each other in their utter
extravagance.[130]

These profane festivals were universally practised in the middle ages,
and, as I shall show, comparatively even in modern times. The ignorant
and the careless clergy then imagined it was the securest means to
retain the populace, who were always inclined to these pagan revelries.

These grotesque festivals have sometimes amused the pens of foreign and
domestic antiquaries: for our own country has participated as keenly in
these irreligious fooleries. In the feast of asses, an ass covered with
sacerdotal robes was gravely conducted to the choir, where service was
performed before the ass, and a hymn chanted in as discordant a manner
as they could contrive; the office was a medley of all that had been
sung in the course of the year; pails of water were flung at the head of
the chanters; the ass was supplied with drink and provender at every
division of the service; and the asinines were drinking, dancing, and
braying for two days. The hymn to the ass has been preserved; each
stanza ends with the burthen "Hez! Sire Ane, hez!" "Huzza! Seignior Ass,
Huzza!" On other occasions, they put burnt old shoes to fume in the
censers; ran about the church, leaping, singing, and dancing obscenely;
scattering ordure among the audience; playing at dice upon the altar!
while a _boy-bishop_, or a _pope of fools_, burlesqued the divine
service. Sometimes they disguised themselves in the skins of animals,
and pretending to be transformed into the animal they represented, it
became dangerous, or worse, to meet these abandoned fools. There was a
_precentor of fools_, who was shaved in public, during which he
entertained the populace with all the balderdash his genius could
invent. We had in Leicester, in 1415, what was called a _glutton-mass_,
during the five days of the festival of the Virgin Mary. The people rose
early to mass, during which they practised eating and drinking with the
most zealous velocity, and, as in France, drew from the corners of the
altar the rich puddings placed there.

So late as in 1645, a pupil of Gassendi, writing to his master, what he
himself witnessed at Aix on the feast of the Innocents, says, "I have
seen, in some monasteries in this province, extravagances solemnised,
which the pagans would not have practised. Neither the