l. On the 1st of January money is
distributed to the populace; on the 2nd no more presents are given: it is
customary to stay at home playing dice, masters and slaves together. On
the 3rd there is racing; on the 4th the festivities begin to decline, but
they are not altogether over on the 5th.{18}

Another feature of the Kalends, recorded not in the pages of classical
writers but in ecclesiastical condemnations, was the custom of dressing
up in the hides of animals, in women's clothes, and in masks of various
kinds.{19} Dr. Tille{20} regards this as Italian in origin, but it
seems likely that it was a native custom in Greece, Gaul, Germany, and
other countries conquered by the Romans. In Greece the skin-clad mummers
may have belonged to the winter festivals of Dionysus supplanted by the
_Kalendae_.{21}

The Church's denunciations of pagan festal practices in the winter season
are mainly directed against the Kalends celebrations, and show into how
many regions the keeping of the feast had spread. Complaints of its
continued observance abound in the writings of churchmen and the decrees
of councils. In the second volume of his "Mediaeval Stage"{22} Mr.
Chambers has made an interesting collection of forty excerpts from such
denunciations, ranging in date from the fourth century to the eleventh,
and coming from Spain, Italy, Antioch, northern Africa, Constantinople,
Germany, England, and various districts of what is now France.

|170| As a specimen I may translate a passage describing at some length
the practices condemned. It is from a sermon often ascribed to St.
Augustine of Hippo, but probably composed in the sixth century, very
likely by Caesarius of Arles in southern Gaul:--

"On those days," says the preacher, speaking of the Kalends of
January, "the heathen, reversing the order of all things, dress
themselves up in indecent deformities.... These miserable men, and
what is worse, some who have been baptized, put on counterfeit forms
and monstrous faces, at which one should rather be ashamed and sad.
For what reasonable man would believe that any men in their senses
would by making a stag (_cervulum_) turn themselves into the
appearance of animals? Some are clothed in the hides of cattle;
others put on the heads of beasts, rejoicing and exulting that they
have so transformed themselves into the shapes of animals that they
no longer appear to be men.... How vile, further,