Feast of Fools

Feast of Fools burlesque religious festival of the Middle Ages. It occurred during the Christmas and New Year's revels, on or near New Year's Day. In many places a Lord of Misrule ruled over the revels. In France and England the ceremonies were under the charge of the Boy-Bishop, a young man fitted out as a high clergyman. During the feast, lower clergymen and minor officials parodied the sacred rites and customs of the Church. A similar burlesque, the Feast of the Ass, celebrating the donkey on which Mary and the Child Jesus rode, was widespread in France. Such burlesques were generally put down by the 15th cent.

Feast of Fools, generic name for the New Year revels in European cathedrals and collegiate churches, when the minor clergy usurped the functions of their superiors and burlesqued the services of the Church. The practice may have arisen spontaneously, as an outlet for high spirits, or may be an echo of the Roman Saturnalia. It appears to have originated in France in about the 12th century, and from the beginning evidently included some form of crude drama. The proceedings opened with a procession headed by an elected ‘king’—in schools a boy bishop—riding on a donkey, a detail which was taken over by the liturgical drama for the scenes of Balaam's Ass, the Flight into Egypt, and perhaps Christ's Entry into Jerusalem. The Feast of Fools lingered on in France until the 16th century, by which time the festivities had moved out of the church, and was eventually absorbed into the merrymaking of the sociétés joyeuses; but in England, where it is known to have taken place at St Paul's in London as well as at Lincoln, Beverley, and Salisbury, it died out some time in the 14th century. Part of its functions, though without the burlesque church services, survived during the Christmas season at Court and in the colleges of the universities, the ‘king’ being replaced by an Abbot or Lord of Misrule; at the Inns of Court in London the custom of appointing a Christmas Lord of Misrule lingered on intermittently until the 1660s.

Fools, Feast of. A mock religious festival widely celebrated in the Middle Ages on or about 1 Jan., especially in France.