nking, singing, playing, making imaginary
kings, playing servants at table with their masters."

The advent of Christianity was impotent to arrest the annual scenes of
disorder; and, in some form or another--sometimes tolerated, sometimes
the object of the Church's anathema--the tradition held its own down
through the Dark Ages, and we meet with the substance of the Saturnalia,
during the centuries immediately preceding the Reformation, in the
burlesque festivals with which the rule of the Boy-Bishop has been often
identified. We shall see presently how far this judgment is correct. An
example will, no doubt, readily recur to the reader from a source to
which we owe so many impressions of the Middle Ages, some true, others
false or at least exaggerated--we mean the historical romances of Sir
Walter Scott. That writer has introduced into "The Abbot" an Abbot of
Unreason, and he explains in a note that "The Roman Catholic Church
connived at the frolics of the rude vulgar, who, in almost all Catholic
countries, enjoyed, or at least assumed, the privilege of making some
Lord of the Revels, who, under the name of the Abbot of Unreason, the
Boy-Bishop, or the President of Fools, occupied the churches, profaned
the holy places by a mock imitation of the sacred rites, and sang
indecent parodies of the hymns of the church." The last touch, at any
rate, may be safely challenged as untrue, and the whole picture has the
appearance of being largely overdrawn. This is certainly the case as
regards England, though there is evidence that on the Continent the
Boy-Bishop celebration was, at certain times and in certain places, not
free from objectionable features. In 1274 the Council of Salzburg was
moved to prohibit the "noxii ludi quos vulgaris eloquentia Episcopus
puerorum appellat" on the ground that they had produced great
enormities. Probably this sentence referred to the accessories, such as
immoral plays, but it is quite possible that the Boy-Bishop ceremonies
themselves had degenerated into a farce. As the _Rex Stultorum_
festival was prohibited at Beverly Minster in 1371, we must conclude
that similar extravagance and profanity had crept into Yuletide
observances in this country. The festival of the Boy-Bishop, however,
was conducted with a decency hardly to be expected in view of its
apparent associations. It would seem, indeed, to have been an impressive
and edifying function, and that reasonable exception can be taken to it