The burlesque ritual which characterized the Feast of Fools throughout the middle ages was now at its height. A young sub-deacon was elected bishop, vested in the episcopal insignia (except the mitre) and conducted by his fellows to the sanctuary. A mock mass was begun, during which the lections were read cum farsia, obscene songs were sung and dances performed, cakes and sausages eaten at the altar, and cards and dice played upon it.
This burlesquing of things universally held sacred, though condemned by serious-minded theologians, conveyed to the child-like popular mind of the middle ages no suggestion of contempt, though when belief in the doctrines and rites of the medieval Church was shaken it became a ready instrument in the hands of those who sought to destroy them. Of this kind of retribution Scott in The Abbot gives a vivid picture, the Protestants interrupting the mass celebrated by the trembling remnant of the monks in the ruined abbey church, and insisting on substituting the traditional Feast of Fools.
This naive temper of the middle ages is nowhere more conspicuously displayed than in the Feast of the Ass, which under various forms was celebrated in a large number of churches throughout the West. The ass had been introduced into the ritual of the church in the 9th century, representing either Balaam’s ass, that which stood with the ox beside the manger at Bethlehem, that which carried the Holy Family into Egypt, or that on which Christ rode in triumph into Jerusalem. Often the ass was a mere incident in the Feast of Fools; but sometimes he was the occasion of a special festival, ridiculous enough to modern notions, but by no means intended in an irreverent spirit. The three most notable celebrations of the Feast of the Ass were at Rouen, Beauvais and Sens. At Rouen the feast was celebrated on Christmas Day, and was intended to represent the times before the coming of Christ. The service opened with a procession of Old Testament characters, prophets, patriarchs and kings, together with heathen prophets, including Virgil, the chief figure being Balaam on his ass. The ass was a hollow wooden effigy, within which a priest capered and uttered prophecies. The procession was followed, inside the church, by a curious combination of ritual office and mystery play, the text of which, according to the Ordo processionis asinorum secundum Rothomagensem usum, is given in Du Cange.
Far more singular was the celebration at Beauvais, which was held on the 14th of January, and represented the flight into Egypt. A richly caparisoned ass, on which was seated the prettiest girl in the town holding in her arms a baby or a large doll, was escorted with much pomp from the cathedral to the church of St Étienne. There the procession was received by the priests, who led the ass and its burden to the sanctuary. Mass was then sung; but instead of the ordinary responses to the Introit, Kyrie, Gloria, &c., the congregation chanted “Hinham” (Hee-haw) three times. The rubric of the mass for this feast actually runs: In fine Missae Sacerdos versus ad populum vice, Ite missa est, Hinhannabit: populus vero vice, Deo Gratias, ter respondebit Hinham, Hinham, Hinham (At the close of the mass the priest turning to the people instead of saying, Ite missa est, shall bray thrice: the people, instead of Deo gratias, shall thrice respond Hee-haw, Hee-haw, Hee-haw).
At Sens the Feast of the Ass was associated with the Feast of Fools, celebrated at Vespers on the Feast of Circumcision. The clergy went in procession to the west door of the church, where two canons received the ass, amid joyous chants, and led it to the precentor’s table. Bizarre vespers followed, sung falsetto and consisting of a medley of extracts from all the vespers of the year. Between the lessons the ass was solemnly fed, and at the conclusion of the service was led by the precentor out into the square before the church (conductus ad ludos); water was poured on the precentor’s head, and the ass became the centre of burlesque ceremonies, dancing and buffoonery being carried on far into the night, while the clergy and the serious-minded retired to matins and bed.
Various efforts were made during the middle ages to abolish the Feast of Fools. Thus in 1198 the chapter of Paris suppressed its more obvious indecencies; in 1210 Pope Innocent III. forbade the feasts of priests, deacons and sub-deacons altogether; and in 1246 Innocent IV. threatened those who disobeyed this prohibition with excommunication. How little effect this had, however, is shown by the fact that in 1265 Odo, archbishop of Sens, could do no more than prohibit the obscene excesses of the feast, without abolishing the feast itself; that in 1444 the university of Paris, at the request of certain bishops, addressed a letter condemning it to all cathedral chapters; and that King Charles VII. found it necessary to order all masters in theology to forbid it in collegiate churches. The festival was, in fact, too popular to succumb to these efforts, and it survived throughout Europe till the Reformation, and even later in France; for in 1645 Mathurin de Neuré complains in a letter to Pierre Gassendi of the monstrous fooleries which yearly on Innocents’ Day took place in the monastery of the Cordeliers at Antibes. “Never did pagans,” he writes, “solemnize with such extravagance their superstitious festivals as do they.... The lay-brothers, the cabbage-cutters, those who work in the kitchen ... occupy the places of the clergy in the church. They don the sacerdotal garments, reverse side out. They hold in their hands books turned upside down, and pretend to read through spectacles in which for glass have been substituted bits of orange-peel.”
See B. Picart, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples (1723); du Tilliot, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la fête des Fous (Lausanne, 1741); Aimé Cherest, Nouvelles recherches sur la fête des Innocents et la fête des Fous dans plusieurs églises et notamment dans celle de Sens (Paris, 1853); Schneegans in Müller’s Zeitschrift für deutsche Kulturgeschichte (1858); H. Böhmer, art. “Narrenfest” in Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklop. (ed. 1903); Du Cange, Glossarium (ed. 1884), s.v. “Festum Asinorum.”
FOOLSCAP, the cap, usually of conical shape, with a cockscomb
running up the centre of the back, and with bells attached, worn
by jesters and fools (see Fool); also a conical cap worn by
dunces. The name is given to a size of writing or printing paper,
varying in size from 12 × 15 in. to 17 × 1312 in. (see Paper). The
name is derived from the use of a “fool’s cap” as a watermark.
A German example of the watermark dating from 1479 was
exhibited in the Caxton Exhibition (1877). The New English
Dictionary finds no trustworthy evidence for the introduction of
the watermark by a German, Sir John Spielmann, at his paper-mill
at Dartford in 1580, and states that there is no truth in the
familiar story that the Rump Parliament substituted a fool’s cap
for the royal arms as a watermark on the paper used for the
journals of parliament.
FOOL’S PARSLEY, in botany, the popular name for Aethusa
Cynapium, a member of the family Umbelliferae, and a common
weed in cultivated ground. It is an annual herb, with a fusiform
root and a smooth hollow branched stem 1 to 2 ft. high, with
much divided (ternately pinnate) smooth leaves and small compound
umbels of small irregular white flowers. The plant has a
nauseous smell, and, like other members of the order (e.g. hemlock,
water-dropwort), is poisonous.
FOOT, the lower part of the leg, in vertebrate animals consisting
of tarsus, metatarsus and phalanges, on which the body rests
when in an upright position, standing or moving (see Anatomy:
Superficial and Artistic; and Skeleton: Appendicular). The
word is also applied to such parts of invertebrate animals as serve
as a foot, either for movement or attachment to a surface.
“Foot” is a word common in various forms to Indo-European
languages, Dutch, voet, Ger. Fuss, Dan. fod, &c. The Aryan root
is pod-, which appears in Sans. pūd, Gr. ποῦς, ποδός and Lat.
pes, pedis. From the resemblance to the foot, in regard to its
position, as the base of anything, or as the lowest member of the
body, or in regard to its function of movement, the word is
applied to the lowest part of a hill or mountain, the plate of a
sewing-machine which holds the material in position, to the part
of an organ pipe below the mouth, and the like. In printing the
bottom of a type is divided by a groove into two portions known
as “feet.” Probably referring to the beating of the rhythm
with the foot in dancing, the Gr. ποῦς and Lat. pes were applied in
prosody to a grouping of syllables, one of which is stressed,
forming the division of a verse. “Foot,” i.e. foot-soldier, was
