instituendis, in which he denounced the apocryphal nature of some among these new institutions. Pierre d’Ailly, in De Reformatione, deplores the ever-increasing number of churches, of festivals, of saints, of holy-days; he protests against the multitude of images and paintings, the prolixity of the Service, against the introduction of new hymns and prayers, against the augmentation of vigils and fasts. In short, what alarms him is the evil of superfluity.
There are too many religious orders, says d’Ailly, and this leads to a diversity of usages, to exclusiveness and rivalry, to pride and vanity. In particular he desired to impose restrictions on the mendicant orders, whose social utility he question : they live to the detriment of the inmates of leper houses and hospitals, and other really poor and wretched people, who are truly entitled to beg (ac aliis vere pauperibus et miserabilibus indigentibus quibus convenit jus et verus titulus mendicandi). Let the sellers of indulgences be banished from the Church, which they soil with their lies and make ridiculous. Convents are built on all sides, but sufficient funds are lacking. Where is this to lead?
Pierre d’Ailly does not question the holy and pious character of all these practices in themselves, he only deplores their endless multiplication; he sees the Church weighed down under the load of particulars.
Religious customs tended to multiply in an almost mechanical way. A special office was instituted for every detail of the worship of the Virgin Mary. There were particular masses, afterwards abolished by the Church, in honour of the piety of Mary, of her seven sorrows, of all her festivals taken collectively, of her sisters—the two other Marys—of the archangel Gabriel, of all the saints of our Lord’s genealogy. A curious example of this spontaneous accretion of religious usage is found in the weekly observance of Innocents’ Day. The 28th of December, the day of the massacre at Bethlehem, was taken to be ill-omened. This belief was the origin of a custom, widely spread during the fifteenth century, of considering as a black-letter day, all the year through, the day of the week on which the preceding Innocents’ Day fell. Consequently, there was one day in every week on which people abstained from setting out upon a journey and beginning a
