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RECREATIONS 609
monkeys and bears were common shows (PI. 132 r). A bear^
ward (ursinarius) was a not unusual appendage to a nobleman's
household in the later middle ages and doubtless earlier; and
he appears to have been a person of some social position, for
when in 1485 Lord Stanley's bears were staying at Magdalen
College, Oxford, the ursarii dined with the fellows at the high
table. A few years later this college had a bear ofits own, the gift
ofthe king. A strange entry in the Magdalen accounts ofabout
this time records a payment to a college servant for looking
after quandam bestiam vocatam ly merumsytt (marmoset).
We have seen that the Church had been obliged to modify
its opposition to the prevalent forms ofentertainment. However
much the Church reformers might dislike these pastimes, they
found themselves in an embarrassing position, for the lower
clergy had their own occasions for jollity which provided an
outlet from the normal restraints of ecclesiastical discipline.
They had their feast of fools, festum stultorum, fatuorum, oifolo'
rum, generally centred on a cathedral and held on one of the
feasts following Christmas, usually the day of the Circunv
cision(i January) ortheEpiphany (6January). Bishop Grosse/
testein 1236 tried to it
suppress
at Lincoln on the ground that
it was 'replete with vanity and foul with voluptuosity', and two
years later the prohibition was lest repeated 'the house of
prayer should become a house of wantonness*. But these at'
tempts were not apparently altogether successful for at the end
of the fourteenth century when Archbishop Courtenay made
a visitation to Lincoln he was told that the vicars and other
clergy on the day of Circumcision dressed in secular garments
disturbed the divine office by their din, buffoonery, chattering,
and games, which they commonly call the Feast of Fools.
Details of the English celebrations are lacking; but if it was
anything like the similar feast in France, where it was firmly
entrenched, with its annual election ofa dominusfesti, a "king* or
'bishop* from among the canons or vicars (sometimes baptized
with three buckets of water), its procession to the church, its
account of the ceremony is given by Robert Plot, who witnessed it in 1680, in his
Natural History of Staffordshire.