The Christians retained much of the ceremony and wantonness of the kalends of January, which for many ages was held as a festival, and celebrated by the clergy with great indecency, under the names of festum kalendarium, or hypodiaconorum, or statto-rum, that is, "the feast of fools;" sometimes also libertas de-

cembrica. The people met masked in the church, and in a ludicrous way proceeded to the election of a mock pope or bishop, who exercised a jurisdiction over them suitable to the festivity of the occasion. Fathers, councils, and popes, long laboured in vain to restrain this license, which prevailed even at the close of the fifteenth century.