Note 1324 — Chapter XV · THE BOY BISHOP

At Mainz, not only the pueri, but also the diaconi and the sacerdotes, had their episcopus (Dürr, 71). On the other hand at Vienne the term used at all the feasts, of the triduum and on January 1 and 6, was rex (Pilot de Thorey, Usages, Fêtes et Coutumes en Dauphiné, i. 179). The Boy Bishops received, for their brief day, all the external marks of honour paid to real bishops. They are alleged to have occasionally enjoyed more solid privileges. Louvet (Hist. et Ant. de Beauvais, cited Rigollot, 142), says that at Beauvais the right of presentation to chapter benefices falling vacant on Innocents’ Day fell to the pueri. Jean Van der Muelen or Molanus (De Canonicis (1587), ii. 43) makes a similar statement as to Cambrai: ‘Immo personatus hic episcopus in quibusdam locis reditus, census et capones, annue percipit: alibi mitram habet, multis episcoporum mitris sumptuosiorem. In Cameracensi ecclesia visus est vacantem, in mense episcopi, praebendam, quasi iure ad se devoluto, conferre; quam collationem beneficii vere magnifici, reverendissimus praesul, cum puer grato animo, magistrum suum, bene de ecclesia meritum, nominasset, gratam et raram habuit.’ At Mainz lost tradition had it that if an Elector died during the tenure of office by a Boy Bishop, the revenues sede vacante would fall to him. Unfortunately the chapter and verse of history disprove this (Dürr, 67, 79). On the other hand it is certain that the Boy Bishops assumed the episcopal privilege of coinage. Rigollot, 52 sqq., describes and figures a long series of fifteenth-and sixteenth-century coins or medals mostly struck by ‘bishops’ of the various churches and monastic houses of Amiens. They are the more interesting, because some of them bear ‘fools’ as devices, and thus afford another proof of the relations between the feasts of Boys and Fools. Lille monetae of the sixteenth century are figured by Vanhende, Numismatique Lilloise, 256, and others from Laon by C. Hidé, in Bull. de la Soc. acad. de Laon, xiii. 126. Some of Rigollot’s specimens seem to have belonged, not to Boy Bishops, but to confréries, who struck them as ‘jetons de présence’ (Chartier, L’ancien Chapitre de N.-D. de Paris, 178); and probably this is also the origin of the pieces found at Bury St. Edmunds, which have nothing in their devices to connect them with a Boy Bishop (Rimbault, xxvi).