On St Nicholas’s Day a chorister was chosen as boy bishop and, with a boy dean and chapter, carried out the bishop’s offices until Holy Innocents’ Day. The custom was general in English cathedrals and many grammar schools, but Salisbury kept its fullest form, with the service printed in its processional. A boy who died in office was buried as a bishop, and a small effigy in bishop’s robes in the nave at Salisbury was long taken for his monument. Henry VIII abolished the custom in 1542, and several cathedrals have revived it in modern times.
The boy bishop
6 December · Salisbury Cathedral, Wiltshire
Still kept
The election of the Boy-bishop seems to have prevailed generally throughout the English cathedrals, and also in many of the grammar-schools
From Chambers's Book of Days, vol. 2, p. 665; Hone's Every-Day Book, vol. 1, cols. 1558-1560. Read the original
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