For over five hundred years, the city of Lille had held an annual procession dedicated to its divine protectress, Notre Dame de la Treille. In the procession, the city's corporate groups – the guilds with their emblems and images of patron saints, the religious confraternities with their relics, the clergy, the chapter of Saint-Pierre, the municipal magistrates, and the bailliage and gouvernance courts – wound their way through the city. Valets dressed as fools and madmen roamed among the guildmasters, snapping harmless horsehair whips to keep them in their assigned ranks. Seated on a float in the middle of the procession was a young girl dressed in white, representing the Virgin. For the townspeople, the procession was a time to eat, drink and make merry, and to drink again, much to the dismay of the clergy and delight of the local tax collectors. For many Lillois, the symbol of the procession could have been the Bacchus, who marched with the guild of tavernkeepers and carried a barrel of wine that was consumed and replenished with abandon. In 1767 the clergy insisted that the most scandalous abuses in the procession be suppressed in order to make the procession a purer, holier, and simpler ceremony, closer to its “primitive institution.” The procession's route was shortened, the valets and their foolery suppressed, and the drinking curtailed. These reforms accomplished, the tax collectors began to complain. To keep up receipts from the sale of beer and liquor during the festivities, the municipal magistrates began to sponsor games for the people after the procession.