These passages provide an indication of how ceremonial and recreation were intermixed, and how they had underlying political functions. It was important for the town leaders to be seen participating in festival activities, while at the same time setting an example for decorous behaviour. Processions and worship were suitably dignified activities that helped to reassert political authority within the community, in part by imputing legitimacy to the town rulers by linking their earthly jurisdiction with Divine order. At the same time, they reinforced bonds within the ruling class. Unfortunately these passages reflect only the participation of Bristol officials in the celebrations, and say little of the way the community as a whole celebrated.

The official ceremonies associated with the festivals of St. Clement, patron saint of merchants and mariners, and St. Katherine, patron saint of weavers and (particularly) spinsters, were probably a product of the fifteenth century, when ceremonial had become very important in the preservation of harmony in a society that was, or had once been, egalitarian in theory, but by this time was clearly stratified socio-politically. The great Corpus Christi festival was the clearest expression of such symbolic ceremonies, but at Bristol November was an important time in the annual cycle of urban affairs, since towards the end of the month a great fleet would set sail for France carrying English cloth manufactures; Bristol's importance and prosperty relied heavily on the cloth export trade.

The procession and religious service on St. Katherine's day, a very popular festival and the high point of November, was followed by merry feasting and intinerant actors performing outside selected homes – a form of wassailing, it appears. Probably the play presented related to the legend of the saint's life; we hear of a play in honour of St. Katherine being performed elsewhere in England during the fifteenth century.

David Sacks (The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450-1700, University of California Press:1991) has interpreted the official activities preceding the festivals of St. Clements' and St. Katherine's as rituals of social unification. He argues that underlying symbolism demonstrated amical relations between the town authorities and the weavers, who were focused in the franchise called the Temple Fee not under jurisdiction of the authorities, while the subsequent visits by St. Katherine's players symbolized the powerful members of the community paying tribute to the less powerful, a reversal of the normal relationship in which rulers exacted payments from the ruled. The procession on the saint's day itself, by encompassing the independent franchise with the rest of the town, was to show the essential territorial cohesion of the town, he suggests.

St. Nicholas' day was another popular festival associated with various entertainments, prior to the more solemn period of fast that was Advent. Smith assumed that the bishop active on this day was in fact the boy-bishop, a character associated with misrule – a feature of the Christmas season. It was a custom in many places on St. Nicholas' day for a schoolboy or choirboy to be chosen and dressed in episcopal robes, then to proceed around a town blessing the townspeople and presiding at church ceremonies, sometimes with elements of parody or burlesque involved, although the Church authorities had suppressed much of this by Ricart's time. Bristol was evidently one of those places where this took place; an inventory of 1433 includes the boy-bishop's mitre and crozier, eight banners to be carried in his procession, and a white cloth hung before the statue of St. Nicholas (presumably also carried in the procession). The gambling activity of the town officials prior to the bishop's arrival would seem inappropriate behaviour (especially given the usual prohibition of gambling) except in the context of misrule.

The Christmas season as a whole provided a release mechanism for feasting, drinking and high spirits; Carnival, preceding Lent, was another season when misrule came into play. The authorities were anxious to keep Christmas revels from getting too far out of control. With many of the townspeople staying up late to attend midnight mass, there was greater concern that honest folk abroad in the dark identify themselves by carrying a light. However, a certain amount of tomfoolery was tolerated. By reversing the norms of society, misrule provided a temporary release for social tensions which, through dissipation, helped ensure compliance with those norms during the rest of the year and thereby it too contributed to unity and conformity within a community.