From Fr Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints:
This is also the Octave of the Epiphany. The principal object of the devotion of the church on this day is the baptism of our Saviour by St. John in the Jordan. We learn from the great council of Oxford, in 1222,5 that it was then kept a holyday of the third class; on which all were obliged to hear mass, though they might work afterwards. In France and Germany all servile work was forbidden on it, by the capitulars of Lewis le Débonnaire.6 The emperor Theodosius II. forbids all civil courts and transactions during eight days before the festival of the Epiphany, and as many after it.
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