<While hiding from the bailiffs in 1671 at Broad Chalk, Aubrey (see i. 52) set himself to compose a comedy descriptive of country life as he had seen it, abating nothing of its grossness, and concealing nothing of its immorality. The rude draft of this comedy is found in MS. Aubrey 21, written in the blank spaces and between the lines of a long legal document.

Although few of the scenes are sketched, and fewer completed, it is possible to form an idea of the scope and plot of the piece.

The jumbling together of all classes of society in the rude merriment of a country wake was designed to bring out the follies and vices of them all. A few gentlemen and ladies of the old school, of courtly manners and decent carriage, were brought in to set out by contrast the boorishness, the insolence, and the mad drunken bouts of Aubrey's contemporaries. A mixed company of sow-gelders, carters, dairy-maids, gypsies, were to give evidence, in dialogue and song, of the coarse talk and the vile ideas of the vulgar. And a still more disreputable rout of squires who had left their wives and taken up with cook-maids, and of heiresses who had run away with grooms, was to exemplify the degradation of the gentry. In several cases, over the names of his Dramatis Personae, Aubrey has jotted the names or initials of the real persons he was copying.

The plot was to have a double movement; on the one hand, the innocent loves of a boy and girl of gentle birth, living in disguise as shepherd and dairy-maid, the 'Lord and Lady of the Maypole,' and, on the other hand, the fortunes of an adulteress, pursued by her husband, following her paramour in page's attire, jealous of his attentions to other women, ending in murder all round—'Raynes[1356] comes and invades Sir Fastidious Overween, and is slayne by him; and then Sir Fastidious neglects her; she comes and stabbes him, and then herselfe.'

The scene, on the title-page, is laid, for a blind, at 'Aldford in Cheshire, by the river Dee, St. Peters day, 1669'; but in act i, scene 1, Aubrey, laying pretence aside, places it on 'Christian Malford green' in his own district in Wiltshire, near Kington St. Michael, Draycot Cerne, etc.

Taken as a whole, both in what is written out and in the anecdotes collected to be worked into the plot, the comedy affords a terrible picture of the corruption of Aubrey's county and times. It may be compared with the society pictures in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Two scenes, of the less offensive ones, may serve to give a faint idea of this curious piece of seventeenth century realism.>