[533] Tille, D. W. 301; G. Raynaud, in Études dédiées à Gaston Paris, 53; E. Schröder, Die Tänzer von Kölbigk, in Z. f. Kirchengeschichte, xvii. 94; G. Paris, in Journal des Savants (1899), 733.
[534] H. E. Reynolds, Wells Cathedral, 85 ‘cum ex choreis ludis et spectaculis et lapidum proiectionibus in praefata ecclesia et eius cemeteriis ac claustro dissentiones sanguinis effusiones et violentiae saepius oriantur et in hiis dicta Wellensis ecclesia multa dispendia patiatur.’
[535] Menestrier, Des Ballets anciens et modernes (1863), 4; on other French church dances, cf. Du Tilliot, 21; Barthélemy, iv. 447; Leber, ix. 420. The most famous are the pilota of Auxerre, which was accompanied with ball-play (cf. ch. vi) and the bergeretta of Besançon. Julian, Dict. of Hymn. 206, gives some English examples.
[536] Grove, 106. A full account of the ceremony at the feast of the Conception in 1901 is given in the Church Times for Jan. 17, 1902.
[537] Grove, 103; Bérenger-Féraud, iii. 430; Mélusine (1879), 39; N. and Q. for May 17, 1890. The dance is headed by the clergy, and proceeds to a traditional tune from the banks of the Sûre to the church, up sixty-two steps, along the north aisle, round the altar deasil, and down the south aisle. It is curious that until the seventeenth century only men took part in it. St. Willibrord is famous for curing nervous diseases, and the pilgrimage is done by way of vow for such cures. The local legend asserts that the ceremony had its origin in an eighth-century cattle-plague, which ceased through an invocation of St. Willibrord: it is a little hard on the saint, whose prohibition of dances at the church-door has just been quoted.
[538] Bérenger-Féraud, iii. 409. A similarly named saint, St. Martial, was formerly honoured in the same way. Every psalm on his day ended, not with the Gloria Patri, but with a dance, and the chant, ‘Saint-Marceau, pregas per nous, et nous epingaren per vous’ (Du Méril, La Com. 68).
[539] Cf. p. 26. There were ‘madinnis that dansit’ before James IV of Scotland at Forres, Elgin and Dernway in 1504, but nothing is said of songs (L. H. T. Accounts, ii. 463).
[540] Carm. Bur. 191:
Ibid. 195:
[541] W. Fitzstephen, Descriptio Londin. (Mat. for Hist. of Becket, R. S. iii. 11) ‘puellarum Cytherea ducit choros usque imminente luna, et pede libero pulsatur tellus.’
[542] Jeanroy, 102, 387; Guy, 504; Paris, Journal des Savants (1892), 407. M. Paris points out that dances, other than professional, first appear in the West after the fall of the Empire. The French terms for dancing—baller, danser, treschier, caroler—are not Latin. Caroler, however, he thinks to be the Greek χοραυλεῖν, ‘to accompany a dance with a flute.’ But the French carole was always accompanied, not with a flute, but with a sung chanson.
[543] Paris, loc. cit. 410; Jeanroy, 391. In Wace’s description of Arthur’s wedding, the women carolent and the men behourdent. Cf. Bartsch, Romanzen und Pastourellen, i. 13:
[544] On the return of Edward II and Isabella of France in 1308, the mayor and other dignitaries of London went ‘coram rege et regina karolantes’ (Chronicles of Edward I and Edward II, R. S. i. 152). On the birth of Prince Edward in 1312, they ‘menerent la karole’ in church and street (Riley, 107).
[545] Kögel, i. 1. 6.
[546] Mrs. Gomme, ii. 228; Haddon, 345.
[547] Cf. ch. vi on the motion deasil round the sacred object. It is curious that the modern round dances go withershins round a room. Grimm, i. 52, quotes Gregory the Great, Dial. iii. 28 on a Lombard sacrifice, ‘caput caprae, hoc ei, per circuitum currentes, carmine nefando dedicantes.’
[548] At Bradford-on-Avon, Wilts (which preserves its Anglo-Saxon church), and at South Petherton, Somerset, in both cases on Shrove Tuesday (Mrs. Gomme, ii. 230); cf. Vaux, 18. The church at Painswick, Gloucester, is danced round on wake-day (F. L. viii. 392). There is a group of games, in which the players wind and unwind in spirals round a centre. Such are Eller Tree, Wind up the Bush Faggot, and Bulliheisle. These Mrs. Gomme regards as survivals of the ritual dance round a sacred tree. Some obscure references in the rhymes used to ‘dumplings’ and ‘a bundle of rags’ perhaps connect themselves with the cereal cake and the rags hung on the tree for luck. In Cornwall such a game is played under the name of ‘Snail’s Creep’ at certain village feasts in June, and directed by young men with leafy branches.
[549] Du Méril, La Com. 72; Haddon, 346; Grove, 50, 81; Haigh, 14; N. W. Thomas, La Danse totémique en Europe, in Actes d. Cong. intern. d. Trad. pop. (1900).
[550] Plot, Hist. of Staffs. (1686); F. L. iv. 172; vii. 382 (with cuts of properties); Ditchfield, 139.
[551] The O. H. G. hîleih, originally meaning ‘sex-dance,’ comes to be ‘wedding.’ The root hi, like wini (cf. p. 170), has a sexual connotation (Pearson, ii. 132; Kögel, i. 1. 10).
[552] Coussemaker, Chants populaires des Flamands de France, 100:
[553] Frazer, i. 35; Dyer, 7; Northall, 233. A Lancashire song is sung ‘to draw you these cold winters away,’ and wishes ‘peace and plenty’ to the household. A favourite French May chanson is
If the quêteurs come on a churl, they have an ill-wishing variant. The following is characteristic of the French peasantry:
Often more practical tokens of revenge are shown. The Plough Monday ‘bullocks’ in some places consider themselves licensed to plough up the ground before a house where they have been rebuffed.’
[554] Mrs. Gomme, ii. 1, 399; Haddon, 343; Du Méril, La Com. 81. Amongst the jeux of the young Gargantua (Rabelais, i. 22) was one ‘à semer l’avoyne et au laboureur.’ This probably resembled the games of Oats and Beans and Barley, and Would you know how doth the Peasant? which exist in English, French, Catalonian, and Italian versions. On the mimetic character of these games, cf. ch. viii.
[555] Text from Harl. MS. 978 in H. E. Wooldridge, Oxford Hist. of Music, i. 326, with full account. The music, to which religious as well as the secular words are attached, is technically known as a rota or rondel. It is of the nature of polyphonic part-song, and of course more advanced than the typical mediaeval rondet can have been.
[556] On these songs in general, see Northall, 233; Martinengo-Cesaresco, 249; Cortet, 153; Tiersot, 191; Jeanroy, 88; Paris, J. des Savants (1891), 685, (1892), 155, 407.
[557] H. A. Wilson, Hist. of Magd. Coll. (1899), 50. Mr. Wilson discredits the tradition that the performance began as a mass for the obit of Henry VII. The hymn is printed in Dyer, 259; Ditchfield, 96. It has no relation to the summer festival, having been written in the seventeenth century by Thomas Smith and set by Benjamin Rogers as a grace. In other cases hymns have been attached to the village festivals. At Tissington the well-dressing,’ on Ascension Day includes a clerical procession in which ‘Rock of Ages’ and ‘A Living Stream’ are sung (Ditchfield, 187). A special ‘Rushbearers’ Hymn’ was written for the Grasmere Rushbearing in 1835, and a hymn for St. Oswald has been recently added (E. G. Fletcher, The Rushbearing, 13, 74).
[558] Dyer, 240, from Hertfordshire. There are many other versions; cf. Northall, 240.
[559] Kögel, i. 1. 32.
[560] Pertz, Leges, i. 68 ‘nullatenus ibi uuinileodos scribere vel mittere praesumat.’ Kögel, i. 1. 61: Goedeke, i. 11, quote other uses of the term from eighth-century glosses, e.g. ‘uuiniliod, cantilenas saeculares, psalmos vulgares, seculares, plebeios psalmos, cantica rustica et inepta.’ Winiliod is literally ‘love-song,’ from root wini (conn. with Venus). Kögel traces an earlier term O. H. G. winileih, A.-S. winelâc = hîleih. On the erotic motive in savage dances, cf. Grosse, 165, 172; Hirn, 229.
[561] Romania, vii. 61; Trad. Pop. i. 98. Mr. Swinburne has adapted the idea of this poem in A Match (Poems and Ballads, 1st Series, 116).
[562] Romania, ix. 568.
[563] K. Bartsch, Chrest. Prov. 111. A similar chanson is in G. Raynaud, Motets, i. 151, and another is described in the roman of Flamenca (ed. P. Meyer), 3244. It ends
[564] Trimousette, from trî mâ câ, an unexplained burden in some of the French maierolles.
[565] Guy, 503.
[566] Tiersot, Robin et Marion; Guy, 506. See the refrain in Bartsch, 197, 295; Raynaud, Rec. de Motets, i. 227.
[567] Langlois, Robin et Marion: Romania, xxiv. 437; H. Guy, Adan de la Hale, 177; J. Tiersot, Sur le Jeu de Robin et Marion (1897); Petit de Julleville, La Comédie, 27; Rep. Com. 21, 324. A jeu of Robin et Marion is recorded also as played at Angers in 1392, but there is no proof that this was Adan de la Hale’s play, or a drama at all. There were folk going ‘desguiziez, à un jeu que l’en dit Robin et Marion, ainsi qu’il est accoutumé de fere, chacun an, en les foiries de Penthecouste’ (Guy, 197). The best editions of Robin et Marion are those by E. Langlois (1896), and by Bartsch in La Langue et la Littérature françaises (1887), col. 523. E. de Coussemaker, Œuvres de Adam de la Halle (1872), 347, gives the music, and A. Rambeau, Die dem Trouvère Adam de la Halle zugeschriebenen Dramen (1886), facsimiles the text. On Adan de la Hale’s earlier sottie of La Feuillée, see ch. xvi.
[568] Thomas Wright, Lyrical Poems of the Reign of Edward I (Percy Soc.).
[569] Cf. ch. xvii.
[570] The May-game is probably intended by the ‘Whitsun pastorals’ of Winter’s Tale, iv. 4. 134, and the ‘pageants of delight’ at Pentecost, where a boy ‘trimmed in Madam Julias gown’ played ‘the woman’s part’ (i. e. Maid Marian) of Two Gentlemen of Verona, iv. 4. 163. Cf. also W. Warner, Albion’s England, v. 25:
[571] Flores Historiarum (R. S.), iii. 130 ‘aestimo quod rex aestivalis sis; forsitan hyemalis non eris.’
[572] Cf. Appendix E.
[573] ‘King-play’ at Reading (Reading St. Giles Accounts in Brand-Hazlitt, i. 157; Kerry, Hist. of St. Lawrence, Reading, 226).
[574] ‘King’s revel’ at Croscombe, Somerset (Churchwardens’ Accounts in Hobhouse, 3).
[575] ‘King’s game’ at Leicester (Kelly, 68) and ‘King-game’ at Kingston (Lysons, Environs of London, i. 225). On the other hand the King-game in church at Hascombe in 1578 (Representations, s. v. Hascombe), was probably a miracle-play of the Magi or Three Kings of Cologne. This belongs to Twelfth night (cf. ch. xix), but curiously the accounts of St. Lawrence, Reading, contain a payment for the ‘Kyngs of Colen’ on May day, 1498 (Kerry, loc. cit.).
[576] Cf. ch. xvii. Local ‘lords of misrule’ in the summer occur at Montacute in 1447-8 (Hobhouse, 183 ‘in expensis Regis de Montagu apud Tyntenhull existentis tempore aestivali’), at Meriden in 1565 (Sharpe, 209), at Melton Mowbray in 1558 (Kelly, 65), at Tombland, near Norwich (Norfolk Archaeology, iii. 7; xi. 345), at Broseley, near Much Wenlock, as late as 1652 (Burne-Jackson, 480). See the attack on them in Stubbes, i. 146. The term ‘lord of misrule’ seems to have been borrowed from Christmas (ch. xvii). It does not appear whether the lords of misrule of Old Romney in 1525 (Archaeologia Cantiana, xiii. 216) and Braintree in 1531 (Pearson, ii. 413) were in winter or summer.
[577] Owen and Blakeway, i. 331; Jackson and Burne, 480 (cf. Appendix E). Miss Burne suggests several possible derivations of the name; from mar ‘make mischief,’ from Mardoll or Marwell (St. Mary’s Well), streets in Shrewsbury, or from Muryvale or Meryvalle, a local hamlet. But the form ‘Mayvoll’ seems to point to ‘Maypole.’
[578] Representations, s. v. Aberdeen. Here the lord of the summer feast seems to have acted also as presenter of the Corpus Christi plays.
[579] Cf. ch. xvii.
[580] Batman, Golden Books of the Leaden Gods (1577), f. 30. The Pope is said to be carried on the backs of four deacons, ‘after the maner of carying whytepot queenes in Western May games.’ A ‘whitepot’ is a kind of custard.
[581] Such phrases occur as ‘the May-play called Robyn Hod’ (Kerry, Hist. of St. Lawrence, Reading, 226, s. a. 1502), ‘Robin Hood and May game’ and Kynggam and Robyn Hode’ (Kingston Accounts, 1505-36, in Lysons, Environs of London, i. 225). The accounts of St. Helen’s, Abingdon, in 1566, have an entry ‘for setting up Robin Hood’s bower’ (Brand-Hazlitt, i. 144). It is noticeable that from 1553 Robin Hood succeeds the Abbot of Mayvole in the May-game at Shrewsbury (Appendix E). Similarly, in an Aberdeen order of 1508 we find ‘Robert Huyid and Litile Johne, quhilk was callit, in yers bipast, Abbat and Prior of Bonacord’ (Representations, s. v. Aberdeen). Robin Hood seems, therefore, to have come rather late into the May-games, but to have enjoyed a widening popularity.
[582] The material for the study of the Robin Hood legend is gathered together by S. Lee in D. N. B. s. v. Hood; Child, Popular Ballads, v. 39; Ritson, Robin Hood (1832); J. M. Gutch, Robin Hood (1847). Prof. Child gives a critical edition of all the ballads.
[583] Piers Plowman, B-text, passus v. 401.
[584] Fabian, Chronicle, 687, records in 1502 the capture of ‘a felowe whych hadde renewed many of Robin Hode’s pagentes, which named himselfe Greneleef.’
[585] Cf. p. 177.
[586] Kühn, in Haupt’s Zeitschrift, v. 481.
[587] Ramsay, F. E. i. 168.
[588] In the Nottingham Hall-books (Hist. MSS. i. 105), the same locality seems to be described in 1548 as ‘Robyn Wood’s Well,’ and in 1597 as ‘Robyn Hood’s Well.’ Robin Hood is traditionally clad in green. If he is mythological at all, may he not be a form of the ‘wild-man’ or ‘wood-woz’ of certain spring dramatic ceremonies, and the ‘Green Knight’ of romance? Cf. ch. ix.
[589] The earliest mention of her is (†1500) in A. Barclay, Eclogue, 5, ‘some may fit of Maide Marian or else of Robin Hood.’
[590] Hist. MSS. i. 107, from Convocation Book, ‘pecuniae ecclesiae ac communitatis Welliae ... videlicet, provenientes ante hoc tempus de Robynhode, puellis tripudiantibus, communi cervisia ecclesiae, et huiusmodi.’
[591] The accounts of Croscombe, Somerset, contain yearly entries of receipts from ‘Roben Hod’s recones’ from 1476 to 1510, and again in 1525 (Hobhouse, 1 sqq.). At Melton Mowbray the amount raised by the ‘lord’ was set aside for mending the highways (Kelly, 65).
[592] Lysons, Environs, i. 225. Mention is made of ‘Robin Hood,’ ‘the Lady,’ ‘Maid Marion,’ ‘Little John,’ ‘the Frere,’ ‘the Fool,’ ‘the Dysard,’ ‘the Morris-dance.’
[593] Archaeologia Cantiana, xiii. 216.
[594] C. Kerry, History of St. Lawrence, Reading, 226. ‘Made Maryon,’ ‘the tree’ and ‘the morris-dance,’ are mentioned.
[595] L. H. T. Accounts, ii. 377.
[596] Stowe, Survey (1598), 38. He is speaking mainly of the period before 1517, when there was a riot on ‘Black’ May-day, and afterwards the May-games were not ‘so freely used as before.’
[597] Appendix E (vi).
[598] Cf. Representations.
[599] Bower (†1437), Scotichronicon (ed. Hearne), iii. 774 ‘ille famosissimus sicarius Robertus Hode et Litill-Iohanne cum eorum complicibus, de quibus stolidum vulgus hianter in comoediis et tragoediis prurienter festum faciunt, et, prae ceteris romanciis, mimos et bardanos cantitare delectantur.’ On the ambiguity of ‘comoediae’ and ‘tragoediae’ in the fifteenth century, cf. ch. xxv.
[600] Gairdner, Paston Letters, iii. 89; Child, v. 90; ‘W. Woode, whyche promysed ... he wold never goo ffro me, and ther uppon I have kepyd hym thys iij yer to pleye Seynt Jorge and Robyn Hod and the Shryff off Nottyngham, and now, when I wolde have good horse, he is goon into Bernysdale, and I withowt a keeper.’ The Northumberland Household Book, 60, makes provision for ‘liveries for Robin Hood’ in the Earl’s household.
[601] Printed by Child, v. 90; Manly, i. 279. The MS. of the fragment probably dates before 1475.
[602] Printed by Child, v. 114, 127; Manly, i. 281, 285. They were originally printed as one play by Copland (†1550).
[603] Printed in Dodsley-Hazlitt, vol. viii. These plays were written for Henslowe about February 1598. In November Chettle ‘mended Roben hood for the corte’ (Henslowe’s Diary, 118-20, 139). At Christmas 1600, Henslowe had another play of ‘Roben hoodes penerths’ by William Haughton (Diary, 174-5). An earlier ‘pastoral pleasant comedie of Robin Hood and Little John’ was entered on the Stationers’ Registers on May 18, 1594. These two are lost, as is The May Lord which Jonson wrote (Conversations with Drummond, 27). Robin Hood also appears in Peele’s Edward I (†1590), and the anonymous Look About You (1600), and is the hero of Greene’s George a Greene the Pinner of Wakefield (†1593). Anthony Munday introduced him again into his pageant of Metropolis Coronata (1615), and a comedy of Robin Hood and his Crew of Soldiers, acted at Nottingham on the day of the coronation of Charles II, was published in 1661. On all these plays, cf. F. E. Schelling, The English Chronicle Play, 156.
[604] Furnivall, Robert Laneham’s Letter, clxiii. Chaucer, Rom. of Rose, 7455, has ‘the daunce Joly Robin,’ but this is from his French original ‘li biaus Robins.’
[605] Cf. p. 176.
[606] Dyer, 278; Drake, 86; Brand-Ellis, i. 157; Cutts, Parish Priests, 317; Archaeologia, xii. 11; Stubbes, i. 150; F. L. x. 350. At an ‘ale’ a cask of home-brewed was broached for sale in the church or church-house, and the profits went to some public object; at a church-ale to the parish, at a clerk-ale to the clerk, at a bride-ale or bridal to the bride, at a bid-ale to some poor man in trouble. A love-ale was probably merely social.
[607] At Reading in 1557 (C. Kerry, Hist. of St. Lawrence, Reading, 226).
[608] At Tintinhull in 1513 (Hobhouse, 200, ‘Robine Hood’s All’).
[609] Brand-Ellis, i. 157; Dyer, 278. A carving on the church of St. John’s, Chichester, represents a Whitsun-ale, with a ‘lord’ and ‘lady.’
[610] Cf. p. 141.
[611] At Ashton-under-Lyne, from 1422 to a recent date (Dyer, 181). ‘Gyst’ appears to be either ‘gist’ (gîte) ‘right of pasturage’ or a corruption of ‘guising’; cf. ch. xvii.
[612] Cf. p. 91. On Scot-ale, cf. Ducange, s. v. Scotallum; Archaeologia, xii. 11; H. T. Riley, Munimenta Gildhallae Londin. (R. S.), ii. 760. The term first appears as the name of a tax, as in a Northampton charter of 1189 (Markham-Cox, Northampton Borough Records, i. 26) ‘concessimus quod sint quieti de ... Brudtol et de Childwite et de hieresgiue et de Scottale, ita quod Prepositus Northamptonie ut aliquis alius Ballivus scottale non faciat’; cf. the thirteenth-century examples quoted by Ducange. The Council of Lambeth (1206), c. 2, clearly defines the term as ‘communes potationes,’ and the primary sense is therefore probably that of an ale at which a scot or tax is raised.
[613] Malory, Morte d’ Arthur, xix. 1. 2.
[614] Hall, 515, 520, 582; Brewer, Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, ii. 1504. In 1510, Henry and his courtiers visited the queen’s chamber in the guise of Robin Hood and his men on the inappropriate date of January 18. In Scotland, about the same time, Dunbar wrote a ‘cry’ for a maying with Robin Hood; cf. Texts, s. v. Dunbar.
[615] Latimer, Sermon vi before Edw. VI (1549, ed. Arber, 173). Perhaps the town was Melton Mowbray, where Robin Hood was very popular, and where Latimer is shown by the churchwardens’ accounts to have preached several years later in 1553 (Kelly, 67).
[616] Machyn, 20.
[617] Ibid. 89, 137, 196, 201, 283, 373. In 1559, e. g. ‘the xxiiij of June ther was a May-game ... and Sant John Sacerys, with a gyant, and drumes and gunes [and the] ix wordes (worthies), with spechys, and a goodly pagant with a quen ... and dyvers odur, with spechys; and then Sant Gorge and the dragon, the mores dansse, and after Robyn Hode and lytyll John, and M[aid Marian] and frere Tuke, and they had spechys round a-bout London.’
[618] ‘Mr. Tomkys publicke prechar’ in Shrewsbury induced the bailiffs to ‘reform’ May-poles in 1588, and in 1591 some apprentices were committed for disobeying the order. A judicial decision was, however, given in favour of the ‘tree’ (Burne-Jackson, 358; Hibbert, English Craft-Gilds, 121). In London the Cornhill May-pole, which gave its name to St. Andrew Undershaft, was destroyed by persuasion of a preacher as early as 1549 (Dyer, 248); cf. also Stubbes, i. 306, and Morrison’s advice to Henry VIII quoted in ch. xxv.
[619] Archbishop Grindal’s Visitation Articles of 1576 (Remains, Parker Soc. 175), ‘whether the minister and churchwardens have suffered any lords of misrule or summer lords or ladies, or any disguised persons, or others, in Christmas or at May-games, or any morris-dancers, or at any other times, to come unreverently into the church or churchyard, and there to dance, or play any unseemly parts, with scoffs, jests, wanton gestures, or ribald talk, namely in the time of Common Prayer.’ Similarly worded Injunctions for Norwich (1569), York (1571), Lichfield (1584), London (1601) and Oxford (1619) are quoted in the Second Report of the Ritual Commission; cf. the eighty-eighth Canon of 1604. It is true that the Visitation Articles for St. Mary’s, Shrewsbury, in 1584 inquire more generally ‘whether there have been any lords of mysrule, or somer lords or ladies, or any disguised persons, as morice dancers, maskers, or mum’ers, or such lyke, within the parishe, ether in the nativititide or in som’er, or at any other tyme, and what be their names’; but this church was a ‘peculiar’ and its ‘official’ the Puritan Tomkys mentioned in the last note (Owen and Blakeway, i. 333; Burne-Jackson, 481).
[620] Stafford, 16.
[621] Stubbes, i. 146; cf. the further quotations and references there given in the notes.
[622] 6 Mary, cap. 61.
[623] Child, v. 45; cf. Representations, s.v. Aberdeen, on the breaches of the statute there in 1562 and 1565.
[624] Dyer, 228; Drake, 85. At Cerne Abbas, Dorset, the May-pole was cut down in 1635 and made into a town ladder (F. L. x. 481).
[625] Grimm, ii. 784; Kleinere Schriften, v. 281; Pearson, ii. 281.
[626] Frazer, ii. 82; Grant Allen, 293, 315; Grimm, ii. 764; Pearson, ii. 283.
[627] Frazer, ii. 86; Martinengo-Cesaresco, 267. Cf. the use of the bladder of blood in the St. Thomas procession at Canterbury (Representations, s. v.).
[628] Frazer, iii. 70. Amongst such customs are the expulsion of Satan on New Year’s day by the Finns, the expulsion of Kore at Easter in Albania, the expulsion of witches on March 1 in Calabria, and on May 1 in the Tyrol, the frightening of the wood-sprites Strudeli and Strätteli on Twelfth night at Brunnen in Switzerland. Such ceremonies are often accompanied with a horrible noise of horns, cleavers and the like. Horns are also used at Oxford (Dyer, 261) and elsewhere on May 1, and I have heard it said that the object of the Oxford custom is to drive away evil spirits. Similar discords are de rigueur at Skimmington Ridings. I very much doubt whether they are anything but a degenerate survival of a barbaric type of music.
[629] Frazer, iii. 121.
[630] Tylor, Anthropology, 382.
[631] Caspari, 10 ‘qui in mense februario hibernum credit expellere ... non christianus, sed gentilis est.’
[632] Frazer, ii. 91.
[633] Frazer, ii. 60.
[634] Sometimes the Pfingstl is called a ‘wild man.’ Two ‘myghty woordwossys [cf. p. 392] or wyld men’ appeared in a revel at the court of Henry VIII in 1513 (Revels Account in Brewer, ii. 1499), and similar figures are not uncommon in the sixteenth-century masques and entertainments.