FESTIVAL PLAY
[_Bibliographical Note._--A systematic revision of J. Strutt,
_The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England_ (1801,
ed. W. Hone, 1830), is, as in the case of Brand’s book, much
needed. On the psychology of play should be consulted K. Groos,
_Die Spiele der Thiere_ (1896, transl. 1898), and _Die Spiele
der Menschen_ (1899, transl. 1901). Various anthropological
aspects of play are discussed by A. C. Haddon, _The Study of
Man_ (1898), and the elaborate dictionary of _The Traditional
Games of England, Scotland and Ireland_ by Mrs. A. B. Gomme
(1894-8) may be supplemented from W. W. Newell, _Games and Songs
of American Children_ (1884), H. C. Bolton, _The Counting-Out
Rhymes of Children_ (1888), E. W. B. Nicholson, _Golspie_ (1897),
and R. C. Maclagan, _The Games and Diversions of Argyleshire_
(F.L.S. 1901). The _charivari_ is treated by C. R. B. Barrett,
_Riding Skimmington and Riding the Stang_ in the _Journal of the
British Archaeological Association_, N. S. i. 58, and C. Noirot,
_L’Origine des Masques_ (1609), reprinted with illustrative
matter by C. Leber, _Dissertations relatives à l’Histoire de
France_, vol. ix. The account of the Coventry Hox Tuesday Play
given in _Robert Laneham’s Letter_ (1575) will be found in
Appendix H.]
The charms, the prayer, the sacrifice, make up that side of the
agricultural festival which may properly be regarded as cult: they do
not make up the whole of it. It is natural to ask whether, side by side
with the observances of a natural religion, there were any of a more
spiritual type; whether the village gods of our Keltic and Teutonic
ancestors were approached on festival occasions solely as the givers of
the good things of earth, or whether there was also any recognition of
the higher character which in time they came to have as the guardians
of morality, such as we can trace alike in the ritual of Eleusis and
in the tribal mysteries of some existing savage peoples. It is not
improbable that this was so; but it may be doubted whether there is
much available evidence on the matter, and, in any case, it cannot be
gone into here[484]. There is, however, a third element of the village
festival which does demand consideration, and that is the element
of play. The day of sacrifice was also a day of cessation from the
ordinary toil of the fields, a holiday as well as a holy day. Sacred
and secular met in the amorous encounters smiled upon by the liberal
wood-goddess, and in the sacramental banquet with its collops of flesh
and spilth of ale and mead. But the experience of any bank holiday
will show that, for those who labour, the suspension of their ordinary
avocations does not mean quiescence. When the blood is heated with love
and liquor, the nervous energies habitually devoted to wielding the
goad and guiding the plough must find vent in new and for the nonce
unprofitable activities. But such activities, self-sufficing, and
primarily at least serving no end beyond themselves, are, from pushpin
to poetry, exactly what is meant by play[485].
The instinct of play found a foothold at the village feast in the
débris which ritual, in its gradual transformation, left behind. It has
already been noted as a constant feature in the history of institutions
that a survival does not always remain merely a survival; it may be its
destiny, when it is emptied of its first significance, to be taken up
into a different order of ideas, and to receive a new lease of vitality
under a fresh interpretation. Sacrifice ceases to be sacrament and
becomes oblation. Dipping and smoking customs, originally magical, grow
to be regarded as modes of sacrificial death. Other such waifs of the
past become the inheritance of play. As the old conception of sacrifice
passed into the new one, the subsidiary rites, through which the
sacramental influence had of old been distributed over the worshippers
and their fields, although by no means disused, lost their primitive
meaning. Similarly, when human sacrifice was abolished, that too left
traces of itself, only imperfectly intelligible, in mock or symbolical
deaths, or in the election of the temporary king. Thus, even before
Christianity antiquated the whole structure of the village festivals,
there were individual practices kept alive only by the conservatism of
tradition, and available as material for the play instinct. These find
room in the festivals side by side with other customs which the same
instinct not only preserved but initiated. Of course, the antithesis
between play and cult must not be pushed too far. The peasant mind is
tenacious of acts and forgetful of explanations; and the chapters to
come will afford examples of practices which, though they began in
play, came in time to have a serious significance of quasi-ritual, and
to share in the popular imagination the prestige as fertility charms
of the older ceremonies of worship with which they were associated.
The _ludi_ to be immediately discussed, however, present themselves
in the main as sheer play. Several of them have broken loose from the
festivals altogether, or, if they still acknowledge their origin by
making a special appearance on some fixed day, are also at the service
of ordinary amusement, whenever the leisure or the whim of youth may so
suggest.
To begin with, it is possible that athletic sports and horse-racing are
largely an outcome of sacrificial festivals. Like the Greeks around
the pyre of Patroclus, the Teutons celebrated games at the tombs of
their dead chieftains[486]. But games were a feature of seasonal,
no less than funeral feasts. It will be remembered that the council
of Clovesho took pains to forbid the keeping of the Rogation days
with horse-races. A bit of wrestling or a bout of quarter-staff is
still _de rigueur_ at many a wake or rushbearing, while in parts of
Germany the winner of a race or of a shooting-match at the popinjay
is entitled to light the festival fire, or to hold the desired office
of May-king[487]. The reforming bishops of the thirteenth century
include public wrestling-bouts and contests for prizes amongst the
_ludi_ whose performance they condemn; and they lay particular stress
upon a custom described as _arietum super ligna et rotas elevationes_.
The object of these ‘ram-raisings’ seems to be explained by the fact
that in the days of Chaucer a ram was the traditional reward proposed
for a successful wrestler[488]; and this perhaps enables us to push
the connexion with the sacrificial rite a little further. I would
suggest that the original object of the man who wrestled for a ram, or
climbed a greasy pole for a leg of mutton, or shot for a popinjay, was
to win a sacrificial victim or a capital portion thereof, which buried
in his field might bring him abundant crops. The orderly competition
doubtless evolved itself from such an indiscriminate scrimmage for the
fertilizing fragments as marks the rites of the earth-goddess in the
Indian village feast[489]. Tug-of-war would seem to be capable of a
similar explanation, though here the desired object is not a portion
of the victim, but rather a straw rope made out of the corn divinity
itself in the form of the harvest-May[490]. An even closer analogy
with the Indian rite is afforded by such games as hockey and football.
The ball is nothing else than the head of the sacrificial beast, and
it is the endeavour of each player to get it into his own possession,
or, if sides are taken, to get it over a particular boundary[491].
Originally, of course, this was the player’s own boundary; it has come
to be regarded as that of his opponents; but this inversion of the
point of view is not one on which much stress can be laid. In proof
of this theory it may be pointed out that in many places football is
still played, traditionally, on certain days of the year. The most
notable example is perhaps at Dorking, where the annual Shrove Tuesday
scrimmage in the streets of the town and the annual efforts of the
local authorities to suppress it furnish their regular paragraph to the
newspapers. There are several others, in most of which, as at Dorking,
the contest is between two wards or districts of the town[492]. This
feature is repeated in the Shrove Tuesday tug-of-war at Ludlow, and
in annual faction-fights elsewhere[493]. It is probably due to that
συνοικισμός of village communities by which towns often came into
being. Here and there, moreover, there are to be found rude forms of
football in which the primitive character of the proceeding is far more
evident than in the sophisticated game. Two of these deserve especial
mention. At Hallaton in Leicestershire a feast is held on Easter Monday
at a piece of high ground called Hare-pie Bank. A hare--the sacrificial
character of the hare has already been dwelt upon--is carried in
procession. ‘Hare-pies’ are scrambled for; and then follows a sport
known as ‘bottle-kicking.’ Hooped wooden field-bottles are thrown down
and a scrimmage ensues between the men of Hallaton and the men of the
adjoining village of Medbourne. Besides the connexion with the hare
sacrifice, it is noticeable that each party tries to drive the bottle
towards its own boundary, and not that of its opponents[494]. More
interesting still is the Epiphany struggle for the ‘Haxey hood’ at
Haxey in Lincolnshire. The ‘hood’ is a roll of sacking or leather, and
it is the object of each of the players to carry it to a public-house
in his own village. The ceremony is connected with the Plough Monday
_quête_, and the ‘plough-bullocks’ or ‘boggons’ led by their ‘lord
duke’ and their ‘fool,’ known as ‘Billy Buck,’ are the presiding
officials. On the following day a festival-fire is lit, over which
the fool is ‘smoked.’ The strongest support is given to my theory
of the origin of this type of game, by an extraordinary speech which
the fool delivers from the steps of an old cross. As usual, the cross
has taken the place of a more primitive tree or shrine. The speech
runs as follows: ‘Now, good folks, this is Haxa’ Hood. We’ve killed
two bullocks and a half, _but the other half we had to leave running
field_: we can fetch it if it’s wanted. Remember it’s
‘Hoose agin hoose, toon agin toon,
And if you meet a man, knock him doon.’
In this case then, the popular memory has actually preserved the
tradition that the ‘hood’ or ball played with is the half of a bullock,
the head that is to say, of the victim decapitated at a sacrifice[495].
Hockey and football and tug-of-war are lusty male sports, but the
sacrificial survival recurs in some of the singing games played by
girls and children. The most interesting of these is that known as
‘Oranges and Lemons.’ An arch is formed by two children with raised
hands, and under this the rest of the players pass. Meanwhile rhymes
are sung naming the bells of various parishes, and ending with some
such formula as
‘Here comes a chopper to chop off your head:
The last, last, last, last man’s head.’
As the last word is sung, the hands forming the arch are lowered,
and the child who is then passing is caught, and falls in behind one
of the leaders. When all in turn have been so caught, a tug-of-war,
only without a rope, follows. The ‘chopping’ obviously suggests a
sacrifice, in this case a human sacrifice. And the bell-rhymes show the
connexion of the game with the parish contests just described. There
exists indeed a precisely similar set of verses which has the title,
_Song of the Bells of Derby on Football Morning_. The set ordinarily
used in ‘Oranges and Lemons’ names London parishes, but here is a
Northamptonshire variant, which is particularly valuable because it
alludes to another rite of the agricultural festival, the sacramental
cake buried in a furrow:
‘Pancakes and fritters,
Says the bells of St. Peter’s:
Where must we fry ’em?
Says the bells of Cold Higham:
In yonder land thurrow (furrow)
Says the bells of Wellingborough, &c.[496]’
Other games of the same type are ‘How many Miles to Babylon,’ ‘Through
the Needle Eye,’ and ‘Tower of London.’ These add an important incident
to ‘Oranges and Lemons,’ in that a ‘king’ is said to be passing through
the arch. On the other hand, some of them omit the tug-of-war[497].
With all these singing games it is a little difficult to say whether
they proceed from children’s imitations of the more serious proceedings
pf their elders, or whether they were originally played at the
festivals by grown men and maidens, and have gradually, like the May
_quête_ itself, fallen into the children’s hands. The ‘Oranges and
Lemons’ group has its analogy to the tug-of-war; the use of the arch
formation also connects it with the festival ‘country’ dances which
will be mentioned in the next chapter.
The rude punishments by which the far from rigid code of village
ethics vindicates itself against offenders, are on the border line
between play and jurisprudence. These also appear to be in some cases
survivals, diverted from their proper context, of festival usage. It
has been pointed out that the ducking which was a form of rain-charm
came to be used as a penalty for the churlish or dispirited person, who
declined to throw up his work or to wear green on the festival day.
In other places this same person has to ‘ride the stang.’ That is to
say, he is set astride a pole and borne about with contumely, until
he compounds for his misdemeanour by a fine in coin or liquor[498].
‘Riding the stang,’ however, is a rural punishment of somewhat wide
application[499]. It is common to England and to France, where it
can be traced back, under the names of _charivari_ and _chevauchée_,
to the fifteenth century[500]. The French _sociétés joyeuses_, which
will be described in a later chapter, made liberal use of it[501]. The
offences to which it is appropriate are various. A miser, a henpecked
husband or a wife-beater, especially in May, and, on the other hand,
a shrew or an unchaste woman, are liable to visitation, as are the
parties to a second or third marriage, or to one perilously long
delayed, or one linking May to December. The precise ceremonial varies
considerably. Sometimes the victim has to ride on a pole, sometimes on
a hobby-horse[502], or on an ass with his face turned to the tail[503].
Sometimes, again, he does not appear at all, but is represented by
an effigy or guy, or, in France, by his next-door neighbour[504].
This dramatic version is, according to Mr. Barrett, properly called a
‘skimmington riding,’ while the term ‘riding the stang’ is reserved
for that in which the offender figures in person. The din of kettles,
bones, and cleavers, so frequent an element in rustic ceremonies, is
found here also, and in one locality at least the attendants are
accustomed to blacken their faces[505]. It may perhaps be taken for
granted that ‘riding the stang’ is an earlier form of the punishment
than the more delicate and symbolical ‘skimmington riding’; and it
is probable that the rider represents a primitive village criminal
haled off to become the literal victim at a sacrificial rite. The
fine or forfeit by which in some cases the offence can be purged
seems to create an analogy between the custom under consideration and
other sacrificial survivals which must now be considered. These are
perhaps best treated in connexion with Hock-tide and the curious play
proper to that festival at Coventry[506]. This play was revived for
the entertainment of Elizabeth when she visited the Earl of Leicester
at Kenilworth in July, 1575, and there exists a description of it in
a letter written by one Robert Laneham, who accompanied the court,
to a friend in London[507]. The men of Coventry, led by one Captain
Cox, who presented it called it an ‘olld storiall sheaw,’ with for
argument the massacre of the Danes by Ethelred on Saint Brice’s night
1002[508]. Laneham says that it was ‘expressed in actionz and rymez,’
and it appears from his account to have been a kind of sham fight
or ‘barriers’ between two parties representing respectively Danish
‘launsknights’ and English, ‘each with allder poll marcially in their
hand[509].’ In the end the Danes were defeated and ‘many led captiue
for triumph by our English wéemen.’ The presenters also stated that
the play was of ‘an auncient beginning’ and ‘woont too bee plaid in
oour Citee yeárely.’ Of late, however, it had been ‘laid dooun,’ owing
to the importunity of their preachers, and ‘they woold make theyr
humbl peticion vntoo her highnes, that they myght haue theyr playz vp
agayn.’ The records of Coventry itself add but little to what Laneham
gathered. The local _Annals_, not a very trustworthy chronicle, ascribe
the invention of ‘Hox Tuesday’ to 1416-7, and perhaps confirm the
_Letter_ by noting that in 1575-6 the ‘pageants on Hox Tuesday’ were
played after eight years[510]. We have seen that, according to the
statement made at Kenilworth, the event commemorated by the performance
was the Danish massacre of 1002. There was, however, another tradition,
preserved by the fifteenth-century writer John Rous, which connected it
rather with the sudden death of Hardicanute and the end of the Danish
usurpation at the accession of Edward the Confessor[511]. It is, of
course, possible that local _cantilenae_ on either or both of these
events may have existed, and may have been worked into the ‘rymez’
of the play. But I think it may be taken for granted that, as in the
Lady Godiva procession, the historical element is comparatively a late
one, which has been grafted upon already existing festival customs.
One of these is perhaps the faction-fight just discussed. But it is
to be noticed that the performance as described by Laneham ended with
the Danes being led away captive by English women; and this episode
seems to be clearly a dramatization of a characteristic Hock-tide
_ludus_ found in many places other than Coventry. On Hock-Monday, the
women ‘hocked’ the men; that is to say, they went abroad with ropes,
caught and bound any man they came across, and exacted a forfeit. On
Hock-Tuesday, the men retaliated in similar fashion upon the women.
Bishop Carpenter of Worcester forbade this practice in his diocese
in 1450[512], but like some other festival customs it came to be
recognized as a source of parochial revenue, and the ‘gaderyngs’
at Hock-tide, of which the women’s was always the most productive,
figure in many a churchwarden’s budget well into the seventeenth
century[513]. At Shrewsbury in 1549 ‘hocking’ led to a tragedy. Two men
were ‘smothered under the Castle hill,’ hiding themselves from maids,
the hill falling there on them[514].’ ‘Hockney day’ is still kept at
Hungerford, and amongst the old-fashioned officers elected on this
occasion, with the hay-ward and the ale-tasters, are the two ‘tything
men’ or ‘tutti men,’ somewhat doubtfully said to be so named from their
poles wreathed with ‘tutties’ or nose-gays, whose function it is to
visit the commoners, and to claim from every man a coin and from every
woman a kiss[515]. The derivation of the term Hock-tide has given rise
to some wild conjectures, and philologists have failed to come to a
conclusion on the subject[516]. Hock-tide is properly the Monday and
Tuesday following the Second Sunday after Easter, and ‘Hokedaie’ or
_Quindena Paschae_ is a frequent term day in leases and other legal
documents from the thirteenth century onwards[517].
‘Hocking’ can be closely paralleled from other customs of the spring
festivals. The household books of Edward I record in 1290 a payment
‘to seven ladies of the queen’s chamber who took the king in bed
on the morrow of Easter, and made him fine himself[518].’ This was
the _prisio_ which at a later date perturbed the peace of French
ecclesiastics. The council of Nantes, for instance, in 1431, complains
that clergy were hurried out of their beds on Easter Monday, dragged
into church, and sprinkled with water upon the altar[519]. In this
aggravated form the _prisio_ hardly survived the frank manners of
the Middle Ages. But it was essentially identical with the ceremonies
in which a more modern usage has permitted the levying of forfeits at
both Pasque and Pentecost. In the north of England, women were liable
to have their shoes taken on one or other of these feasts, and must
redeem them by payment. On the following day they were entitled to
retaliate on the shoes of the men[520]. A more widely spread method of
exacting the _droit_ is that of ‘heaving.’ The unwary wanderer in some
of the northern manufacturing towns on Easter Monday is still liable
to find himself swung high in the air by the stalwart hands of factory
girls, and will be lucky if he can purchase his liberty with nothing
more costly than a kiss. If he likes, he may take his revenge on Easter
Tuesday[521]. Another mediaeval custom described by Belethus in the
twelfth century, which prescribed the whipping of husbands by wives
on Easter Monday and of wives by husbands on Easter Tuesday, has also
its modern parallel[522]. On Shrove Tuesday a hockey match was played
at Leicester, and after it a number of young men took their stand with
cart whips in the precincts of the Castle. Any passer-by who did not
pay a forfeit was liable to lashes. The ‘whipping Toms,’ as they were
called, were put down by a special Act of Parliament in 1847[523].
The analogy of these customs with the requirement made of visitors to
certain markets or to the roofs of houses in the building to ‘pay their
footing’ is obvious[524].
In all these cases, even where the significant whipping or sprinkling
is absent, the meaning is the same. The binding with ropes, the loss
of the shoes, the lifting in the air, are symbols of capture. And the
capture is for the purposes of sacrifice, for which no more suitable
victim, in substitution for the priest-king, than a stranger, could be
found. This will, I think, be clear by comparison with some further
parallels from the harvest field and the threshing-floor, in more
than one of which the symbolism is such as actually to indicate the
sacrifice itself, as well as the preliminary capture. In many parts
of England a stranger, and sometimes even the farmer himself, when
visiting a harvest field, is liable to be asked for ‘largess’[525]. In
Scotland, the tribute is called ‘head-money,’ and he who refuses is
seized by the arms and feet and ‘dumped’ on the ground[526]. Similar
customs prevail on the continent, in Germany, Norway, France; and the
stranger is often, just as in the ‘hocking’ ceremony, caught with
straw ropes, or swathed in a sheaf of corn. It is mainly in Germany
that the still more elaborate rites survive. In various districts
of Mecklenburg, and of Pomerania, the reapers form a ring round the
stranger, and fiercely whet their scythes, sometimes with traditional
rhymes which contain a threat to mow him down. In Schleswig, and
again in Sweden, the stranger in a threshing-floor is ‘taught the
flail-dance’ or ‘the threshing-song.’ The arms of a flail are put round
his neck and pressed so tightly that he is nearly choked. When the
madder-roots are being dug, a stranger passing the field is caught by
the workers, and buried up to his middle in the soil[527].
The central incident of ‘hocking’ appears therefore to be nothing but
a form of that symbolical capture of a human victim of which various
other examples are afforded by the village festivals. The development
of the custom into a play or mock-fight at Coventry may very well
have taken place, as the town annals say, about the beginning of the
fifteenth century. Whether it had previously been connected by local
tradition with some event in the struggles of Danes and Saxons or not,
is a question which one must be content to leave unsolved. A final
word is due to the curious arrangement by which in the group of customs
here considered the rôles of sacrificers and sacrificed are exchanged
between men and women on the second day; for it lends support to the
theory already put forward that a certain stage in the evolution of the
village worship was marked by the merging of previously independent
sex-cults.