POPULAR FESTIVALS AND FESTIVITIES.
What a revolution of taste has taken place in the English people as it
regards popular festivals and festivities! Our ancestors were
passionately fond of shows, pageants, processions, and maskings. They
were fond of garlands and ribbons, dancing and festive merriment.
May-day, Easter, Whitsuntide, St. John’s Day, Yule, and many other
times, were times of general sport and gaiety. Music and flowers
abounded; mumming, morris-dancing, and many a quaint display of humour
and frolic spread over the country. The times, and the spirit of the
times, are changed:--we are become a sober people. England is no longer
merry England, but busy England; England full of wealth and
poverty--extravagance and care. There has been no small lamentation over
this change; and many of our writers have laboured hard to bring us once
more to adopt this state of things. They might as well attempt to bring
back jousts and tourneys[26], popery, and government without
representation. The times, and the spirit of the times are changed.
Strutt, Hone, Leigh Hunt, Miss Laurence, and many others, may expatiate
on the poetic beauty of these things: they may deplore the extinction of
this graceful rite, that jocund festivity, and pray us earnestly to
resume them once more; but can they give us our light hearts again? Can
they make the nation young again? Can they make us the simple, ignorant,
confiding people, living in the present, careless of the future, as our
ancestors were? Till they can do this, they must lament and exhort us in
vain. As soon might they bid the sun to retrace his path; the seasons
reverse their course; earth and heaven turn back in the path of their
years. What our ancestors were, they were from circumstances that are
gone for ever; and what we are, we are from another mighty succession of
circumstances, of which the memory and effect may no more be blotted
out, than the stars can be blotted out of the clear heavens of midnight.
The country has passed through deep baptisms, and processes of
fermentation which have worked out the lighter external characters, and
totally reorganised the moral as well as the political constitution of
the kingdom. The better qualities of the old English character I trust
we fully retain, but the more juvenile and fantastic ones are
irrevocably destroyed in the shock of most momentous convulsions.
[26] Since the former edition of this work was written, _that_ even
_has_ been attempted.
Amongst the many attempts to account for the sedater cast of the modern
popular mind, Sir E. Bulwer, in “England and the English,” has
attributed it to the spread of Methodism. Had he attributed it to
Puritanism he would have been nearer the mark. Methodism may possibly
have done something towards it, but it neither began early enough, nor
spread universally enough, to have the credit of this change. The decay
of popular festivities has been noticed and lamented by writers for the
last century. It has been going on both before and since the rise of
Methodism, with much the same pace of progression, and is equally felt
where Methodism is not allowed to shew its face, as where it exercises
its fullest power. Over what a great extent of this country does the
influence of high-church landlords prevail, where Methodism cannot get
footing; where the people are all expected to go soberly to church as in
the good old times; and yet there the people are just as grave, have
grown out of the sports and pastimes of their ancestors, just as much as
in the most Methodistic districts. In the manufacturing districts, where
the Methodists have gained most influence, it is true enough that they
have helped to expel an immense quantity of dog-fighting, cock-fighting,
bull-baiting, badger-baiting, boxing, and such blackguard amusements;
but Maying, guising, plough-bullocking, morris-dancing, were gone
before, or would have gone had not Methodism appeared.
Mighty and many are the causes which have wrought this great national
change; causes which have been operating upon us for the last three
hundred years; and are so intimately connected with our whole national
progress, political and intellectual--with all our growing greatness,
with all our glory and our sorrows, that had not Methodism existed, that
character would have been exactly what it is.
The Reformation laid the foundation of this change. While we had an
absolute pope, and an absolute king; while the people were neither
educated, nor allowed to read the Bible, nor to be represented in
Parliament; while the monarch and a few noble families held all the
lands of the kingdom, the lower classes had nothing to do but to follow
their masters to the wars, or live easily and dance gaily in times of
peace. The retainers of great houses, the labourers in the fields,
foresters and shepherds, following their solitary occupations,
constituted the bulk of the nation. Merchants and merchandise were few;
our great trading towns and interests did not exist; the days of
newspapers, of religious disputes, of literature and periodicals, were
not come. The people were either at work or at play. When their work was
over, play was their sole resource. They danced, they acted rude plays
and pantomimes, with all the zest and gaiety of children, for their
heads were as unoccupied with knowledge and grave concerns as those of
children. They lived in poverty it may be, but still they lived in that
state of simplicity and dependence which left them little care; and they
were cut off, by the impossibility of rising out of their original rank,
from all troublesome excitement. It was equally the concern of the civil
government and the hierarchy to encourage sports and festivities, to
keep them out of dangerous inquiries into their own condition, or
rights. In the great feudal halls, the minstrel, the jongleur, the
jester, and other ministers of gaiety; hawks and hounds abroad, jollity
and drinking at home, kept the minds of all idlers occupied with matters
to their taste. The clergy and monks promoted with an equal zeal of
policy, the festivals of saints, keeping of high days and holidays,
processions, games, and even acting the mysteries and miracle-plays.
While the system continued, this spirit and national character must have
continued likewise; but the Reformation burst like a volcano from
beneath, and scattered the whole smiling surface into disjointed
fragments, or buried it beneath the lava of ruin.
Henry VIII. at once destroyed Monkery and the Catholic church. He at
once seized on the ecclesiastical lands, and snapped asunder the
ecclesiastical policy. The translation of the Bible let in a flood of
light that revealed all the phantasmagoria of the past, and prepared a
train of everlasting inquiries, disquietudes, and intellectual and
political triumphs for the future. The people saw they had been treated
as children, but they now awoke to the passions and the conscious power
of men. They had tasted of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and
their eyes were opened to their actual condition, never more to be
closed. The lands that were rudely seized and arbitrarily distributed,
created a new class in the community--the gentry--a link between the
aristocracy and the people;--possessing the knowledge of the one, and
sharing the interests of the other. Henry’s predecessors had hastened
this new era by curtailing the wealth and power of the nobility; and the
long wars of the houses of York and Lancaster had already done much of
this work for him; exterminating some, humbling others, and embarrassing
with debts the remainder. So were the elements of a more popular career
thrown into the midst of the nation; and the religious persecutions on
the Continent, by sending us swarms of jewellers, weavers, and other
artificers, laid the foundation of those trading propensities which have
now carried us to such a marvellous length. We came to be a trading and
colonizing people, and to possess a fleet in order to protect our new
interests. How rapidly this navy grew, indicating by its own growth that
of the general wealth and commercial enterprise of England, of which it
was the consequence, is seen by this circumstance. In that fine old
ballad of Sir Andrew Barton, Lord Howard is made to say to Henry VIII.
in 1511--
Sir Andrew’s shipp I bring with mee;
A braver shipp was never none;
_Now hath your grace two shipps of warr_,
_Before in England was but one_!
This one was the _Great Harry_, built in 1504. In about 80 years only
afterwards, the English had thirty vessels of war at sea, and with these
dared to attack the Invincible Armada of Spain, consisting of one
hundred and thirty vessels, and by the assistance of a providential
tempest, totally dispersed and destroyed it. Then Howard of Effingham,
Drake, Frobisher, Hawkins, were the names of our commanders,--names
which thenceforward filled all the known world with terror, and gave to
England the empire of the seas. With this extension of national
interests, a more active and earnest spirit was diffused through the
people. The struggle with enemies abroad, and with the rapidly maturing
spirit of religious freedom at home, kept Elizabeth engaged, and induced
in her a rigour of persecution, and in the people a rigour of resistance
and the soul of martyrdom. Before the development of these antagonist
powers, all lightness fled; singing gave way to preaching and listening;
dancing, to running anxiously to know the fate of sufferers, and the
doctrines of fresh-springing teachers. So completely had the old relish
for merriment and pastimes died out, that her successor, James,
endeavoured to compel the people, by the publication of his “Book of
Sports” to be jocose and gamesome. But it would not do. The soul of the
people was now up in arms for their rights; and the despotic nature of
himself and his son, resisting their claims, kept up such a fever of
political strife in the kingdom as would have put out all jesting and
capering if they had not gone before. The hierarchy fell,--fell in one
wide chaos of civil contention; and, as if torrents of blood and volumes
of fire, and the trampling hoofs of thousands of careering cavalry had
not been enough to overwhelm and dash to pieces every remaining fragment
of jollity and popular fête,--in came Puritanism from Geneva, and the
Solemn League and Covenant from Scotland. There was a final close to all
the pageantry of processions and the merry saintliness of festivals:
they were denounced and abhorred as the carnality of Anti-Christ and the
rags of the scarlet woman. Charles II. indeed, could revive
licentiousness, but he could not bring back the holiday guise of “the
old profession.” And what has been the course of England since? One
ever-widening and ascending course of mighty wars, expanding commerce,
vast colonization, and the growth of science, literature, and general
knowledge. We are no longer a nation of feudal combatants, of piping
shepherds, and thoughtless peasantry,--but of busy, scheming,
money-collecting, family-creating men. Our last tremendous war put the
climax to this amazing career. In it all Europe seemed torn to pieces
and organized anew. We, as a people, were led by circumstances to put
forth the most stupendous energies that perhaps any nation ever did. To
defend our colonies; to support the interests of our allies with arms
and subsidies; to supply the whole of Europe with all species of
manufactures, and almost all species of merchandise, and through this
demand stimulating into existence the powers of steam and machinery, a
population of amazing numbers to maintain. And then, the shock and the
revulsion when this great war-system suddenly ceased! An immense debt,
vast taxes, the necessity of maintaining high prices, the necessity of
boundless competition and low wages that we might so compete with the
continent, returning to its old habits.
Who does not know with what a fiery force this has fallen on the working
classes? What distress, what pauperization, what desperation, brought to
the very pitch of rebellion, they have gone through; and recollecting
this, can any one think otherwise than that it has been enough to sober
any people that is not destitute of every element of high character. If
we could, after a baptism like this, be still like the French, a
dancing, dissipation-loving people, we should, like them, have but a
fitful care to secure our liberties, and the comforts of good
government; like them, at this moment, we should be the victims of
successive revolutions, yielding no fruit but tyranny. But we are a
sober and a thoughtful people, and are therefore working out of the mass
of our difficulties the form of a renewed constitution, adapted to our
present enlarged views and experience. But besides this, our energies
have not been called forth for this good end alone; they have brought
with their exercise a high relish for intellectual pleasures. Our minds
have been stirred mightily, and, like animals that during their wintry
torpor feel no hunger, yet feel it keenly the moment they are awake,
they have become hungry for congenial aliment. We have fed on much
knowledge, and are no longer children, but full-grown men, with manly
appetites and experienced tastes. Could we now sit, as our ancestors
did, for nine hours together at a mystery? Could we endure to read
through the chronicles and romances of the middle ages,--books which
spun out their recitals to the most extraordinary length, and were never
too long; for books then were few? If we could not, so neither could the
simple pleasures and rural festivities satisfy the peasantry of this.
We are the creatures of new circumstances, and of a higher reach of
knowledge. A combination of causes, too puissant to be resisted, has
made hopeless all return to the juvenilities of the past. And after all,
happiness--of which the people, however unwisely, are always in quest,
does not consist in booths and garlands, drums and horns, or in capering
round a May-pole. Happiness is a fireside thing. It is a thing of grave
and earnest tone; and the deeper and truer it is, the more is it removed
from the riot of mere merriment:
The highest mood allowed
To sinful creatures, for all happiness
Worthy that holy name, seems steeped in tears,
Like flowers in dew, or tinged with misty hues,
Like stars in halo.
_John Wilson._
And the more our humble classes come to taste of the pleasures of books
and intellect, and the deep fireside affections which grow out of the
growth of heart and mind, the less charms will the outward forms of
rejoicing have for them. Beautiful and poetical, I grant, are many of
the old rites and customs of which we have been speaking; but they are
beautiful and poetical as belonging to their own times,--and many of
them, I am inclined to believe, as seen in the distance; for, seen at
hand, there is a vulgarity in most popular customs that offends
invariably our present tastes. Nor do I mean to say that our present
population cannot be cheerful. A more truly cheerful people never
existed; and they can dance and be merry too when they will; as
Christmas, and Whitsuntide, and their annual village feasts and their
harvest-homes can testify. Since the Reformation, the saints of the
calendar having become mere names in this country, their festivals have
accordingly died away. Whitsuntide, Easter, and Christmas seem almost
all that have maintained their stand; and of these we will speak a
little; but in the first place let us have a few words on May-Day.