CHAPTER VIII

THE MAY-GAME

[_Bibliographical Note._--The festal character of primitive dance and song is admirably brought out by R. Wallaschek, _Primitive Music_ (1893); E. Grosse, _Die Anfänge der Kunst_ (1894, French transl. 1902); Y. Hirn, _The Origins of Art_ (1900); F. B. Gummere, _The Beginnings of Poetry_ (1901). The popular element in French lyric is illustrated by A. Jeanroy, _Les Origines de la Poésie lyrique en France au Moyen Âge_ (1889), and J. Tiersot, _Histoire de la Chanson populaire en France_ (1889). Most of such English material as exists is collected in Mrs. Gomme’s _Traditional Games_ (1896-8) and G. F. Northall, _English Folk-Rhymes_ (1892). For comparative study E. Martinengo-Cesaresco, _Essays in the Study of Folk-Songs_ (1886), may be consulted. The notices of the May-game are scattered through the works mentioned in the bibliographical note to ch. vi and others.]

The foregoing chapter has illustrated the remarkable variety of modes in which the instinct of play comes to find expression. But of all such the simplest and most primitive is undoubtedly the dance. Psychology discovers in the dance the most rudimentary and physical of the arts, and traces it to precisely that overflow of nervous energies shut off from their normal practical ends which constitutes play[528]. And the verdict of psychology is confirmed by philology; for in all the Germanic languages the same word signifies both ‘dance’ and ‘play,’ and in some of them it is even extended to the cognate ideas of ‘sacrifice’ or ‘festival[529]’. The dance must therefore be thought of as an essential part of all the festivals with which we have to deal. And with the dance comes song: the rhythms of motion seem to have been invariably accompanied by the rhythms of musical instruments, or of the voice, or of both combined[530].

The dance had been from the beginning a subject of contention between Christianity and the Roman world[531]; but whereas the dances of the East and South, so obnoxious to the early Fathers, were mainly those of professional entertainers, upon the stage or at banquets, the missionaries of the West had to face the even more difficult problem of a folk-dance and folk-song which were amongst the most inveterate habits of the freshly converted peoples. As the old worship vanished, these tended to attach themselves to the new. Upon great feasts and wake-days, choruses of women invaded with wanton _cantica_ and _ballationes_ the precincts of the churches and even the sacred buildings themselves, a desecration against which generation after generation of ecclesiastical authorities was fain to protest[532]. Clerkly sentiment in the matter is represented by a pious legend, very popular in the Middle Ages, which told how some reprobate folk of Kölbigk in Anhalt disobeyed the command of a priest to cease their unholy revels before the church of Saint Magnus while he said mass on Christmas day, and for their punishment must dance there the year round without stopping[533]. The struggle was a long one, and in the end the Church never quite succeeded even in expelling the dance from its own doors. The chapter of Wells about 1338 forbade _choreae_ and other _ludi_ within the cathedral and the cloisters, chiefly on account of the damage too often done to its property[534]. A seventeenth-century French writer records that he had seen clergy and singing-boys dancing at Easter in the churches of Paris[535]; and even at the present day there are some astounding survivals. At Seville, as is well known, the six boys, called _los Seises_, dance with castanets before the Holy Sacrament in the presence of the archbishop at Shrovetide, and during the feasts of the Immaculate Conception and Corpus Christi[536]. At Echternach in Luxembourg there is an annual dance through the church of pilgrims to the shrine of St. Willibrord[537], while at Barjols in Provence a ‘tripe-dance’ is danced at mass on St. Marcel’s day in honour of the patron[538].

Still less, of course, did dance and song cease to be important features of the secular side of the festivals. We have already seen how _cantilenae_ on the great deeds of heroes had their vogue in the mouths of the _chori_ of young men and maidens, as well as in those of the minstrels[539]. The _Carmina Burana_ describe the dances of girls upon the meadows as amongst the pleasures of spring[540]. William Fitzstephen tells us that such dances were to be seen in London in the twelfth century[541], and we have found the University of Oxford solemnly forbidding them in the thirteenth. The _romans_ and _pastourelles_ frequently mention _chansons_ or _rondets de carole_, which appear to have been the _chansons_ used to accompany the choric dances, and to have generally consisted of a series of couplets sung by the leader, and a refrain with which the rest of the band answered him. Occasionally the refrains are quoted[542]. The minstrels borrowed this type of folk _chanson_, and the conjoint dance and song themselves found their way from the village green to the courtly hall. In the twelfth century ladies _carolent_, and more rarely even men condescend to take a part[543]. Still later _carole_, like _tripudium_, seems to become a term for popular rejoicing in general, not necessarily expressed in rhythmical shape[544].

The customs of the village festival gave rise by natural development to two types of dance[545]. There was the processional dance of the band of worshippers in progress round their boundaries and from field to field, from house to house, from well to well of the village. It is this that survives in the dance of the Echternach pilgrims, or in the ‘faddy-dance’ in and out the cottage doors at Helston wake. And it is probably this that is at the bottom of the interesting game of ‘Thread the Needle.’ This is something like ‘Oranges and Lemons,’ the first part of which, indeed, seems to have been adapted from it. There is, however, no sacrifice or ‘tug-of-war,’ although there is sometimes a ‘king,’ or a ‘king’ and his ‘lady’ or ‘bride’ in the accompanying rhymes, and in one instance a ‘pancake.’ The players stand in two long lines. Those at the end of each line form an arch with uplifted arms, and the rest run in pairs beneath it. Then another pair form an arch, and the process is repeated. In this way long strings of lads and lasses stream up and down the streets or round and about a meadow or green. In many parts of England this game is played annually on Shrove Tuesday or Easter Monday, and the peasants who play it at Châtre in central France say that it is done ‘to make the hemp grow.’ Its origin in connexion with the agricultural festivals can therefore hardly be doubtful[546]. It is probable that in the beginning the players danced rather than ran under the ‘arch’; and it is obvious that the ‘figure’ of the game is practically identical with one familiar in _Sir Roger de Coverley_ and other old English ‘country’ dances of the same type.

Just as the ‘country’ dance is derived from the processional dance, so the other type of folk-dance, the _ronde_ or ‘round,’ is derived from the comparatively stationary dance of the group of worshippers around the more especially sacred objects of the festival, such as the tree or the fire[547]. The custom of dancing round the May-pole has been more or less preserved wherever the May-pole is known. But ‘Thread the Needle’ itself often winds up with a circular dance or _ronde_, either around one of the players, or, on festival occasions, around the representative of the earlier home of the fertilization divinity, the parish church. This custom is popularly known as ‘clipping the church[548].’

Naturally the worshippers at a festival would dance in their festival costume; that is to say, in the garb of leaves and flowers worn for the sake of the beneficent influence of the indwelling divinity, or in the hides and horns of sacrificial animals which served a similar purpose. Travellers describe elaborate and beautiful beast-dances amongst savage peoples, and the Greeks had their own bear- and crane-dances, as well as the dithyrambic goat-dance of the Dionysia. They had also flower dances[549]. In England the village dancers wear posies, but I do not know that they ever attempt a more elaborate representation of flowers. But a good example of the beast-dance is furnished by the ‘horn-dance’ at Abbots Bromley in Staffordshire, held now at a September wake, and formerly at Christmas. In this six of the performers wear sets of horns. These are preserved from year to year in the church, and according to local tradition the dance used at one time to take place in the churchyard on a Sunday. The horns are said to be those of the reindeer, and from this it may possibly be inferred that they were brought to Abbots Bromley by Scandinavian settlers. The remaining performers represent a hobby-horse, a clown, a woman, and an archer, who makes believe to shoot the horned men[550].

The _motifs_ of the dances and their _chansons_ must also at first have been determined by the nature of the festivals at which they took place. There were dances, no doubt, at such domestic festivals as weddings and funerals[551]. In Flanders it is still the custom to dance at the funeral of a young girl, and a very charming _chanson_ is used[552]. The development of epic poetry from the _cantilenae_ of the war-festival has been noted in a former chapter. At the agricultural festivals, the primary _motif_ is, of course, the desire for the fertility of the crops and herds. The song becomes, as in the Anglo-Saxon charm, so often referred to, practically a prayer[553]. With this, and with the use of ‘Thread the Needle’ at Châtre ‘to make the hemp grow,’ may be compared the games known to modern children, as to Gargantua, in which the operations of the farmer’s year, and in

## particular his prayer for his crops, are mimicked in a _ronde_[554].

Allusions to the process of the seasons, above all to the delight of the _renouveau_ in spring, would naturally also find a place in the festival songs. The words of the famous thirteenth-century lyric were perhaps written to be sung to the twinkling feet of English girls in a round. It has the necessary refrain:

‘Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu! Groweth sed and bloweth med And springth the wdë nu, Sing cuccu!

‘Awë bleteth after lomb, Lhouth after calvë cu. Bulloc sterteth, buckë verteth, Murie sing cuccu!

‘Cuccu, cuccu, wel singës thu, cuccu; Ne swik thu naver nu. Sing cuccu nu. Sing cuccu. Sing cuccu. Sing cuccu nu!’[555]

The savour of the spring is still in the English May songs, the French _maierolles_ or _calendes de mai_ and the Italian _calen di maggio_. But for the rest they have either become little but mere _quête_ songs, or else, under the influence of the priests, have taken on a Christian colouring[556]. At Oxford the ‘merry ketches’ sung by choristers on the top of Magdalen tower on May morning were replaced in the seventeenth century by the hymn now used[557]. Another very popular Mayers’ song would seem to show that the Puritans, in despair of abolishing the festival, tried to reform it.

‘Remember us poor Mayers all, And thus we do begin To lead our lives in righteousness, Or else we die in sin.

‘We have been rambling all this night, And almost all this day: And now returned back again, We have brought you a branch of May.

‘A branch of May we have brought you, And at your door it stands; It is but a sprout, but it’s well budded out, By the work of our Lord’s hands,’ &c.[558]

Another religious element, besides prayer, may have entered into the pre-Christian festival songs; and that is myth. A stage in the evolution of drama from the Dionysiac dithyramb was the introduction of mythical narratives about the wanderings and victories of the god, to be chanted or recited by the _choragus_. The relation of the _choragus_ to the _chorus_ bears a close analogy to that between the leader of the mediaeval _carole_ and his companions who sang the refrain. This leader probably represents the Keltic or Teutonic priest at the head of his band of worshippers; and one may suspect that in the north and west of Europe, as in Greece, the pauses of the festival dance provided the occasion on which the earliest strata of stories about the gods, the hieratic as distinguished from the literary myths, took shape. If so the development of divine myth was very closely parallel to that of heroic myth[559].

After religion, the commonest _motif_ of dance and song at the village festivals must have been love. This is quite in keeping with the amorous licence which was one of their characteristics. The goddess of the fertility of earth was also the goddess of the fertility of women. The ecclesiastical prohibitions lay particular stress upon the _orationes amatoriae_ and the _cantica turpia et luxuriosa_ which the women sang at the church doors, and only as love-songs can be interpreted the _winileodi_ forbidden to the inmates of convents by a capitulary of 789[560]. The love-interest continues to be prominent in the folk-song, or the minstrel song still in close relation to folk-song, of mediaeval and modern France. The beautiful wooing _chanson_ of _Transformations_, which savants have found it difficult to believe not to be a _supercherie_, is sung by harvesters and by lace-makers at the pillow[561]. That of _Marion_, an ironic expression of wifely submission, belongs to Shrove Tuesday[562]. These are modern, but the following, from the _Chansonnier de St. Germain_, may be a genuine mediaeval folk-song of Limousin _provenance_:

‘A l’entrada dal tems clar, eya, Per joja recomençar, eya, Et per jelos irritar, eya, Vol la regina mostrar Qu’el’ es si amoroza. Alavi’, alavia jelos, Laissaz nos, laissaz nos Ballar entre nos, entre nos[563].’

The ‘queen’ here is, of course, the festival queen or lady of the May, the _regina avrillosa_ of the Latin writers, _la reine_, _la mariée_, _l’épousée_, _la trimousette_ of popular custom[564]. The defiance of the _jelos_, and the desire of the queen and her maidens to dance alone, recall the conventional freedom of women from restraint in May, the month of their ancient sex-festival, and the month in which the mediaeval wife-beater still ran notable danger of a _chevauchée_.

The amorous note recurs in those types of minstrel song which are most directly founded upon folk models. Such are the _chansons à danser_ with their refrains, the _chansons de mal mariées_, in which the ‘_jalous_’ is often introduced, the _aubes_ and the _pastourelles_[565]. Common in all of these is the spring setting proper to the _chansons_ of our festivals, and of the ‘queen’ or ‘king’ there is from time to time mention. The leading theme of the _pastourelles_ is the wooing, successful or the reverse, of a shepherdess by a knight. But the shepherdess has generally also a lover of her own degree, and for this pair the names of Robin and Marion seem to have been conventionally appropriated. Robin was perhaps borrowed by the _pastourelles_ from the widely spread refrain

‘Robins m’aime, Robins m’a: Robins m’a demandée: si m’ara[566].’

The borrowing may, of course, have been the other way round, but the close relation of the _chanson à danser_ with its refrain to the dance suggests that this was the earliest type of lyric minstrelsy to be evolved, as well as the closest to the folk-song pattern. The _pastourelle_ forms a link between folk-song and drama, for towards the end of the thirteenth century Adan de la Hale, known as ‘le Bossu,’ a minstrel of Arras, wrote a _Jeu de Robin et Marion_, which is practically a _pastourelle par personnages_. The familiar theme is preserved. A knight woos Marion, who is faithful to her Robin. Repulsed, he rides away, but returns and beats Robin. All, however, ends happily with dances and _jeux_ amongst the peasants. Adan de la Hale was one of the train of Count Robert of Artois in Italy. The play may originally have been written about 1283 for the delectation of the court of Robert’s kinsman, Charles, king of Naples, but the extant version was probably produced about 1290 at Arras, when the poet was already dead. Another hand has prefixed a dramatic prologue, the _Jeu du Pèlerin_, glorifying Adan, and has also made some interpolations in the text designed to localize the action near Arras. The performers are not likely to have been villagers: they may have been the members of some _puy_ or literary society, which had taken over the celebration of the summer festival. In any case the _Jeu de Robin et Marion_ is the earliest and not the least charming of pastoral comedies[567].

It is impossible exactly to parallel from the history of English literature this interaction of folk-song and minstrelsy at the French _fête du mai_. For unfortunately no body of English mediaeval lyric exists. Even ‘Sumer is icumen in’ only owes its preservation to the happy accident which led some priest to fit sacred words to the secular tune; while the few pieces recovered from a Harleian manuscript of the reign of Edward I, beautiful as they are, read like adaptations less of English folk-song, than of French lyric itself[568]. Nevertheless, the village summer festival of England seems to have closely resembled that of France, and to have likewise taken in the long run a dramatic turn. A short sketch of it will not be without interest.

I have quoted at the beginning of this discussion of folk-customs the thirteenth-century condemnations of the _Inductio Maii_ by Bishop Grosseteste of Lincoln and of the _ludi de Rege et Regina_ by Bishop Chanteloup of Worcester. The _ludus de Rege et Regina_ is not indeed necessarily to be identified with the _Inductio Maii_, for the harvest feast or _Inductio Autumni_ of Bishop Grosseteste had also its ‘king’ and ‘queen,’ and so too had some of the feasts in the winter cycle, notably Twelfth night[569]. It is, however, in the summer feast held usually on the first of May or at Whitsuntide[570], that these rustic dignitaries are more particularly prominent. Before the middle of the fifteenth century I have not come across many notices of them. That a summer king was familiar in Scotland is implied by the jest of Robert Bruce’s wife after his coronation at Scone in 1306[571]. In 1412 a ‘somerkyng’ received a reward from the bursar of Winchester College[572]. But from about 1450 onwards they begin to appear frequently in local records. The whole _ludus_ is generally known as a ‘May-play’ or ‘May-game,’ or as a ‘king-play[573],’ ‘king’s revel[574],’ or ‘king-game[575].’ The leading personages are indifferently the ‘king’ and ‘queen,’ or ‘lord’ and ‘lady.’ But sometimes the king is more specifically the ‘somerkyng’ or _rex aestivalis_. At other times he is the ‘lord of misrule[576],’ or takes a local title, such as that of the ‘Abbot of Marham,’ ‘Mardall,’ ‘Marrall,’ ‘Marram,’ ‘Mayvole’ or ‘Mayvoll’ at Shrewsbury[577], and the ‘Abbot of Bon-Accord’ at Aberdeen[578]. The use of an ecclesiastical term will be explained in a later chapter[579]. The queen appears to have been sometimes known as a ‘whitepot’ queen[580]. And finally the king and queen receive, in many widely separated places, the names of Robin Hood and Maid Marian, and are accompanied in their revels by Little John, Friar Tuck, and the whole joyous fellowship of Sherwood Forest[581]. This affiliation of the _ludus de Rege et Regina_ to the Robin Hood legend is so curious as to deserve a moment’s examination[582].

The earliest recorded mention of Robin Hood is in Langland’s _Piers Plowman_, written about 1377. Here he is coupled with another great popular hero of the north as a subject of current songs:

‘But I can rymes of Robyn hood, and Randolf erle of Chestre[583].’

In the following century his fame as a great outlaw spread far and wide, especially in the north and the midlands[584]. The Scottish chronicler Bower tells us in 1447 that whether for comedy or tragedy no other subject of romance and minstrelsy had such a hold upon the common folk[585]. The first of the extant ballads of the cycle, _A Gest of Robyn Hode_, was probably printed before 1500, and in composition may be at least a century earlier. A recent investigator of the legend, and a very able one, denies to Robin Hood any traceable historic origin. He is, says Dr. Child, ‘absolutely a creation of the ballad muse.’ However this may be, the version of the Elizabethan playwright Anthony Munday, who made him an earl of Huntingdon and the lover of Matilda the daughter of Lord Fitzwater, may be taken as merely a fabrication. And whether he is historical or not, it is difficult to see how he got, as by the sixteenth century he did get, into the May-game. One theory is that he was there from the beginning, and that he is in fact a mythological figure, whose name but faintly disguises either Woden in the aspect of a vegetation deity[586], or a minor wood-spirit Hode, who also survives in the Hodeken of German legend[587]. Against this it may be pointed out, firstly that Hood is not an uncommon English name, probably meaning nothing but ‘à-Wood’ or ‘of the wood[588],’ and secondly that we have seen no reason to suppose that the mock king, which is the part assigned to Robin Hood in the May-game, was ever regarded as an incarnation of the fertilization spirit at all. He is the priest of that spirit, slain at its festival, but nothing more. I venture to offer a more plausible explanation. It is noticeable that whereas in the May-game Robin Hood and Maid Marian are inseparable, in the early ballads Maid Marian has no part. She is barely mentioned in one or two of the latest ones[589]. Moreover Marian is not an English but a French name, and we have already seen that Robin and Marion are the typical shepherd and shepherdess of the French _pastourelles_ and of Adan de la Hale’s dramatic _jeu_ founded upon these. I suggest then, that the names were introduced by the minstrels into English and transferred from the French _fêtes du mai_ to the ‘lord’ and ‘lady’ of the corresponding English May-game. Robin Hood grew up independently from heroic _cantilenae_, but owing to the similarity of name he was identified with the other Robin, and brought Little John, Friar Tuck and the rest with him into the May-game. On the other hand Maid Marian, who does not properly belong to the heroic legend, was in turn, naturally enough, adopted into the later ballads. This is an hypothesis, but not, I think, an unlikely hypothesis.

Of what, then, did the May-game, as it took shape in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, consist? Primarily, no doubt, of a _quête_ or ‘gaderyng.’ In many places this became a parochial, or even a municipal, affair. In 1498 the corporation of Wells possessed moneys ‘_provenientes ante hoc tempus de Robynhode_[590].’ Elsewhere the churchwardens paid the expenses of the feast and accounted for the receipts in the annual parish budget[591]. There are many entries concerning the May-game in the accounts of Kingston-on-Thames during some half a century. In 1506 it is recorded that ‘Wylm. Kempe’ was ‘kenge’ and ‘Joan Whytebrede’ was ‘quen.’ In 1513 and again in 1536 the game went to Croydon[592]. Similarly the accounts of New Romney note that in 1422 or thereabouts the men of Lydd ‘came with their may and ours[593],’ and those of Reading St. Lawrence that in 1505 came ‘Robyn Hod of Handley and his company’ and in 1507 ‘Robyn Hod and his company from ffynchamsted[594].’ In contemporary Scotland James IV gave a present at midsummer in 1503 ‘to Robin Hude of Perth[595].’ It would hardly have been worth while, however, to carry the May-game from one village or town to another, had it been nothing but a procession with a garland and a ‘gaderyng’; and as a matter of fact we find that in England as in France dramatic performances came to be associated with the summer folk-festivals. The London ‘Maying’ included stage plays[596]. At Shrewsbury _lusores_ under the Abbot of Marham acted interludes ‘for the glee of the town’ at Pentecost[597]. The guild of St. Luke at Norwich performed secular as well as miracle plays, and the guild of Holy Cross at Abingdon held its feast on May 3 with ‘pageants, plays and May-games,’ as early as 1445[598]. Some of these plays were doubtless miracles, but so far as they were secular, the subjects of them were naturally drawn, in the absence of _pastourelles_, from the ballads of the Robin Hood cycle[599]. Amongst the Paston letters is preserved one written in 1473, in which the writer laments the loss of a servant, whom he has kept ‘thys iij yer to pleye Seynt Jorge and Robyn Hod and the Shryff off Nottyngham[600].’ Moreover, some specimens of the plays themselves are still extant. One of them, unfortunately only a fragment, must be the very play referred to in the letter just quoted, for its subject is ‘Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham,’ and it is found on a scrap of paper formerly in the possession of Sir John Fenn, the first editor of the _Paston Letters_[601]. A second play on ‘Robin Hood and the Friar’ and a fragment of a third on ‘Robin Hood and the Potter’ were printed by Copland in the edition of the _Gest of Robyn Hode_ published by him about 1550[602]. The Robin Hood plays are, of course, subsequent to the development of religious drama which will be discussed in the next volume. They are of the nature of interludes, and were doubtless written, like the plays of Adan de la Hale, by some clerk or minstrel for the delectation of the villagers. They are, therefore, in a less degree folk-drama, than the examples which we shall have to consider in the next chapter. But it is worthy of notice, that even in the hey-day of the stage under Elizabeth and James I, the summer festival continued to supply motives to the dramatists. Anthony Munday’s _Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon_[603], Chapman’s _May-Day_, and Jonson’s delightful fragment _The Sad Shepherd_ form an interesting group of pastoral comedies, affinities to which may be traced in the _As You Like It_ and _Winter’s Tale_ of Shakespeare himself.

As has been said, it is impossible to establish any direct affiliation between the Robin Hood plays and earlier _caroles_ on the same theme, in the way in which this can be done for the _jeu_ of Adan de la Hale, and the Robin and Marion of the _pastourelles_. The extant Robin Hood ballads are certainly not _caroles_; they are probably not folk-song at all, but minstrelsy of a somewhat debased type. The only actual trace of such _caroles_ that has been come across is the mention of ‘Robene hude’ as the name of a dance in the _Complaynt of Scotland_ about 1548[604]. Dances, however, of one kind or another, there undoubtedly were at the May-games. The Wells corporation accounts mention _puellae tripudiantes_ in close relation with _Robynhode_[605]. And particularly there was the morris-dance, which was so universally in use on May-day, that it borrowed, almost in permanence, for its leading character the name of Maid Marian. The morris-dance, however, is common to nearly all the village feasts, and its origin and nature will be matter for discussion in the next chapter.

In many places, even during the Middle Ages, and still more afterwards, the summer feast dropped out or degenerated. It became a mere beer-swilling, an ‘ale[606].’ And so we find in the sixteenth century a ‘king-ale[607]’ or a ‘Robin Hood’s ale[608],’ and in modern times a ‘Whitsun-ale[609],’ a ‘lamb-ale[610]’ or a ‘gyst-ale[611]’ beside the ‘church-ales’ and ‘scot-ales’ which the thirteenth-century bishops had already condemned[612]. On the other hand, the village festival found its way to court, and became a sumptuous pageant under the splendour-loving Tudors. For this, indeed, there was Arthurian precedent in the romance of Malory, who records how Guenever was taken by Sir Meliagraunce, when ‘as the queen had mayed and all her knights, all were bedashed with herbs, mosses, and flowers, in the best manner and freshest[613].’ The chronicler Hall tells of the Mayings of Henry VIII in 1510, 1511, and 1515. In the last of these some hundred and thirty persons took part. Henry was entertained by Robin Hood and the rest with shooting-matches and a collation of venison in a bower; and returning was met by a chariot in which rode the Lady May and the Lady Flora, while on the five horses sat the Ladies Humidity, Vert, Vegetave, Pleasaunce and Sweet Odour[614]. Obviously the pastime has here degenerated in another direction. It has become learned, allegorical, and pseudo-classic. At the Reformation the May-game and the May-pole were marks for Puritan onslaught. Latimer, in one of his sermons before Edward VI, complains how, when he had intended to preach in a certain country town on his way to London, he was told that he could not be heard, for ‘it is Robyn hoodes daye. The parishe are gone a brode to gather for Robyn hoode[615].’ Machyn’s _Diary_ mentions the breaking of a May-pole in Fenchurch by the lord mayor of 1552[616], and the revival of elaborate and heterogeneous May-games throughout London during the brief span of Queen Mary[617]. The Elizabethan Puritans renewed the attack, but though something may have been done by reforming municipalities here and there to put down the festivals[618], the ecclesiastical authorities could not be induced to go much beyond forbidding them to take place in churchyards[619]. William Stafford, indeed, declared in 1581 that ‘May-games, wakes, and revels’ were ‘now laid down[620],’ but the violent abuse directed against them only two years later by Philip Stubbes, which may be taken as a fair sample of the Puritan polemic as a whole, shows that this was far from being really the case[621]. In Scotland the Parliament ordered, as early as 1555, that no one ‘be chosen Robert Hude, nor Lytill Johne, Abbot of vnressoun, Quenis of Maij, nor vtherwyse, nouther in Burgh nor to landwart in ony tyme to cum[622].’ But the prohibition was not very effective, for in 1577 and 1578 the General Assembly is found petitioning for its renewal[623]. And in England no similar action was taken until 1644 when the Long Parliament decreed the destruction of such May-poles as the municipalities had spared. Naturally this policy was reversed at the Restoration, and a new London pole was erected in the Strand, hard by Somerset House, which endured until 1717[624].

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