[381] Pfannenschmidt, 244; Brand, ii. 1; Ditchfield, 130; Burne-Jackson, 439; Burton, Rushbearing, 147; Schaff, vi. 544; Duchesne, 385. The dedication of churches was solemnly carried out from the fourth century, and the anniversary observed. Gregory the Great ordered ‘solemnitates ecclesiarum dedicationum per singulos annos sunt celebrandae.’ The A.-S. Canons of Edgar (960), c. 28 (Wilkins, i. 227), require them to be kept with sobriety. Originally the anniversary, as well as the actual dedication day, was observed with an all night watch, whence the name vigilia, wakes. Belethus, de rat. offic. (P. L. ccii. 141), c. 137, says that the custom was abolished owing to the immorality to which it led. But the ‘eve’ of these and other feasts continued to share in the sanctity of the ‘day,’ a practice in harmony with the European sense of the precedence of night over day (cf. Schräder-Jevons, 311; Bertrand, 267, 354, 413). An Act of Convocation in 1536 (Wilkins, iii. 823) required all wakes to be held on the first Sunday in October, but it does not appear to have been very effectual.
[382] S. O. Addy, in F. L. xii. 394, has a full account of ‘Garland day’ at Castleton, Derbyshire, on May 29; cf. F. L. xii. 76 (Wishford, Wilts); Burne-Jackson, 365.
[383] The classification of agricultural feasts in U. Jahn, Die deutschen Opfergebräuche, seems throughout to be based less on the facts of primitive communal agriculture, than on those of the more elaborate methods of the later farms with their variety of crops.
[384] Frazer, i. 193; ii. 96; Brand, i. 125; Dyer, 223; Ditchfield, 95; Philpot, 144; Grimm, ii. 762; &c., &c. A single example of the custom is minutely studied by S. O. Addy, Garland Day at Castleton, in F. L. xii. 394.
[385] A. B. Gomme, ii. 507; Hartland, Perseus, ii. 187; Grimm, iv. 1738, 1747; Gaidoz, Un vieux rite médical (1893).
[386] Tacitus, Germania, 40.
[387] Vigfusson and Ungar, Flateyjarbok, i. 337; Grimm, i. 107; Gummere, G. O. 433; Mogk, iii. 321; Golther, 228.
[388] Sozomenes, Hist. Eccles. vi. 37. Cf. also Indiculus (ed. Saupe, 32) ‘de simulacro, quod per campos portant,’ the fifth-century Vita S. Martini, c. 12, by Sulpicius Severus (Opera, ed. Halm, in Corp. Script. Eccl. Hist. i. 122) ‘quia esset haec Gallorum rusticis consuetudo, simulacra daemonum, candido tecta velamine, misera per agros suos circumferre dementia,’ and Alsso’s account of the fifteenth-century calendisationes in Bohemia (ch. xii).
[389] Cf. ch. x.
[390] Cf. Representations (Chester, London, York). There were similar watches at Nottingham (Deering, Hist. of Nott. 123), Worcester (Smith, English Gilds, 408), Lydd and Bristol (Green, Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, i. 148), and on St. Thomas’s day (July 7) at Canterbury (Arch. Cant. xii. 34; Hist. MSS. ix. 1. 148).