To sweep the dust behind the door.’
[761] Ditchfield, 315. ‘The play in this village is performed in most approved fashion, as the Rector has taken the matter in hand, coached the actors in their parts, and taught them some elocution.’ This sort of thing, of course, is soon fatal to folk-drama.
[762] Burne-Jackson, 484; Manly, i. 289.
[763] Burne-Jackson, 402, 410; F. L. iv. 162; Dyer, 504. The broom is used in Christmas and New Year quêtes in Scotland and Yorkshire, even when there is no drama. Northall 205, gives a Lancashire Christmas song, sung by ‘Little David Doubt’ with black face, skin coat and broom. At Bradford they ‘sweep out the Old Year’; at Wakefield they sweep up dirty hearths. In these cases the notion of threatening to do the unlucky thing has gone.
[764] Ditchfield, 12. An ‘Old Bet’ is mentioned in 5 N. Q. iv. 511, as belonging to a Belper version. The woman is worked in with various ingenuity, but several versions have lost her. The prologue to the Newcastle chap-book promises a ‘Dives’ who never appears. Was this the woman? In the Linton in Craven sword-dance, she has the similar name of ‘Miser.’
[765] I hardly like to trace a reminiscence of the connexion with the renouveau in the ‘General Valentine’ and ‘Colonel Spring’ who fight and are slain in the Dorset (A) version; but there the names are. Mr. Gomme (Nature for Dec. 23, 1897) finds in certain mumming costumes preserved in the Anthropological Museum at Cambridge and made of paper scales, a representation of leaves of trees. Mr. Ordish, I believe, finds in them the scales of the dragon (F. L. iv. 163). Some scepticism may be permitted as to these conjectures. In most places the dress represents little but rustic notions of the ornamental. Cf. Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, bk. ii. ch. 3: ‘The girls could never be brought to respect tradition in designing and decorating the armour: they insisted on attaching loops and bows of silk and velvet in any situation pleasing to their taste. Gorget, gusset, bassinet, cuirass, gauntlet, sleeve, all alike in the view of these feminine eyes were practicable spaces whereon to sew scraps of fluttering colour.’ The usual costume of the sword-dancers, as we have seen (p. 200), was a clean white smock, and probably that of the mummers is based upon this.
[766] T. F. Ordish, in F. L. iv. 158.
[767] Printed in The Old English Drama (1830), vol. iii. Burne-Jackson, 490, think that ‘the masque owes something to the play,’ but the resemblances they trace are infinitesimal. A play of St. George for England, by William or Wentworth Smith, was amongst the manuscripts destroyed by Warburton’s cook, and a Bartholomew Fair ‘droll’ of St. George and the Dragon is alluded to in the Theatre of Compliments, 1688 (Fleay, C. H. ii. 251; Hazlitt, Manual, 201).
[768] In the Dorset (A) version, the king of Egypt is ‘Anthony’ and the doctor ‘Mr. Martin Dennis.’ Conceivably these are reminiscences of St. Anthony of Padua and St. Denys of France. The Revesby Plough Monday play (cf. p. 208) has also an ‘Anthony.’ The ‘Seven Champions’ do not appear in the English sword-dances described in ch. ix, but the morris-dancers at Edgemond wake used to take that name (Burne-Jackson, 491). Mrs. Nina Sharp writes in F. L. R. iii. 1. 113: ‘I was staying at Minety, near Malmesbury, in Wilts (my cousin is the vicar), when the mummers came round (1876). They went through a dancing fight in two lines opposed to each other—performed by the Seven Champions of Christendom. There was no St. George, and they did not appear to have heard of the Dragon. When I inquired for him, they went through the performance of drawing a tooth—the tooth produced, after great agony, being a horse’s. The mummers then carried into the hall a bush gaily decorated with coloured ribbons.... [They] were all in white smock frocks and masks. At Acomb, near York, I saw very similar mummers a few years ago, but they distinguished St. George, and the Dragon was a prominent person. There was the same tooth-drawing, and I think the Dragon was the patient, and was brought back to life by the operation.’ I wonder whether the ‘Seven Champions’ were named or whether Mrs. Sharp inferred them. Anyhow, there could not have been seven at Minety, without St. George. The ‘bush’ is an interesting feature. According to C. R. Smith, Isle of Wight Words (Eng. Dial. Soc. xxxii. 63) the mummers are known in Kent as the ‘Seven Champions.’
[769] Entered on the Stationers’ Registers in 1596. The first extant edition is dated 1597. Johnson first introduced Sabra, princess of Egypt, into the story; in the mediaeval versions, the heroine is an unnamed princess of Silena in Libya. The mummers’ play follows Johnson, and makes it Egypt. On Johnson was based Heylin’s History of St. George (1631 and 1633), and on one or both of these Kirke’s play.