BOOK II
FOLK DRAMA
Stultorum infinitus est numerus.
Ecclesiastes.
CHAPTER V
THE RELIGION OF THE FOLK
[Bibliographical Note.—The conversion of heathen England is described in the Ecclesiastical History of Bede (C. Plummer, Baedae Opera Historica, 1896). Stress is laid on the imperfect character of the process by L. Knappert, Le Christianisme et le Paganisme dans l’Histoire ecclésiastique de Bède le Vénérable (in Revue de l’Histoire des Religions, 1897, vol. xxxv). A similar study for Gaul is E. Vacandard, L’Idolatrie dans la Gaule (in Revue des Questions historiques, 1899, vol. lxv). Witness is borne to the continued presence of pre-Christian elements in the folk-civilization of western Europe both by the general results of folk-lore research and by the ecclesiastical documents of the early Middle Ages. Of these the most important in this respect are—(1) the Decrees of Councils, collected generally in P. Labbe and G. Cossart, Sacrosancta Concilia (1671-2), and J. D. Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum nova et amplissima Collectio (1759-98), and for England in particular in D. Wilkins, Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae (1737) and A. W. Haddan and W. Stubbs, Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents relating to Great Britain and Ireland (1869-78). An interesting series of extracts is given by G. Gröber, Zur Volkskunde aus Concilbeschlüssen und Capitularien (1894):—(2) the Penitentials, or catalogues of sins and their penalties drawn up for the guidance of confessors. The most important English example is the Penitential of Theodore (668-90), on which the Penitentials of Bede and of Egbert are based. Authentic texts are given by Haddan and Stubbs, vol. iii, and, with others of continental origin, in F. W. H. Wasserschleben, Die Bussordnungen der abendländischen Kirche (1851), and H. J. Schmitz, Die Bussbücher und die Bussdisciplin der Kirche (1883). The most interesting for its heathen survivals is the eleventh-century Collectio Decretorum of Burchardus of Worms (Migne, P. L. cxl, extracts in J. Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, iv. 1740):—(3) Homilies or Sermons, such as the Sermo ascribed to the seventh-century St. Eligius (P. L. lxxxvii. 524, transl. Grimm, iv. 1737), and the eighth-century Frankish pseudo-Augustinian Homilia de Sacrilegiis (ed. C. P. Caspari, 1886):—(4) the Vitae of the apostles of the West, St. Boniface, St. Columban, St. Gall, and others. A critical edition of these is looked for from M. Knappert. The Epistolae of Boniface are in P. L. lxxxix. 593:—(5) Miscellaneous Documents, including the sixth-century De correctione Rusticorum of Bishop Martin of Braga in Spain (ed. C. P. Caspari, 1883) and the so-called Indiculus Superstitionum et Paganiarum (ed. H. A. Saupe, 1891), a list of heathen customs probably drawn up in eighth-century Saxony.—The view of primitive religion taken in this book is largely, although not altogether in detail, that of J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890, 2nd ed. 1900), which itself owes much to E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871); W. Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites (2nd ed. 1894); W. Mannhardt, Der Baumkultus der Germanen (1875); Antike Wald-und Feldkulte (1875-7). A more systematic work on similar lines is F. B. Jevons, An Introduction to the History of Religion (1896): and amongst many others may be mentioned A. Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion (1887, 2nd ed. 1899), the conclusions of which are somewhat modified in the same writer’s The Making of Religion (1898); Grant Allen, The Evolution of the Idea of God (1897); E. S. Hartland, The Legend of Perseus (1894-6); J. Rhys, The Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by Celtic Heathendom (1888). The last of these deals especially with Keltic data, which may be further studied in H. D’Arbois de Jubainville, Le Cycle mythologique irlandais et la Mythologie celtique (1884), together with the chapter on La Religion in the same writer’s La Civilisation des Celtes et celle de l’Épopée homérique (1899) and A. Bertrand, La Religion des Gaulois (1897). Teutonic religion has been more completely investigated. Recent works of authority are E. H. Meyer, Germanische Mythologie (1891); W. Golther, Handbuch der germanischen Mythologie (1895); and the article by E. Mogk on Mythologie in H. Paul’s Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, vol. iii (2nd ed. 1897). The collection of material in J. Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology (transl. J. S. Stallybrass, 1880-8) is still of the greatest value. The general facts of early German civilization are given by F. B. Gummere, Germanic Origins (1892), and for the Aryan-speaking peoples in general by O. Schräder, Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples (transl. F. B. Jevons, 1890), and Reallexicon der indo-germanischen Altertumskunde (1901). In dealing with the primitive calendar I have mainly, but not wholly, followed the valuable researches of A. Tille, Deutsche Weihnacht (1893) and Yule and Christmas (1899), a scholar the loss of whom to this country is one of the lamentable results of the recent war.]
Minstrelsy was an institution of the folk, no less than of the court and the bourgeoisie. At many a village festival, one may be sure, the taberers and buffoons played their conspicuous part, ravishing the souls of Dorcas and Mopsa with merry and doleful ballads, and tumbling through their amazing programme of monkey tricks before the ring of wide-mouthed rustics on the green. Yet the soul and centre of such revels always lay, not in these alien professional spectacula, but in other entertainments, home-grown and racy of the soil, wherein the peasants shared, not as onlookers only, but as performers, even as their fathers and mothers, from immemorial antiquity, had done before them. A full consideration of the village ludi is important to the scheme of the present book for more than one reason. They shared with the ludi of the minstrels the hostility of the Church. They bear witness, at point after point, to the deep-lying dramatic instincts of the folk. And their substantial contribution to mediaeval and Renaissance drama and dramatic spectacle is greater than has been fully recognized.
Historically, the ludi of the folk come into prominence with the attacks made upon them by the reforming ecclesiastics of the thirteenth century and in particular by Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln[329]. Between 1236 and 1244 Grosseteste issued a series of disciplinary pronouncements, in which he condemned many customs prevalent in his diocese. Amongst these are included miracle plays, ‘scotales’ or drinking-bouts, ‘ram-raisings’ and other contests of athletic prowess, together with ceremonies known respectively as the festum stultorum and the Inductio Maii sive Autumni[330]. Very similar are the prohibitions contained in the Constitutions (1240) of Walter de Chanteloup, bishop of Worcester[331]. These particularly specify the ludus de Rege et Regina, a term which may be taken as generally applicable to the typical English folk-festival, of which the Inductio Maii sive Autumni, the ‘May-game’ and ‘mell-supper,’ mentioned by Grosseteste, are varieties[332]. Both this ludus, in its various forms, and the less strictly popular festum stultorum, will find ample illustration in the sequel. Walter de Chanteloup also lays stress upon an aggravation of the ludi inhonesti by the performance of them in churchyards and other holy places, and on Sundays or the vigils and days of saints[333].
The decrees of the two bishops already cited do not stand alone. About 1250 the University of Oxford found it necessary to forbid the routs of masked and garlanded students in the churches and open places of the city[334]. These appear to have been held in connexion with the feasts of the ‘nations’ into which a mediaeval university was divided. Articles of visitation drawn up in connexion with the provisions of Oxford in 1253 made inquiry as to several of the obnoxious ludi and as to the measures adopted to check them throughout the country[335]. Prohibitions are upon record by the synod of Exeter in 1287[336], and during the next century by the synod of York in 1367[337], and by William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, in 1384[338]; while the denunciations of the rulers of the church find an unofficial echo in that handbook of ecclesiastical morality, Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s Handlyng Synne[339]. There is, however, reason to suppose that the attitude thus taken up hardly represents that of the average ecclesiastical authority, still less that of the average parish priest, towards the ludi in question. The condemnatory decrees should probably be looked upon as the individual pronouncements of men of austere or reforming temper against customs which the laxer discipline of their fellows failed to touch; perhaps it should rather be said, which the wiser discipline of their fellows found it better to regulate than to ban. At any rate there is evidence to show that the village ludi, as distinct from the spectacula of the minstrels, were accepted, and even to some extent directed, by the Church. They became part of the parochial organization, and were conducted through the parochial machinery. Doubtless this was the course of practical wisdom. But the moralist would find it difficult to deny that Robert Grosseteste and Walter de Chanteloup had, after all, some reason on their side. On the one hand they could point to the ethical lapses of which the ludi were undoubtedly the cause—the drunkenness, the quarrels, the wantonings, by which they were disgraced[340]. And on the other they could—if they were historically minded—recall the origin of the objectionable rites in some of those obscure survivals of heathenism in the rustic blood, which half a dozen centuries of Christianity had failed to purge[341]. For if the comparative study of religions proves anything it is, that the traditional beliefs and customs of the mediaeval or modern peasant are in nine cases out of ten but the detritus of heathen mythology and heathen worship, enduring with but little external change in the shadow of an hostile creed. This is notably true of the village festivals and their ludi. Their full significance only appears when they are regarded as fragments of forgotten cults, the naïve cults addressed by a primitive folk to the beneficent deities of field and wood and river, or the shadowy populace of its own dreams. Not that when even the mediaeval peasant set up his May-pole at the approach of summer or drove his cattle through the bonfire on Midsummer eve, the real character of his act was at all explicit in his consciousness. To him, as to his descendant of to-day, the festival was at once a practice sanctioned by tradition and the rare amusement of a strenuous life: it was not, save perhaps in some unplumbed recesses of his being, anything more definitely sacred. At most it was held to be ‘for luck,’ and in some vague general way, to the interest of a fruitful year in field and fold. The scientific anthropologist, however, from his very different point of view, cannot regard the conversion to Christianity as a complete solution of continuity in the spiritual and social life of western Europe. This conversion, indeed, was clearly a much slower and more incomplete process than the ecclesiastical chroniclers quite plainly state. It was so even on the shores of the Mediterranean. But there the triumph of Christianity began from below. Long before the edict of Milan, the new religion, in spite of persecutions, had got its firm hold upon the masses of the great cities of the Empire. And when, less than a century later, Theodosius made the public profession of any other faith a crime, he was but formally acknowledging a chose jugée. But even in these lands of the first ardour the old beliefs and, above all, the old rituals died hard. Lingering unacknowledged in the country, the pagan, districts, they passed silently into the dim realm of folk-lore. How could this but be more so when Christianity came with the missionaries of Rome or of Iona to the peoples of the West? For with them conversion was hardly a spontaneous, an individual thing. As a rule, the baptism of the king was the starting-point and motive for that of his followers: and the bulk of the people adopted wonderingly an alien cult in an alien tongue imposed upon them by the will of their rulers. Such a Christianity could at best be only nominal. Ancient beliefs are not so easily surrendered: nor are habits and instincts, deep-rooted in the lives of a folk, thus lightly laid down for ever, at the word of a king. The churches of the West had, therefore, to dispose somehow of a vast body of practical heathenism surviving in all essentials beneath a new faith which was but skin-deep. The conflict which followed is faintly adumbrated in the pages of Bede: something more may be guessed of its fortunes by a comparison of the customs and superstitions recorded in early documents of church discipline with those which, after all, the peasantry long retained, or even now retain.
Two letters of Gregory the Great, written at the time of the mission of St. Augustine, are a key to the methods adopted by the apostles of the West. In June 601, writing to Ethelbert of Kent by the hands of abbot Mellitus, Gregory bade the new convert show zeal in suppressing the worship of idols, and throwing down their fanes[342]. Having written thus, the pope changed his mind. Before Mellitus could reach England, he received a letter instructing him to expound to Augustine a new policy. ‘Do not, after all,’ wrote Gregory, ‘pull down the fanes. Destroy the idols; purify the buildings with holy water; set relics there; and let them become temples of the true God. So the people will have no need to change their places of concourse, and where of old they were wont to sacrifice cattle to demons, thither let them continue to resort on the day of the saint to whom the church is dedicated, and slay their beasts no longer as a sacrifice, but for a social meal in honour of Him whom they now worship[343].’ There can be little doubt that the conversion of England proceeded in the main on the lines thus laid down by Gregory. Tradition has it that the church of Saint Pancras outside the walls of Canterbury stands on the site of a fane at which Ethelbert himself once worshipped[344]; and that in London St. Paul’s replaced a temple and grove of Diana, by whom the equivalent Teutonic wood-goddess, Freyja, is doubtless intended[345]. Gregory’s directions were, perhaps, not always carried out quite so literally as this. When, for instance, the priest Coifi, on horseback and sword in hand, led the onslaught against the gods of Northumbria, he bade his followers set fire to the fane and to all the hedges that girt it round[346]. On the other hand, Reduald, king of East Anglia, must have kept his fane standing, and indeed he carried the policy of amalgamation further than its author intended, for he wavered faint-heartedly between the old religion and the new, and maintained in one building an altare for Christian worship and an arula for sacrifice to demons[347]. Speaking generally, it would seem to have been the endeavour of the Christian missionaries to effect the change of creed with as little dislocation of popular sentiment as possible. If they could extirpate the essentials, or what they considered as the essentials, of heathenism, they were willing enough to leave the accidentals to be worn away by the slow process of time. They did not, probably, quite realize how long it would take. And what happened in England, happened also, no doubt, on the continent, save perhaps in such districts as Saxony, where Christianity was introduced vi et armis, and therefore in a more wholesale, if not in the end a more effectual fashion[348].