The instinct of play found a foothold at the village feast in the débris which ritual, in its gradual transformation, left behind. It has already been noted as a constant feature in the history of institutions that a survival does not always remain merely a survival; it may be its destiny, when it is emptied of its first significance, to be taken up into a different order of ideas, and to receive a new lease of vitality under a fresh interpretation. Sacrifice ceases to be sacrament and becomes oblation. Dipping and smoking customs, originally magical, grow to be regarded as modes of sacrificial death. Other such waifs of the past become the inheritance of play. As the old conception of sacrifice passed into the new one, the subsidiary rites, through which the sacramental influence had of old been distributed over the worshippers and their fields, although by no means disused, lost their primitive meaning. Similarly, when human sacrifice was abolished, that too left traces of itself, only imperfectly intelligible, in mock or symbolical deaths, or in the election of the temporary king. Thus, even before Christianity antiquated the whole structure of the village festivals, there were individual practices kept alive only by the conservatism of tradition, and available as material for the play instinct. These find room in the festivals side by side with other customs which the same instinct not only preserved but initiated. Of course, the antithesis between play and cult must not be pushed too far. The peasant mind is tenacious of acts and forgetful of explanations; and the chapters to come will afford examples of practices which, though they began in play, came in time to have a serious significance of quasi-ritual, and to share in the popular imagination the prestige as fertility charms of the older ceremonies of worship with which they were associated. The ludi to be immediately discussed, however, present themselves in the main as sheer play. Several of them have broken loose from the festivals altogether, or, if they still acknowledge their origin by making a special appearance on some fixed day, are also at the service of ordinary amusement, whenever the leisure or the whim of youth may so suggest.
To begin with, it is possible that athletic sports and horse-racing are largely an outcome of sacrificial festivals. Like the Greeks around the pyre of Patroclus, the Teutons celebrated games at the tombs of their dead chieftains[486]. But games were a feature of seasonal, no less than funeral feasts. It will be remembered that the council of Clovesho took pains to forbid the keeping of the Rogation days with horse-races. A bit of wrestling or a bout of quarter-staff is still de rigueur at many a wake or rushbearing, while in parts of Germany the winner of a race or of a shooting-match at the popinjay is entitled to light the festival fire, or to hold the desired office of May-king[487]. The reforming bishops of the thirteenth century include public wrestling-bouts and contests for prizes amongst the ludi whose performance they condemn; and they lay particular stress upon a custom described as arietum super ligna et rotas elevationes. The object of these ‘ram-raisings’ seems to be explained by the fact that in the days of Chaucer a ram was the traditional reward proposed for a successful wrestler[488]; and this perhaps enables us to push the connexion with the sacrificial rite a little further. I would suggest that the original object of the man who wrestled for a ram, or climbed a greasy pole for a leg of mutton, or shot for a popinjay, was to win a sacrificial victim or a capital portion thereof, which buried in his field might bring him abundant crops. The orderly competition doubtless evolved itself from such an indiscriminate scrimmage for the fertilizing fragments as marks the rites of the earth-goddess in the Indian village feast[489]. Tug-of-war would seem to be capable of a similar explanation, though here the desired object is not a portion of the victim, but rather a straw rope made out of the corn divinity itself in the form of the harvest-May[490]. An even closer analogy with the Indian rite is afforded by such games as hockey and football. The ball is nothing else than the head of the sacrificial beast, and it is the endeavour of each player to get it into his own possession, or, if sides are taken, to get it over a particular boundary[491]. Originally, of course, this was the player’s own boundary; it has come to be regarded as that of his opponents; but this inversion of the point of view is not one on which much stress can be laid. In proof of this theory it may be pointed out that in many places football is still played, traditionally, on certain days of the year. The most notable example is perhaps at Dorking, where the annual Shrove Tuesday scrimmage in the streets of the town and the annual efforts of the local authorities to suppress it furnish their regular paragraph to the newspapers. There are several others, in most of which, as at Dorking, the contest is between two wards or districts of the town[492]. This feature is repeated in the Shrove Tuesday tug-of-war at Ludlow, and in annual faction-fights elsewhere[493]. It is probably due to that συνοικισμός of village communities by which towns often came into being. Here and there, moreover, there are to be found rude forms of football in which the primitive character of the proceeding is far more evident than in the sophisticated game. Two of these deserve especial mention. At Hallaton in Leicestershire a feast is held on Easter Monday at a piece of high ground called Hare-pie Bank. A hare—the sacrificial character of the hare has already been dwelt upon—is carried in procession. ‘Hare-pies’ are scrambled for; and then follows a sport known as ‘bottle-kicking.’ Hooped wooden field-bottles are thrown down and a scrimmage ensues between the men of Hallaton and the men of the adjoining village of Medbourne. Besides the connexion with the hare sacrifice, it is noticeable that each party tries to drive the bottle towards its own boundary, and not that of its opponents[494]. More interesting still is the Epiphany struggle for the ‘Haxey hood’ at Haxey in Lincolnshire. The ‘hood’ is a roll of sacking or leather, and it is the object of each of the players to carry it to a public-house in his own village. The ceremony is connected with the Plough Monday quête, and the ‘plough-bullocks’ or ‘boggons’ led by their ‘lord duke’ and their ‘fool,’ known as ‘Billy Buck,’ are the presiding officials. On the following day a festival-fire is lit, over which the fool is ‘smoked.’ The strongest support is given to my theory of the origin of this type of game, by an extraordinary speech which the fool delivers from the steps of an old cross. As usual, the cross has taken the place of a more primitive tree or shrine. The speech runs as follows: ‘Now, good folks, this is Haxa’ Hood. We’ve killed two bullocks and a half, but the other half we had to leave running field: we can fetch it if it’s wanted. Remember it’s
‘Hoose agin hoose, toon agin toon,
And if you meet a man, knock him doon.’
In this case then, the popular memory has actually preserved the tradition that the ‘hood’ or ball played with is the half of a bullock, the head that is to say, of the victim decapitated at a sacrifice[495].
Hockey and football and tug-of-war are lusty male sports, but the sacrificial survival recurs in some of the singing games played by girls and children. The most interesting of these is that known as ‘Oranges and Lemons.’ An arch is formed by two children with raised hands, and under this the rest of the players pass. Meanwhile rhymes are sung naming the bells of various parishes, and ending with some such formula as
‘Here comes a chopper to chop off your head:
The last, last, last, last man’s head.’
As the last word is sung, the hands forming the arch are lowered, and the child who is then passing is caught, and falls in behind one of the leaders. When all in turn have been so caught, a tug-of-war, only without a rope, follows. The ‘chopping’ obviously suggests a sacrifice, in this case a human sacrifice. And the bell-rhymes show the connexion of the game with the parish contests just described. There exists indeed a precisely similar set of verses which has the title, Song of the Bells of Derby on Football Morning. The set ordinarily used in ‘Oranges and Lemons’ names London parishes, but here is a Northamptonshire variant, which is particularly valuable because it alludes to another rite of the agricultural festival, the sacramental cake buried in a furrow:
‘Pancakes and fritters,