Says the bells of St. Peter’s:
Where must we fry ’em?
Says the bells of Cold Higham:
In yonder land thurrow (furrow)
Says the bells of Wellingborough, &c.[496]’
Other games of the same type are ‘How many Miles to Babylon,’ ‘Through the Needle Eye,’ and ‘Tower of London.’ These add an important incident to ‘Oranges and Lemons,’ in that a ‘king’ is said to be passing through the arch. On the other hand, some of them omit the tug-of-war[497]. With all these singing games it is a little difficult to say whether they proceed from children’s imitations of the more serious proceedings pf their elders, or whether they were originally played at the festivals by grown men and maidens, and have gradually, like the May quête itself, fallen into the children’s hands. The ‘Oranges and Lemons’ group has its analogy to the tug-of-war; the use of the arch formation also connects it with the festival ‘country’ dances which will be mentioned in the next chapter.
The rude punishments by which the far from rigid code of village ethics vindicates itself against offenders, are on the border line between play and jurisprudence. These also appear to be in some cases survivals, diverted from their proper context, of festival usage. It has been pointed out that the ducking which was a form of rain-charm came to be used as a penalty for the churlish or dispirited person, who declined to throw up his work or to wear green on the festival day. In other places this same person has to ‘ride the stang.’ That is to say, he is set astride a pole and borne about with contumely, until he compounds for his misdemeanour by a fine in coin or liquor[498]. ‘Riding the stang,’ however, is a rural punishment of somewhat wide application[499]. It is common to England and to France, where it can be traced back, under the names of charivari and chevauchée, to the fifteenth century[500]. The French sociétés joyeuses, which will be described in a later chapter, made liberal use of it[501]. The offences to which it is appropriate are various. A miser, a henpecked husband or a wife-beater, especially in May, and, on the other hand, a shrew or an unchaste woman, are liable to visitation, as are the parties to a second or third marriage, or to one perilously long delayed, or one linking May to December. The precise ceremonial varies considerably. Sometimes the victim has to ride on a pole, sometimes on a hobby-horse[502], or on an ass with his face turned to the tail[503]. Sometimes, again, he does not appear at all, but is represented by an effigy or guy, or, in France, by his next-door neighbour[504]. This dramatic version is, according to Mr. Barrett, properly called a ‘skimmington riding,’ while the term ‘riding the stang’ is reserved for that in which the offender figures in person. The din of kettles, bones, and cleavers, so frequent an element in rustic ceremonies, is found here also, and in one locality at least the attendants are accustomed to blacken their faces[505]. It may perhaps be taken for granted that ‘riding the stang’ is an earlier form of the punishment than the more delicate and symbolical ‘skimmington riding’; and it is probable that the rider represents a primitive village criminal haled off to become the literal victim at a sacrificial rite. The fine or forfeit by which in some cases the offence can be purged seems to create an analogy between the custom under consideration and other sacrificial survivals which must now be considered. These are perhaps best treated in connexion with Hock-tide and the curious play proper to that festival at Coventry[506]. This play was revived for the entertainment of Elizabeth when she visited the Earl of Leicester at Kenilworth in July, 1575, and there exists a description of it in a letter written by one Robert Laneham, who accompanied the court, to a friend in London[507]. The men of Coventry, led by one Captain Cox, who presented it called it an ‘olld storiall sheaw,’ with for argument the massacre of the Danes by Ethelred on Saint Brice’s night 1002[508]. Laneham says that it was ‘expressed in actionz and rymez,’ and it appears from his account to have been a kind of sham fight or ‘barriers’ between two parties representing respectively Danish ‘launsknights’ and English, ‘each with allder poll marcially in their hand[509].’ In the end the Danes were defeated and ‘many led captiue for triumph by our English wéemen.’ The presenters also stated that the play was of ‘an auncient beginning’ and ‘woont too bee plaid in oour Citee yeárely.’ Of late, however, it had been ‘laid dooun,’ owing to the importunity of their preachers, and ‘they woold make theyr humbl peticion vntoo her highnes, that they myght haue theyr playz vp agayn.’ The records of Coventry itself add but little to what Laneham gathered. The local Annals, not a very trustworthy chronicle, ascribe the invention of ‘Hox Tuesday’ to 1416-7, and perhaps confirm the Letter by noting that in 1575-6 the ‘pageants on Hox Tuesday’ were played after eight years[510]. We have seen that, according to the statement made at Kenilworth, the event commemorated by the performance was the Danish massacre of 1002. There was, however, another tradition, preserved by the fifteenth-century writer John Rous, which connected it rather with the sudden death of Hardicanute and the end of the Danish usurpation at the accession of Edward the Confessor[511]. It is, of course, possible that local cantilenae on either or both of these events may have existed, and may have been worked into the ‘rymez’ of the play. But I think it may be taken for granted that, as in the Lady Godiva procession, the historical element is comparatively a late one, which has been grafted upon already existing festival customs. One of these is perhaps the faction-fight just discussed. But it is to be noticed that the performance as described by Laneham ended with the Danes being led away captive by English women; and this episode seems to be clearly a dramatization of a characteristic Hock-tide ludus found in many places other than Coventry. On Hock-Monday, the women ‘hocked’ the men; that is to say, they went abroad with ropes, caught and bound any man they came across, and exacted a forfeit. On Hock-Tuesday, the men retaliated in similar fashion upon the women. Bishop Carpenter of Worcester forbade this practice in his diocese in 1450[512], but like some other festival customs it came to be recognized as a source of parochial revenue, and the ‘gaderyngs’ at Hock-tide, of which the women’s was always the most productive, figure in many a churchwarden’s budget well into the seventeenth century[513]. At Shrewsbury in 1549 ‘hocking’ led to a tragedy. Two men were ‘smothered under the Castle hill,’ hiding themselves from maids, the hill falling there on them[514].’ ‘Hockney day’ is still kept at Hungerford, and amongst the old-fashioned officers elected on this occasion, with the hay-ward and the ale-tasters, are the two ‘tything men’ or ‘tutti men,’ somewhat doubtfully said to be so named from their poles wreathed with ‘tutties’ or nose-gays, whose function it is to visit the commoners, and to claim from every man a coin and from every woman a kiss[515]. The derivation of the term Hock-tide has given rise to some wild conjectures, and philologists have failed to come to a conclusion on the subject[516]. Hock-tide is properly the Monday and Tuesday following the Second Sunday after Easter, and ‘Hokedaie’ or Quindena Paschae is a frequent term day in leases and other legal documents from the thirteenth century onwards[517].
‘Hocking’ can be closely paralleled from other customs of the spring festivals. The household books of Edward I record in 1290 a payment ‘to seven ladies of the queen’s chamber who took the king in bed on the morrow of Easter, and made him fine himself[518].’ This was the prisio which at a later date perturbed the peace of French ecclesiastics. The council of Nantes, for instance, in 1431, complains that clergy were hurried out of their beds on Easter Monday, dragged into church, and sprinkled with water upon the altar[519]. In this aggravated form the prisio hardly survived the frank manners of the Middle Ages. But it was essentially identical with the ceremonies in which a more modern usage has permitted the levying of forfeits at both Pasque and Pentecost. In the north of England, women were liable to have their shoes taken on one or other of these feasts, and must redeem them by payment. On the following day they were entitled to retaliate on the shoes of the men[520]. A more widely spread method of exacting the droit is that of ‘heaving.’ The unwary wanderer in some of the northern manufacturing towns on Easter Monday is still liable to find himself swung high in the air by the stalwart hands of factory girls, and will be lucky if he can purchase his liberty with nothing more costly than a kiss. If he likes, he may take his revenge on Easter Tuesday[521]. Another mediaeval custom described by Belethus in the twelfth century, which prescribed the whipping of husbands by wives on Easter Monday and of wives by husbands on Easter Tuesday, has also its modern parallel[522]. On Shrove Tuesday a hockey match was played at Leicester, and after it a number of young men took their stand with cart whips in the precincts of the Castle. Any passer-by who did not pay a forfeit was liable to lashes. The ‘whipping Toms,’ as they were called, were put down by a special Act of Parliament in 1847[523]. The analogy of these customs with the requirement made of visitors to certain markets or to the roofs of houses in the building to ‘pay their footing’ is obvious[524].
In all these cases, even where the significant whipping or sprinkling is absent, the meaning is the same. The binding with ropes, the loss of the shoes, the lifting in the air, are symbols of capture. And the capture is for the purposes of sacrifice, for which no more suitable victim, in substitution for the priest-king, than a stranger, could be found. This will, I think, be clear by comparison with some further parallels from the harvest field and the threshing-floor, in more than one of which the symbolism is such as actually to indicate the sacrifice itself, as well as the preliminary capture. In many parts of England a stranger, and sometimes even the farmer himself, when visiting a harvest field, is liable to be asked for ‘largess’[525]. In Scotland, the tribute is called ‘head-money,’ and he who refuses is seized by the arms and feet and ‘dumped’ on the ground[526]. Similar customs prevail on the continent, in Germany, Norway, France; and the stranger is often, just as in the ‘hocking’ ceremony, caught with straw ropes, or swathed in a sheaf of corn. It is mainly in Germany that the still more elaborate rites survive. In various districts of Mecklenburg, and of Pomerania, the reapers form a ring round the stranger, and fiercely whet their scythes, sometimes with traditional rhymes which contain a threat to mow him down. In Schleswig, and again in Sweden, the stranger in a threshing-floor is ‘taught the flail-dance’ or ‘the threshing-song.’ The arms of a flail are put round his neck and pressed so tightly that he is nearly choked. When the madder-roots are being dug, a stranger passing the field is caught by the workers, and buried up to his middle in the soil[527].
The central incident of ‘hocking’ appears therefore to be nothing but a form of that symbolical capture of a human victim of which various other examples are afforded by the village festivals. The development of the custom into a play or mock-fight at Coventry may very well have taken place, as the town annals say, about the beginning of the fifteenth century. Whether it had previously been connected by local tradition with some event in the struggles of Danes and Saxons or not, is a question which one must be content to leave unsolved. A final word is due to the curious arrangement by which in the group of customs here considered the rôles of sacrificers and sacrificed are exchanged between men and women on the second day; for it lends support to the theory already put forward that a certain stage in the evolution of the village worship was marked by the merging of previously independent sex-cults.