Secondly, there are the Plough Monday plays of the east Midlands[735]. These appear in Nottinghamshire, Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire. Two printed versions are available. The first comes from Cropwell in Nottinghamshire[736]. The actors are ‘the plough-bullocks.’ The male characters are Tom the Fool, a Recruiting Sergeant, and a Ribboner or Recruit, three farm-servants, Threshing Blade, Hopper Joe[737], and the Ploughman, a Doctor, and Beelzebub[738]. There are two women, a young Lady and old Dame Jane. Tom Fool is presenter. The Ribboner, rejected by the young Lady, enlists as a recruit. The Lady is consoled by Tom Fool. Then enter successively the three farm-servants, each describing his function on the farm. Dame Jane tries to father a child on Tom Fool. Beelzebub knocks her down[739], and kills her. The Doctor comes in, and after some comic business about his travels, his qualifications and his remedies[740], declares Dame Jane to be only in a trance, and raises her up. A country dance and songs follow, and the performance ends with a quête. The second version, from Lincolnshire, is very similar[741]. But there are no farm-servants, and instead of Beelzebub is a personage called ‘old Esem Esquesem,’ who carries a broom. It is he, not an old woman, who is killed and brought to life. There are several dancers, besides the performers; and these include ‘Bessy,’ a man dressed as a woman, with a cow’s tail.
The distinction between a popular and a literary or heroic type of personification which was noticeable in the sword-dances persists in the folk-plays founded upon them. Both in the Revesby play and in the Plough Monday plays, the drama is carried on by personages resembling the ‘grotesques’ of the sword-and morris-dances[742]. There are no heroic characters. The death is of the nature of an accident or an execution. On the other hand, in the ‘mummers’ play’ of St. George, the heroes take once more the leading part, and the death, or at least one of the deaths, is caused by a fight amongst them. This play is far more widely spread than its rivals. It is found in all parts of England, in Wales, and in Ireland; in Scotland it occurs also, but here some other hero is generally substituted as protagonist for St. George[743]. The following account is based on the twenty-nine versions, drawn from chap-books or from oral tradition, enumerated in the bibliographical note. The list might, doubtless, be almost indefinitely extended. As will soon be seen, the local variations of the play are numerous. In order to make them intelligible, I have given in full in an appendix a version from Lutterworth in Leicestershire. This is chosen, not as a particularly interesting variant, for that it is not, but on the contrary as being comparatively colourless. It shows very clearly and briefly the normal structure of the play, and may be regarded as the type from which the other versions diverge[744].
The whole performance may be divided, for convenience of analysis, into three parts, the Presentation, the Drama, the Quête. In the first somebody speaks a prologue, claiming a welcome from the spectators[745], and then the leading characters are in turn introduced. The second consists of a fight followed by the intervention of a doctor to revive the slain. In the third some supernumerary characters enter, and there is a collection. It is the dramatic nucleus that first requires consideration. The leading fighter is generally St. George, who alone appears in all the versions. Instead of ‘St. George,’ he is sometimes called ‘Sir George,’ and more often ‘Prince George’ or ‘King George,’ modifications which one may reasonably suppose to be no older than the present Hanoverian dynasty. At Whitehaven and at Falkirk he is ‘Prince George of Ville.’ George’s chief opponent is usually one of two personages, who are not absolutely distinct from each other[746]. One is the ‘Turkish Knight,’ of whom a variant appears to be the ‘Prince of Paradine’ (Manchester), or ‘Paradise’ (Newport, Eccleshall), perhaps originally ‘Palestine.’ He is sometimes represented with a blackened face[747]. The other is variously called ‘Slasher,’ ‘Captain Slasher,’ ‘Bold Slasher,’ or, by an obvious corruption, ‘Beau Slasher.’ Rarer names for him are ‘Bold Slaughterer’ (Bampton), ‘Captain Bluster’ (Dorset [A]), and ‘Swiff, Swash, and Swagger’ (Chiswick). His names fairly express his vaunting disposition, which, however, is largely shared by the other characters in the play. In the place of, or as minor fighters by the side of George, the Turkish Knight and Bold Slasher, there appear, in one version or another, a bewildering variety of personages, of whom only a rough classification can be attempted. Some belong to the heroic cycles. Such are ‘Alexander’ (Newcastle, Whitehaven), ‘Hector’ (Manchester), ‘St. Guy’ (Newport), ‘St. Giles’ (Eccleshall)[748], ‘St. Patrick’ (Dorset [A], Wexford), ‘King Alfred’ and ‘King Cole’ (Brill), ‘Giant Blunderbore’ (Brill), ‘Giant Turpin’ (Cornwall). Others again are moderns who have caught the popular imagination: ‘Bold Bonaparte’ (Leigh)[749], and ‘King of Prussia’ (Bampton, Oxford)[750], ‘King William’ (Brill), the ‘Duke of Cumberland’ (Oxford) and the ‘Duke of Northumberland’ (Islip), ‘Lord Nelson’ (Stoke Gabriel, Devon)[751], ‘Wolfe’ and ‘Wellington’ (Cornwall)[752], even the ‘Prince Imperial’ (Wilts)[753], all have been pressed into the service. In some cases characters have lost their personal names, if they ever had any, and figure merely as ‘Knight,’ ‘Soldier,’ ‘Valiant Soldier,’ ‘Noble Captain,’ ‘Bold Prince,’ ‘Gracious King.’ Others bear names which defy explanation, ‘Alonso’ (Chiswick), ‘Hy Gwyer’ (Hollington), ‘Marshalee’ and ‘Cutting Star’ (Dorset [B]). The significance of ‘General Valentine’ and ‘Colonel Spring’ (Dorset [A]) will be considered presently; and ‘Room’ (Dorset [B]), ‘Little Jack,’ the ‘Bride’ and the ‘Fool’ (Brill), and the ‘King of Egypt’ (Newcastle, Whitehaven) have strayed in amongst the fighters from the presenters. The fighting generally takes the form of a duel, or a succession of duels. In the latter case, George may fight all comers, or he may intervene to subdue a previously successful champion. But an important point is that he is not always victorious. On the contrary, the versions in which he slays and those in which he is slain are about equal in number. In two versions (Brill, Steyning) the fighting is not a duel or a series of duels, but a mêlée. The Brill play, in particular, is quite unlike the usual type. A prominent part is taken by the Dragon, with whom fight, all at once, St. George and a heterogeneous company made up of King Alfred and his Bride, King Cole, King William, Giant Blunderbore, Little Jack and a morris-dance Fool.
Whatever the nature of the fight, the result is always the same. One or more of the champions falls, and then appears upon the scene a Doctor, who brings the dead to life again. The Doctor is a comic character. He enters, boasting his universal skill, and works his cure by exhibiting a bolus, or by drawing out a tooth with a mighty pair of pliers. At Newbold he is ‘Dr. Brown,’ at Islip ‘Dr. Good’ (also called ‘Jack Spinney’), at Brill ‘Dr. Ball’; in Dorsetshire (A) he is an Irishman, ‘Mr. Martin’ (perhaps originally ‘Martyr’) ‘Dennis.’ More often he is nameless. Frequently the revival scene is duplicated; either the Doctor is called in twice, or one cure is left to him, and another is effected by some other performer, such as St. George (Dorset [B]), ‘Father Christmas’ (Newbold, Steyning), or the Fool (Bampton).
The central action of the play consists, then, in these two episodes of the fight and the resurrection; and the protagonists, so to speak, are the heroes—a ragged troop of heroes, certainly—and the Doctor. But just as in the sword-dances, so in the plays, we find introduced, besides the protagonists, a number of supernumerary figures. The nature of these, and the part they take, must now be considered. Some of them are by this time familiar. They are none other than the grotesques that have haunted this discussion of the village festivals from the very beginning, and that I have attempted to trace to their origin in magical or sacrificial custom. There are the woman, or lad dressed in woman’s clothes, the hobby-horse, the fool, and the black-faced man. The woman and the hobby-horse are unmistakable; the other two are a little more Protean in their modern appearance. The ‘Fool’ is so called only at Manchester and at Brill, where he brings his morris-dance with him. At Lutterworth he is the ‘Clown’; in Cornwall, ‘Old Squire’; at Newbold, ‘Big Head and Little Wits.’ But I think that we may also recognize him in the very commonly occurring figure ‘Beelzebub,’ also known in Cornwall as ‘Hub Bub’ and at Chiswick as ‘Lord Grubb.’ The key to this identification is the fact that in several cases Beelzebub uses the description ‘big head and little wit’ to announce himself on his arrival. Occasionally, however, the personality of the Fool has been duplicated. At Lutterworth Beelzebub and the Clown, at Newbold Beelzebub and Big Head and Little Wits appear in the same play[754]. The black-faced man has in some cases lost his black face, but he keeps it at Bampton, where he is ‘Tom the Tinker,’ at Rugby, where he is ‘Little Johnny Sweep,’ and in a Sussex version, where he is also a sweep[755]. The analogy of the May-day chimney-sweeps is an obvious one. A black face was a feature in the mediaeval representation of devils, and the sweep of some plays is probably in origin identical with the devil, black-faced or not, of others. This is all the more so, as the devil, like the sweep, usually carries a besom[756]. One would expect his name, and not the Fool’s, to be Beelzebub. He is, however, ‘Little Devil Dout’ or ‘Doubt,’ ‘Little Jack Doubt’ or ‘Jack Devil Doubt.’ At Leigh Little Devil Doubt also calls himself ‘Jack,’
‘With my wife and family on my back’;
and perhaps we may therefore trace a further avatar of this same personage in the ‘John’ or ‘Johnny Jack’ who at Salisbury gives a name to the whole performance[757]. He is also ‘Little Jack’ (Brill, St. Mary Bourne), ‘Fat Jack’ (Islip), ‘Happy Jack’ (Berkshire, Hollington), ‘Humpty Jack’ (Newbold). He generally makes the remark about his wife and family. What he does carry upon his back is sometimes a hump, sometimes a number of rag-dolls. I take it that the hump came first, and that the dolls arose out of Jack’s jocular explanation of his own deformity. But why the hump? Was it originally a bag of soot? Or the saccus with which the German Knechte Ruperte wander in the Twelve nights?[758] At Hollington and in a Hampshire version Jack has been somewhat incongruously turned into a press-gang. In this capacity he gets at Hollington the additional name of ‘Tommy Twing-twang.’
Having got these grotesques, traditional accompaniments of the play, to dispose of somehow, what do the playwrights do with them? The simplest and most primitive method is just to bring them in, to show them to the spectators when the fighting is over. Thus Beelzebub, like the Fool at one point in the Revesby play, often comes in with
‘Here come I; ain’t been yit,
Big head and little wit.’