It does not much matter who speaks these words in the versions of Holophernes, but there are those who think that they originally belonged to the representative of winter, and contained an allusion to the hardness of the frost-bound earth[766]. Personally I do not see why they should refer to anything but the armour which a champion might reasonably be supposed to wear.
A curious thing about the St. George play is the width of its range. All the versions, with the possible exception of that found at Brill, seem to be derived from a common type. They are spread over England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and only in the eastern counties do they give way to the partly, though not wholly, independent Plough Monday type. Unfortunately, the degeneracy of the texts is such that any closer investigation into their inter-relations or into the origin and transmission of the archetype would probably be futile. Something, however, must be said as to the prominence, at any rate outside Scotland, of the character of St. George. As far as I can see, the play owes nothing at all to John Kirke’s stage-play of The Seven Champions of Christendom, printed in 1638[767]. It is possible, however, that it may be a development of a sword-dance in which, as in the Shetland dance, the ‘seven champions’ had usurped the place of more primitive heroes. If so the six champions, other than St. George, have singularly vanished[768]. In any case, there can have been no ‘seven champions,’ either in sword-dance or mummers’ play, before Richard Johnson brought together the scattered legends of the national heroes in his History of the Seven Champions in 1596[769]. This fact presents no difficulty, for the archetype of our texts need certainly not be earlier than the seventeenth century[770]. By this time the literary dramatic tradition was fully established, even in the provinces, and it may well have occurred to Holophernes to convert the sword-dance into the semblance of a regular play.
On the other hand, the mediaeval period had its dramatic or semi-dramatic performances in which St. George figured, and possibly it is to these, and not to the ‘seven champions,’ that his introduction into the sword-dance is due. These performances generally took the form of a ‘riding’ or procession on St. George’s day, April 23. Such ridings may, of course, have originally, like the Godiva processions or the midsummer shows, have preserved the memory of the pre-Christian perambulations of the fields in spring, but during the period for which records are available they were rather municipal celebrations of a semi-ecclesiastical type. St. George was the patron saint of England, and his day was honoured as one of the greater feasts, notably at court, where the chivalric order of the Garter was under his protection[771]. The conduct of the ridings was generally, from the end of the fourteenth century onwards, in the hands of a guild, founded not as a trade guild, but as a half social, half religious fraternity, for the worship of the saint, and the mutual aid and good fellowship of its members. The fullest accounts preserved are from Norwich where the guild or company of St. George was founded in 1385, received a charter from Henry V in 1416, and by 1451 had obtained a predominant share in the government of the city[772]. The records of this guild throw a good deal of light on the riding. The brethren and ‘sustren’ had a chapel in the choir of the cathedral, and after the Reformation held their feasts in a chapel of the common hall of the city, which had formerly been the church of a Dominican convent. The riding was already established by 1408 when the court of the guild ordered that ‘the George shall go in procession and make a conflict with the Dragon and keep his estate both days.’ The George was a man in ‘coat armour beaten with silver,’ and had his club-bearer, henchmen, minstrels and banners. He was accompanied by the Dragon, the guild-priest, and the court and brethren of the guild in red and white capes and gowns. The procession went to ‘the wood’ outside the city, and here doubtless the conflict with the dragon took place. By 1537 there had been added to the dramatis personae St. Margaret, also called ‘the lady,’ who apparently aided St. George in his enterprise[773]. Strange to say, the guild survived the Reformation. In 1552, the court ordered, ‘there shall be neither George nor Margaret, but for pastime the dragon to come and show himself, as in other years.’ But the feast continued, and in spite of an attempt to get rid of him under the Long Parliament, the Dragon endured until 1732 when the guild was dissolved. Eighteenth-century witnesses describe the procession as it then existed. The Dragon was carried by a man concealed in its body. It was of basket work and painted cloth, and could move or spread its wings, and distend or contract its head. The ranks were kept by ‘whifflers’ who juggled with their swords, and by ‘Dick Fools,’ in motley and decked with cats’ tails and small bells. There is one more point of interest about the Norwich guild. In the fifteenth century it included many persons of distinction in Norfolk. Sir John Fastolf gave it an ‘angell silver and guylt.’ And amongst the members in 1496 was Sir John Paston. I have already quoted the lament in the Paston Letters over William Woode, the keeper, whom the writer ‘kepyd thys iij yer to pleye Seynt Jorge and Robyn Hod and the Shryff off Nottyngham,’ and who at a critical moment went off to Bernysdale and left his master in the lurch[774]. I have also identified his Robin Hood play, and now it becomes apparent where he played ‘Seynt Jorge.’ It is curious how the fragments of the wreckage of time fit into one another. The riding of the George is not peculiar to Norwich. We find it at Leicester[775], at Coventry[776], at Stratford[777], at Chester[778], at York, at Dublin[779]. An elaborate programme for the Dublin procession is preserved. It included an emperor and empress with their train, St. George on horse-back, the dragon led by a line and the king and queen of Dele. But no princess is mentioned. The ‘may’ or maiden figured at York, however, and there was also a St. Christopher. At other places, such as Reading, Aston[780] and Louth[781], an equestrian figure, called a ‘George,’ is known to have stood on a ‘loft’ in the church, and here, too, an annual ‘riding’ may be presumed.
There is no proof that the dramatic element in these ‘ridings’ was anything more than a mystère mimé, or pageant in dumb show. On the other hand, there were places where the performance on St. George’s day took the form of a regular miracle-play. The performance described by Collier as taking place before Henry V and the Emperor Sigismund at Windsor in 1416 turns out on examination of Collier’s authority to be really a ‘soteltie,’ a cake or raised pie of elaborate form. But the town of Lydd had its St. George play in 1456, and probably throughout the century; while in 1490 the chaplain of the guild of St. George at New Romney went to see this Lydd play with a view to reproducing it at the sister town. In 1511 again a play of St. George is recorded to have been held at Bassingbourne in Cambridgeshire, not on St. George’s, but on St. Margaret’s day[782].
Obviously the subject-matter of all these pageants and miracles was provided by the familiar ecclesiastical legend of St. George the dragon-slayer, with which was occasionally interwoven the parallel legend of St. Margaret[783]. Similar performances can be traced on the continent. There was one at Mons called le lumeçon[784]. Rabelais describes one at Metz, of which, however, the hero was not St. George, but yet another dragon-slayer, St. Clement[785]. There is no need to ascribe to them a folk origin, although the dragon-slaying champion is a common personage in folk-tale[786]. They belong to the cycle of religious drama, which is dealt with in the second volume of this book. And although in Shropshire at least they seem to have been preserved in a village stage-play up to quite a recent date[787], they obviously do not directly survive in the folk-play with which we are concerned. As far as I know, that nowhere takes place on St. George’s day. The Dragon is very rarely a character, and though St. George’s traditional exploit is generally mentioned, it is, as that very mention shows, not the motive of the action. On the other hand the legend, in its mediaeval form, has no room for the episode of the Doctor[788]. At the same time the Dragon does sometimes occur, and the traditional exploit is mentioned, and therefore if any one chooses to say that the fame of St. George in the guild celebrations as well as the fame of the ‘seven champions’ romance determined his choice as the hero of the later sword-dance rhymes, I do not see that there is much to urge against the view[789].
With regard to the main drift of this chapter, the criticism presents itself; if the folk-plays are essentially a celebration of the renouveau of spring, how is it that the performances generally take place in mid-winter at Christmas? The answer is that, as will be shown in the next chapter, none of the Christmas folk-customs are proper to mid-winter. They have been attracted by the ecclesiastical feast from the seasons which in the old European calendar preceded and followed it, from the beginning of winter and the beginning of summer or spring. The folk-play has come with the rest. But the transference has not invariably taken place. The Norfolk versions belong not to Christmas but to Plough Monday, which lies immediately outside the Christmas season proper, and is indeed, though probably dislocated from its primitive date, the earliest of the spring feasts. The St. George play itself is occasionally performed at Easter, and even perhaps on May-day, whilst versions, which in their present form contain clear allusions to Christmas, yet betray another origin by the title which they bear of the ‘Pace-eggers’’ or ‘Pasque-eggers’’ play[790]. Christmas, however, has given to the play the characteristic figure of Old Father Christmas. And the players are known as ‘mummers’ and ‘guisers,’ or, in Cornwall, ‘geese-dancers,’ because their performance was regarded as a variety of the ‘mumming’ or ‘disguising’ which, as we shall see, became a regular name for the Christmas revel or quête[791].
CHAPTER XI
THE BEGINNING OF WINTER
[Bibliographical Note.—I have largely followed the conclusions of A. Tille, Deutsche Weihnacht (1893) and Yule and Christmas (1899). The Roman winter feasts are well treated by J. Marquardt and T. Mommsen, Handbuch der römischen Alterthümer (3rd ed. 1881-8), vol. vii; W. W. Fowler, The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic (1899); G. Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer (1902); and the Christian feasts by L. Duchesne, Origines du Culte chrétien (2nd ed. 1898). On the history of Christmas, H. Usener, Das Weihnachtsfest, in Religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen, vol. i (1889), and F. C. Conybeare’s introduction to The Key of Truth (1898) should also be consulted. Much information on the Kalends customs is collected by M. Lipenius, Strenarum Historia, in J. G. Graevius, Thesaurus Antiquitatum Romanarum (1699), vol. xii. I have brought together a number of ecclesiastical references to the Kalends, from the third to the eleventh century, in Appendix N.]
So far this study has concerned itself, on the one hand with the general character of the peasant festivals, on the other with the special history of such of these as fall within the summer cycle of the agricultural year, from ploughing to harvest. The remaining chapters will approach the corresponding festivals, centring around Christmas, of winter. These present a somewhat more difficult problem, partly because their elements are not quite so plainly agricultural, partly because of the remarkable dislocations which the development and clash of civilizations have brought about.
It must, I think, be taken as established that the Germano-Keltic tribes had no primitive mid-winter feast, corresponding directly to the modern Christmas[792]. They had no solstitial feast, for they knew nothing of the solstices. And although they had a winter feast of the dead, belonging rather to the domestic than to the elemental side of cult, this probably fell not at the middle, but at the beginning of the season. It was an aspect in the great feast with which not the winter only but the Germano-Keltic year began. This took place when the advance of snow and frost drove the warriors back from foray and the cattle from the pastures. The scarcity of fodder made the stall-feeding of the whole herd an impossibility, and there was therefore an economic reason for a great slaughtering. This in its turn led to a great banquet on the fresh meat, and to a great sacrifice, accompanied with the usual perambulations, water-rites and fire-rites which sacrifice to the deities of field and flock entailed[793]. The vegetation spirit would again be abroad, no longer, as in spring or summer, in the form of flowers and fresh green boughs, but in that of the last sheaf or ‘kern-baby’ saved from harvest, or in that of such evergreens or rarer blossoms as might chance to brave the snows. The particular ‘intention’ of the festival would be to secure the bounty of the divine powers for the coming year, and a natural superstition would find omens for the whole period in the events of the initial day. The feast, however, would be domestic, as well as seasonal. The fire on the hearth was made ‘new,’ and beside it the fathers, resting from the toils of war, or herding or tillage, held jollification with their children. Nor were the dead forgotten. Minni were drunk in honour of ancestors and ancestral deities; and a share of the banquet was laid out for such of these as might be expected, in the whirl of the wintry storm, to revisit the familiar house-place.