“SOMERSET.”
(1) A Latin term signifying “in the first place,” or “to commence with,” and used as the opening of legal or official directions.
It was Christmas Eve. The great hall of Hatfield House gleamed with the light of many candles that flashed upon the sconce and armor and polished floor. Holly and mistletoe, rosemary and bay, and all the decorations of an old-time English Christmas were tastefully arranged. A burst of laughter ran through the hall, as through the ample doorway, and down the broad stair, trooped the Motley train of the Lord of Misrule to open the Christmas revels. A fierce and ferocious-looking fellow was he, with his great green mustache and his ogre-like face. His dress was a gorgeous parti-colored jerkin and half-hose, trunks, ruff, slouch-boots of Cordova leather, and high befeathered steeple hat. His long staff, topped with a fool’s head, cap, and bells, rang loudly on the floor, as, preceded by his diminutive but pompous page, he led his train around and around the great hall, lustily singing the chorus:
“Like prince and king he leads the ring;
Right merrily we go. Sing hey-trix, trim-go-trix,
Under the mistletoe!”
A menagerie let loose, or the most dyspeptic of after-dinner dreams, could not be more bewildering than was this motley train of the Lord of Misrule. Giants and dwarfs, dragons and griffins, hobby-horses and goblins, Robin Hood and the Grand Turk, bears and boars and fantastic animals that never had a name, boys and girls, men and women, in every imaginable costume and device—around and around the hall they went, still ringing out the chorus:
“Sing hey-trix, trim-go-trix,
Under the mistletoe!”
Then, standing in the centre of his court, the Lord of Misrule bade his herald declare that from Christmas Eve to Twelfth Night he was Lord Supreme; that, with his magic art, he transformed all there into children, and charged them, on their fealty to act only as such. “I absolve them all from wisdom,” he said; “I bid them be just wise enough to make fools of themselves, and do decree that none shall sit apart in pride and eke in self-sufficiency to laugh at others”; and then the fun commenced.
Off in stately Whitehall, in the palace of the boy king, her brother, the revels were grander and showier; but to the young Elizabeth, not yet skilled in all the stiffness of the royal court, the Yule-tide feast at Hatfield House brought pleasure enough; and so, seated at her holly-trimmed virginal—that great-great-grandfather of the piano of to-day,—she, whose rare skill as a musician has come down to us, would—when wearied with her “prankes and japes”—“tap through” some fitting Christmas carol, or that older lay of the Yule-tide “Mumming”:
To shorten winter’s sadness see where the folks with gladness Disguised, are all a-coming, right wantonly a-mumming,
Fa-la!
“Whilst youthful sports are lasting, to feasting turn our fasting:
With revels and with wassails make grief and care our vassals,
Fa-la!”