[758]. See the Helstone Furry-Day Song, Bell, Ancient Poems, pp. 167 f., with a refrain of some value.
[759]. Also cross-week and grass-week. See Dyer, British Popular Customs, pp. 204 ff., for a sympathetic account of the customs still lingering in England.
[760]. The standard description of English May-games, of course hostile, is that of Stubbes in his Anatomie of Abuses, ed. New Shaks. Soc., p. 149. See also the diatribe in John Northbrooke’s Treatise wherein Dicing, Dancing ... are Reprooved. London, 1579. He leans to Chrysostom’s view (that is, Age takes this side against Youth, in the dialogue) that dancing “came firste from the Diuell”, and p. 68ᵇ (only one page of the leaf is numbered) he describes the May.
[761]. Compare the chorus of the Maypole song in Actæon and Diana, in Chappell, I. 126:—
Then to the Maypole come away,
For it is now a holiday.
“Trip and go” was “one of the favourite Morris-dances,” and the words seem to have become a proverbial expression. See Chappell, I. 126, 302. It was on the basis of some refrain of this sort that the first part-song in English, the famous Cuckoo Song, was built up. Ten Brink is surely right in giving it a communal origin, though not communal making.
[762]. “We have brought the summer home,” is the spirit of all the May refrains, as the young folk come back with flowers and boughs. See Brand, “Maypoles.”
[763]. Still in vogue in some parts of Germany. See E. H. Meyer, p. 256.
[764]. Volkslieder, I. 23. For the whole subject, see Uhland’s Abhandlung über die deutschen Volkslieder, pp. 17 ff. Suspicion has been expressed that these flytings are a late echo of the Vergilian eclogue through such a transmitting element as the mediæval Conflictus Veris et Hiemis and the song to the cuckoo:—