Most stubborn, of course, is this converted or Christian survival, and almost as stubborn the custom of the village and of remote agricultural communities; such a procession as Coussemaker[[753]] describes, popular throughout Flanders and Brabant, with a fixed refrain, held its place even in the cities. Occasionally Church and State were opposed;[[754]] a proclamation of Henry VIII forbade processions “with songes and dances from house to house,” and even carols were forbidden by act of Parliament in Scotland. Wakes[[755]] were either abolished, or else passed into that curious communal revival, the love-feast and the watch-meeting of Methodists. But the communal song and procession are fast dying out, and the new century will hear little of them; although early in the old century the Christmas days[[756]] heard many a shouting throng, now with cries of an guy, now gut heil, now hogmenay trololay, give us your white bread and none of your gray! and whatever other etymological puzzles the scanty records can show. These fragments of festal song are too far gone in corruption for profitable use. Aubrey[[757]] felt the lapse, and made such memoranda as these: “get the Christmas caroll and the wasselling song;” “get the song which is sung in the ox-house when they wassell the oxen,” that is, with echo of an old refrain, where they drink “to the ox with the crumpled horne that treads out the corne”; and he has noted a few of these songs. The civil wars, he thinks, made an end of these old customs; “warres doe not only extinguish Religion and Lawes, but Superstition; and no suffimen is a greater fugator of Phantosmes than gunpowder.” But peace has its victories of this sort. Not long ago the procession about village and parish boundaries was common enough; the whole community took part in this festal affair, and all sense as of an individual purpose or individual ownership was laid aside. Shout, dance, song, banquet, even directly ceremonial acts, were the concern of a homogeneous throng, “our village” in strictest communal sense. On the march—for example, the boundary march at Hamelin, in the late autumn,—rose traditional songs, varied by noise of every sort; and at the feast which followed, gentle and simple joined hands in the dance, until, with recent innovations, the gentry withdrew, became mere onlookers, and at last left the old rite to fall, like most communal traditions, into a shabby, vulgar, discredited uproar of the lower classes, a thing common and unclean. A quite similar case of degeneration is quoted by Brand from the Gentleman’s Magazine for June, 1790, as going on at Helstone in Cornwall.[[758]] But where the prosperity of crop and barn is in question, the rites are more stubborn and hold their ground. This Helstone song welcomes summer; but before that was sung, processions of all kinds were wont to go about the fields, and in 1868 what the Times newspaper called a “ritualistic revival” came off in Lancashire, priest and choir making a progress through the fields with cross and banners, and singing as they went. Rogation week is still known as gang-week.[[759]] In older times the community itself was priest and choir; the cases are plentiful and may be read in Brand’s account of “parochial perambulations.” Then there is the song of bringing home the May,[[760]] the dance and song about the Maypole, with material and survival beyond one’s compass; enough to let them echo in the verses put by Nash into his chaotic but pretty play, where the clowns and maids sing as they dance:—
Trip and goe, heave and hoe,
Up and down, to and fro;
From the town to the grove
Two and two let us rove.
A-maying, a-playing:
Love hath no gainsaying;
So merrily trip and go.[[761]]
The voices of the real maying folk are here, and the steps, lightly touched by art in the transfer to the play; in that Furry-Day Song at Helstone, with its opening about Robin Hood and Little John, there is a rougher but less effective refrain:—
With ha-lau-tow, rumble O!