The morrice-idols, Whitsun-ales, can be
But profane relics of a jubilee.[614]
One of the greatest difficulties of the English Church was to suppress the dancing which the populace—supported by immemorial custom—insisted upon maintaining, even within the churches and the churchyards. Even to-day English churches possess reindeer heads and other paraphernalia of archaic feasts, and in Paris, as recently as the seventeenth century, the clergy and singing boys might have been seen dancing at Easter in the churches.[615] In Cornwall on the road from Temple to Bradford Bridge is a stone circle known as The Trippet Stones, and doubtless many churches occupy the sites of similar places where from time immemorial the Folk tripped it jubilantly on jubilees: custom notoriously dies hard.
In the Eastern counties of England the two principal reapers were known as the Harvest Lord and Lady, who presided over the Hoppings, and other festivities of the season. Sometimes the Harvest Lady was known as the Hop Queen,[616] and this important potentate may be connoted with the harvest doll which, in Kent particularly, was termed the Ivy Girl. As Prof. Weekley connotes the surname Hoppe with Hobbs, Hobson, and Hopkins, we may infer from the name Hopkinson, there must once have been a Hop King as well as a Hop Queen, and the rôle of this English Hopkin was probably similar to that enacted by other Jack-in-Greens, King-of-the-Years, or Spirit-of-the-Years. The pomp and circumstance of the parallel of the Hopkin ceremony in Greece may be judged from the following particulars: “They wreathe,” says Plato, “a pole of olive wood with laurel and various flowers. On the top is fitted a bronze globe from which they suspend smaller ones. Midway round the pole they place a lesser globe, binding it with purple fillets, but the end of the pole is decked with saffron. By the topmost globe they mean the sun, to which they actually compare Apollo. The globe beneath this is the moon; the smaller globes hung on are the stars and constellations, and the fillets are the course of the year, for they make them 365 in number. The Daphnephoria is headed by a boy, both whose parents are alive, and his nearest male relation carries the filleted pole. The Laurel-Bearer himself, who follows next, holds on to the laurel; he has his hair hanging loose, he wears a golden wreath, and he is dressed out in a splendid robe to his feet and he wears light shoes. There follows him a band of maidens holding out boughs before them, to enforce the supplication of the hymns.”[617]
With this Greek festival of the Laurel-Bearer may be connoted the “one traditional dance connected with all our old festivals and merry makings” in Guernsey, and known as A mon beau Laurier. In this ceremony the dancers join hands, whirl round, curtsey, and kiss a central object, in later days either a man or a woman, but, in the opinion of Miss Carey, “perhaps originally either a sacred stone or a primeval altar”.[618] Adulation of this character is calculated to create snobs, the word as we have seen being fundamentally connected with stump. I have already suggested a connection between the salutation A mon beau Laurier and the kissing or bussing of Paul’s stump at Billingsgate, which is situated almost immediately next Ebgate. On Mount Hube, in Jersey, have been found the remains of a supposed Druidic temple, and doubtless Mount Hube, like Apechurch or Abechurch, was a primitive Hopeton, oppidum, or Abbey.
Fig. 332.—From The Everyday Book (Hone, W.).
Fig. 333.—From The Everyday Book (Hone, W.).