Whereto the countrie franklins flock-meale swarme;"
and the latter observing, in a tract entitled Seven deadly Sinnes of London, 1607, that "Cruelty has got another part to play; it is acted like the old morals at Manningtree."[251:C]
This custom of stage-playing at annual fairs continued to support a few itinerant companies; but in general, after the halls of the nobility and gentry were shut against them[251:D], they divided into small parties of three or four, and at length became mere jugglers, jesters, and puppet-show exhibitors. This last-mentioned amusement, indeed, and its professors, seem to have been known, in this country, under the name of motions, and motion-men, as early as the commencement
of the sixteenth century[252:A]; and the term, indeed, continued to be thus applied in the time of Jonson, who repeatedly uses it, in his Bartholomew Fair.[252:B] The degradation of the STROLLING companies, by the statutes of Elizabeth and James, rendered the exhibition of automaton figures, at this period, common throughout the kingdom. They are alluded to by Shakspeare under the appellation of drolleries; thus in the Tempest, Alonzo, alarmed at the strange shapes bringing in the banquet, exclaims
"Give us kind keepers, heavens! What were these?"
a question to which Sebastian replies,
"A LIVING drollery,"[252:C]
meaning by this epithet to distinguish them from the wooden puppets, the performers in the shows called drolleries.
A very popular annual diversion was celebrated, during the age of Shakspeare, and for more than twenty-five years after, on the Cotswold Hills in Gloucestershire. It has been said that the rural games which constituted this anniversary, were founded by one Robert Dover on the accession of James I.;[252:D] but it appears to be ascertained that Dover was only the reviver, with additional splendour, of sports which had been yearly exhibited, at an early period, on the same spot, and perhaps only discontinued for a short time before their revival in 1603. "We may learn from Rudder's History of Glocestershire," says Mr. Chalmers, "that, in more early times, there was at Cottswold a customary meeting, every year, at Whitsontide, called
an ale, or Whitson-ale, which was attended by all the lads, and the lasses, of the villegery, who, annually, chose a Lord and Lady of the Yule, who were the authorized rulers of the rustic revellers. There is in the Church of Cirencester, says Rudder, an ancient monument, in basso relievo, that evinces the antiquity of those games, which were known to Shakspeare, before the accession of King James. They were known, also, to Drayton early in that reign: for upon the map of Glocestershire, which precedes the fourteenth song, there is a representation of a Whitsun-ale, with a may pole, which last is inscribed 'Heigh for Cotswold.'