This one was the Great Harry, built in 1504. In about 80 years only afterwards, the English had thirty vessels of war at sea, and with these dared to attack the Invincible Armada of Spain, consisting of one hundred and thirty vessels, and by the assistance of a providential tempest, totally dispersed and destroyed it. Then Howard of Effingham, Drake, Frobisher, Hawkins, were the names of our commanders,—names which thenceforward filled all the known world with terror, and gave to England the empire of the seas. With this extension of national interests, a more active and earnest spirit was diffused through the people. The struggle with enemies abroad, and with the rapidly maturing spirit of religious freedom at home, kept Elizabeth engaged, and induced in her a rigour of persecution, and in the people a rigour of resistance and the soul of martyrdom. Before the development of these antagonist powers, all lightness fled; singing gave way to preaching and listening; dancing, to running anxiously to know the fate of sufferers, and the doctrines of fresh-springing teachers. So completely had the old relish for merriment and pastimes died out, that her successor, James, endeavoured to compel the people, by the publication of his “Book of Sports” to be jocose and gamesome. But it would not do. The soul of the people was now up in arms for their rights; and the despotic nature of himself and his son, resisting their claims, kept up such a fever of political strife in the kingdom as would have put out all jesting and capering if they had not gone before. The hierarchy fell,—fell in one wide chaos of civil contention; and, as if torrents of blood and volumes of fire, and the trampling hoofs of thousands of careering cavalry had not been enough to overwhelm and dash to pieces every remaining fragment of jollity and popular fête,—in came Puritanism from Geneva, and the Solemn League and Covenant from Scotland. There was a final close to all the pageantry of processions and the merry saintliness of festivals: they were denounced and abhorred as the carnality of Anti-Christ and the rags of the scarlet woman. Charles II. indeed, could revive licentiousness, but he could not bring back the holiday guise of “the old profession.” And what has been the course of England since? One ever-widening and ascending course of mighty wars, expanding commerce, vast colonization, and the growth of science, literature, and general knowledge. We are no longer a nation of feudal combatants, of piping shepherds, and thoughtless peasantry,—but of busy, scheming, money-collecting, family-creating men. Our last tremendous war put the climax to this amazing career. In it all Europe seemed torn to pieces and organized anew. We, as a people, were led by circumstances to put forth the most stupendous energies that perhaps any nation ever did. To defend our colonies; to support the interests of our allies with arms and subsidies; to supply the whole of Europe with all species of manufactures, and almost all species of merchandise, and through this demand stimulating into existence the powers of steam and machinery, a population of amazing numbers to maintain. And then, the shock and the revulsion when this great war-system suddenly ceased! An immense debt, vast taxes, the necessity of maintaining high prices, the necessity of boundless competition and low wages that we might so compete with the continent, returning to its old habits.
Who does not know with what a fiery force this has fallen on the working classes? What distress, what pauperization, what desperation, brought to the very pitch of rebellion, they have gone through; and recollecting this, can any one think otherwise than that it has been enough to sober any people that is not destitute of every element of high character. If we could, after a baptism like this, be still like the French, a dancing, dissipation-loving people, we should, like them, have but a fitful care to secure our liberties, and the comforts of good government; like them, at this moment, we should be the victims of successive revolutions, yielding no fruit but tyranny. But we are a sober and a thoughtful people, and are therefore working out of the mass of our difficulties the form of a renewed constitution, adapted to our present enlarged views and experience. But besides this, our energies have not been called forth for this good end alone; they have brought with their exercise a high relish for intellectual pleasures. Our minds have been stirred mightily, and, like animals that during their wintry torpor feel no hunger, yet feel it keenly the moment they are awake, they have become hungry for congenial aliment. We have fed on much knowledge, and are no longer children, but full-grown men, with manly appetites and experienced tastes. Could we now sit, as our ancestors did, for nine hours together at a mystery? Could we endure to read through the chronicles and romances of the middle ages,—books which spun out their recitals to the most extraordinary length, and were never too long; for books then were few? If we could not, so neither could the simple pleasures and rural festivities satisfy the peasantry of this. We are the creatures of new circumstances, and of a higher reach of knowledge. A combination of causes, too puissant to be resisted, has made hopeless all return to the juvenilities of the past. And after all, happiness—of which the people, however unwisely, are always in quest, does not consist in booths and garlands, drums and horns, or in capering round a May-pole. Happiness is a fireside thing. It is a thing of grave and earnest tone; and the deeper and truer it is, the more is it removed from the riot of mere merriment:
The highest mood allowed
To sinful creatures, for all happiness
Worthy that holy name, seems steeped in tears,
Like flowers in dew, or tinged with misty hues,
Like stars in halo.
John Wilson.
And the more our humble classes come to taste of the pleasures of books and intellect, and the deep fireside affections which grow out of the growth of heart and mind, the less charms will the outward forms of rejoicing have for them. Beautiful and poetical, I grant, are many of the old rites and customs of which we have been speaking; but they are beautiful and poetical as belonging to their own times,—and many of them, I am inclined to believe, as seen in the distance; for, seen at hand, there is a vulgarity in most popular customs that offends invariably our present tastes. Nor do I mean to say that our present population cannot be cheerful. A more truly cheerful people never existed; and they can dance and be merry too when they will; as Christmas, and Whitsuntide, and their annual village feasts and their harvest-homes can testify. Since the Reformation, the saints of the calendar having become mere names in this country, their festivals have accordingly died away. Whitsuntide, Easter, and Christmas seem almost all that have maintained their stand; and of these we will speak a little; but in the first place let us have a few words on May-Day.
CHAPTER III.
MAY-DAY.
May-day was celebrated with a gaiety and poetical grace far beyond all other festivals. It had come down from the pagan times with all its Arcadian beauty, and seemed to belong to those seasons more than to any Christian occasions. It is one that the poets have all combined to lavish their most delicious strains upon. The time of the year was itself so inspiring,—with all its newness of feeling, its buds and blossoms and smiling skies. It seemed just the chosen period for heaven and earth and youth to mingle their gladness together. There is no festivity that is so totally gone! Washington Irving in his very interesting account of his visit to Newstead Abbey, takes the opportunity to say, that he had been accused by the critics of describing in his Sketch Book popular manners and customs that had gone by, but that he had found those very customs existing in that neighbourhood. That those who doubted the accuracy of his statements must go north of the Trent. That he found May-poles standing in the old-fashioned villages, and that a band of plough-bullocks even came to the abbey while he was there.
Washington Irving certainly seemed most agreeably impressed with the primitive air of that part of Nottinghamshire, and it is interesting to see the effect which places most familiar to you produce on the minds of strangers of taste and poetical feeling. His delight at finding himself in old Sherwood, the haunt of Robin Hood; in hearing the bells of Mansfield at a distance; and his remarking the names of Wagstaff, Hardstaff, Beardall, as names abounding about the forest, naturally suggesting the character of those who first bore them—names so common to our eyes as never to have awakened any such idea;—all this is very agreeable; but let no lover of ancient customs go thither on the strength of Washington Irving’s report, unless he means to travel much farther north of the Trent than Newstead. There is certainly a May-pole standing in the village of Linby near Newstead, and there is one in the village of Farnsfield near Southwell; but I have been endeavouring to recollect any others for twenty miles round and cannot do it, and though garlands are generally hung on these poles on May-day, wreathed by the hands of some fair damsel who has a lingering affection for the olden times, and carried up by some adventurous lad; alas! the dance beneath it, where is it? In the dales of Derbyshire, May-poles are more frequent, but the dancing I never saw. In my own recollection, the appearance of morris-dancers, guisers, plough-bullocks, and Christmas carollers, has become more and more rare, and to find them we must go into the retired hamlets of Staffordshire, and the dales of Yorkshire and Lancashire.
One would have thought that the May-day fête would have outlasted all others, except it were Christmas, on the strength of the poetical wealth of heart and fancy woven with it through our literature. Every writer of any taste and fancy has referred with enthusiasm to May-day. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Fletcher, Milton, Browne, Herrick, and all our later poets, have sung of it with all their hearts. Chaucer, in Palamon and Arcite, describes Arcite going to the woods for garlands on May morning, according to the old custom. He