Page:A short history of social life in England.djvu/202

182 friends and keeping company, conversing with their gossips, and making merry at child-births, christenings and funerals, and all with the permission and knowledge of their husbands." Indeed, this making merry on solemn occasions was characteristic of Elizabethan days. At Christmas, commemorated in other countries by devotional practices, England "rang from one end to the other with mirth. Sports and fooleries, feasts and frolics, games and revels filled the joyous days from All Hallows Eve to the Feast of Pentecost. They loved a noise: the firing of cannon, the beating of drums, the blast of trumpets and the ringing of many bells was as music in their ears. Our Elizabethan forefathers were not yet afflicted with the nerves of the twentieth century. Bear-baiting and bull-baiting presented no horrors to their minds; men and women watched, with varying degrees of pleasure, the hoodwinking of the wretched animals; they applauded the circle of those who plied the tethered beast with whips till it madly charged its unknown foes. But then they were familiar with the sight of public executions, performed by the local butcher on market days, and their fathers had watched the martyrs in the cause of religion tied to stakes at