Page:Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern.djvu/110

 go through the towns and villages singing and begging money, and crying out, “Au Guy! L’An Neuf!”

In the collection of Noei Borguignon, of which some account will be given hereafter, it is stated that at Dijon, about the year 1700, masked persons went about at night during Christmas, some playing, some dancing. The players were called mommons, the dancers simply masques. Among the mummers in England, as late as the seventeenth century, the hobby-horse was an important character, but in more recent times he appears to have been discarded— “For, oh! the hobby-horse is forgot.”

There also appears to have been a sort of goblin or buffoon, dressed in calf-skin. In an old play called “Wily Beguiled,” in the early part of James the First, a character called Robin Goodfellow says, “I’ll go put on my devilish robes, I mean my Christmas calf’s-skin suit, and then walk to the woods: O, I’ll terrify him, I warrant ye.”

A remnant of this appears in a set of mummers mentioned by Jackson about 1760 in his “History of the Scottish Stage,” (pp. 410—11,) whose amusements began with a sort of prologue, announcing the performers, as they came on successively with the clown. The first verse he gives thus—

In the Christmas mumming continued in Ireland to recent times, the Fool generally appeared in a calf, or cow-skin. The mummers, or gysarts, in Scotland