Page:Cornish feasts and folk-lore.djvu/59

 humour of the townsmen permitted, to be spent on the public festivities of the season. Next morning- a procession was formed (all who could afford to ride mounted on horse or ass, smacking long-lashed whips), first to the Priory to receive two large garlands of flowers fixed on staves, and then in due order to the principal streets to the town-end, where the games were formerly opened. The sports, which lasted two days, were of the ordinary sort—wrestling, foot-racing, jumping in sacks, &c. It is worthy of remark that a second or inferior brewing from the same wort was drunk at a minor merry-making at Whitsuntide."—(Popular Antiquities, Journal Royal Institute of Cornwall, 1864.)

In former days the proceedings ended in a servants'-ball, at which dancing was kept up until the next morning's breakfast-hour. A very curious carnival was originally held under a Lord of Misrule, in July, on Halgaver Moor, near Bodmin, thus quaintly described by Carew:—

"The youthlyer sort of Bodmin townsmen vse to sport themselves by playing the box with strangers whom they summon to Halgauer. The name signifieth the Goat's Moore, and such a place it is, lying a little without the towne, and very full of quauemires. When these mates meet with any rawe seruing-man or other young master, who may serue and deserue to make pastime, they cause him to be solemnely arrested, for his appearance before the Maior of Halgauer, where he is charged with wearing one spurre, or going vntrussed, or wanting a girdle, or some such felony. After he had been arraygned and tryed, with all requisite circumstances, iudgement is given in formal terms, and executed in some one vngracious pranke or other, more to the skorne than hurt of the party codemned. Hence is sprung the prouerb when we see one slouenly appareled to say he shall be presented at Halgauer Court (or take him before the Maior of Halgauer).

"But now and then they extend this merriment with the largest, to preiudice of ouer-credulous people, persuading them to fight with a dragon lurking in Halgauer, or to see some strange matter there, which concludeth at least with a trayning them into the mire."—(Survey of Cornwall.)