Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/230

 224 countries ceremonies of a special character are frequently dramatic. They represent, or are believed to represent, actions of the deities in whose honour they are performed. The Coventry procession is admittedly a representation of Godgifu’s ride. It is not now connected with any professed act of worship, but may it not be the long-descended relic of some such observance as those I have just described? There does not appear from Rudder’s account to have been, in his time at least, any pageant at St. Briavels commemorative of the achievement of the lady to whom the parishioners reckoned themselves to owe their privileges, nor have I been able to trace one by local inquiries. But the tradition is there unmistakably connected with a religious and social rite. The distribution of food on a day of high and holy festival in the church to the congregation, and paid for by a levy upon every householder in the parish, can point to nothing else than a feast of the whole community as a solemn act of worship. The point requiring elucidation is the intimate relation of this feast with a story apparently so irrelevant as that of the countess’s ride. To explain this, we must suppose that the feast was only part—doubtless the concluding part—of a ceremony, and that the former portion was a procession, of which the central figure was identical with that familiar to us at Coventry. But such a procession, terminating in a sacred feast, would have had no meaning if the naked lady represented a creature merely of flesh and blood. It is only explicable on the hypothesis that she was the goddess of a heathen cult, such as Hertha (or Nerthus), whose periodical progress among her subject tribes is described by Tacitus, and yet survives in the folk-lore of Rügen. Now the historian tells us that Hertha was Mother Earth, the goddess of the soil, whose yearly celebration would appropriately take place in the spring or early summer. To her the produce of the land