Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/34

20 son. In Europe this appears to arise from migration, from the Teutonic fashion of letting the adult sons go out into the world to found families elsewhere, so that the youngest, remaining longest at home, was naturally the one who inherited the paternal homestead. But in South Africa the inheritance of younger sons, where it occurs, is due to polygamy and wife-purchase. In the struggling days of his youth a man cannot always afford to give much for a wife, and the "great" or chief wife, whose son will be his successor, may not be acquired till, in his mature and prosperous years, his means and position enable him to look higher for an alliance. In such a case, the younger children inherit before their elder brethren, the sons of her humbler predecessors. Thus a superficial likeness of effect may be produced by two entirely distinct causes.

How important it is to study differences as well as likenesses, history as well as environment, I shall now endeavour to show by an examination of some annual customs still observed in England.

In 1901 Mr. S. O. Addy published in Folk-Lore (vol. xii., p. 394) a detailed and very interesting account of a May festival, celebrated at Castleton in the Peak of Derbyshire, and known by the name of "Garland Day." On the 29th of May in each year, the bellringers of Castleton make an enormous "garland" of flowers, which is carried round the village on the head and shoulders of a man on horseback, in costume, accompanied by a band playing a special traditional air and followed by a party of morris-dancers, while another man on horseback, dressed in woman's clothes, brings up the rear. After perambulating the place, they hoist the garland to the top of the church-tower, and fix it on one of the pinnacles. The day is kept as a general holiday. The dancers now are girls, dressed in white and carrying wands adorned with ribbon streamers, but formerly they were men, and it is remembered that the