Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/39

 Rh the restoration of "Church and King." Instead of the old garlands adorning the Maypole on May Day, a floral crown is hoisted to the steeple on the new authorised holiday. The dancing is decorously performed by skilled and selected dancers. Women take no part in it, (though children have lately begun to do so), and the whole affair is carried out by responsible Church officials, the ringers, whose beloved bells the Puritans would have silenced. The thirty-seven years which Mr. Cryer's incumbency lasted after the Restoration would be long enough to allow his reforms to take root. Before his death a new generation would have grown up to whom the reorganized festival would seem part of the natural order of things, and the ringers, who were responsible for it, would have begun to keep it up as a matter of course. It is thus that I would account for the peculiar features of the Castleton Garland Day. Its resemblance to the German spring festivals seems to me to be merely accidental.

Two points in the rite seem to be survivals from the older May festival. First, the man in woman's clothes, who can be no Queen of England, nor of the May. Her crown is a recent innovation; she used to wear a bonnet, and "the oldest shawl that could be found;" and her place is not beside the "King," but at the fag-end of the procession. She is, in fact, that mysterious, but invariable, attendant on the morris-dance, the "Molly" or "Bessy." Second, the nosegay, or "queen," which surmounts the garland, which, before it is hoisted, is taken off and presented to a woman, the latest comer to the parish; just as the harvest-queen, harvest-dolly, or kern-baby is presented to the mistress of the farm. From what dim background of antiquity, from what primitive stages of society, these two features descend, I will not attempt to decide. But the point I want to emphasise is this, that local peculiarities