Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/43

 Rh parks. But he still had the right of hunting, and these five men mentioned above undertook to safeguard his rights in this respect. (The Abbot seems to have held the modern belief that no gamekeeper is as good as an old poacher!)"

"The substitution of themselves for Edric would be a great gain for the tenants. They evidently recognized it to be so. Not only would the absence of a troublesome official be a matter for congratulation, but the recognized forester's perquisites,—such as dead wood, windfalls, and an occasional deer,—would be regarded as worth having. The more one looks into the economy of a forest manor such as this, the more clear is it that this concession of the Abbot's was one to which the villeins would cling most tenaciously. Now a parade, or, in modern terminology, 'a demonstration,' was in the Middle Ages the recognized way of asserting and keeping alive privileges and customs. I believe the Horn Dance served this purpose. No doubt from time to time the Abbots sought to detract from their predecessor's grant, and the villagers took themselves horns,—the natural emblem of a forester,—and paraded the village every year in assertion of their right to be themselves 'forestarii et custodes silvarum.'"

I think there can be little doubt that it was in fact this feature of the local economic system that led to the institution of the local Horn Dance. But to every beginning there is a yet earlier beginning, and if anyone should maintain that the reindeers' horns,—for reindeers' horns they are beyond dispute,—came to Abbot's Bromley up the Trent and the Blythe in Viking galleys from the far north, I should not have a word to say to the contrary. Nor will I venture even to guess what memories of elkhunts in the snow, of earlier dramatic dances and disguises,