Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/46

 32 With these, I think, should be classed the septennial Whitsuntide Ale held at the entrance to Blenheim Park. Here the surrounding district was nominally subject to forest law (as part of Wychwood Forest), as late as 1704, and the object of the festival is expressly said to have been a right-of-way. If it were not kept up, so the people said, a turnpike could be put up across the road from Woodstock to Bladon, which, they declare, was actually done as soon as it was discontinued. The people "claimed certain portions of wood from Wychwood Forest for use on the occasion," and the owner of the park, the Duke of Marlborough, provided a Maypole, and evergreens for the "Bowery," or open shed, erected for the sports. From the roof of this shed were hung two cages containing an owl and a hawk, which were supposed to be the pets of the burlesque "lady" of the feast, but it is not stated how they were procured. Burlesque ceremonies resembling the "Mock Mayor" rites were practised with regard to them, and the festival included a procession, morris-dancing, festival cakes, and other details into which I cannot now enter, (Folk-Lore, vol. xiv., pp. 171-75).

No one, I think, will accuse me of wishing to undervalue survivals, but it is needful to distinguish between one survival and another, between survivals from mediæval days and survivals from totemic days, between local variations and radical differences. It is the possibility of doing this that constitutes the special value and importance of European (and Oriental) folklore, as compared with that of peoples which have no recorded history.

We may ask, (as was asked at a recent meeting), why a given people should change from the matrilineal to the patrilineal method of reckoning descent, what are the causes of the varying forms assumed by totemism in different countries (as numerous in Melanesia as the variants of Cinderella or as the islands of the South Seas), why it should flourish in one place and die out in another,