Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/302

274 and other Places." Therefore, the Act decreed: "All such meetings and Assemblies shall be deemed and adjudged Riots and unlawful Assemblies and punished as such." Punishment for attendance was a 10s. fine or a whipping; for any who "build Booths, sell Ale Victuals or any other Commodities," 20s. fine. Pilgrimages were—and in a lessened degree still are—made to lakes, ponds, wells, trees, stones, crosses, images, relics—in nearly every case connected with a local saint—the Patron—hence the name "Pattern." That they degenerated—or should one say reverted?—into scenes of licence and riot is very manifest, and had the Parliaments—equally at St. Stephen's Green and St. Stephen's—legislated to suppress no other folk customs there would have been less valid plaints, many just grievances would never have arisen, much national unhappiness might have been spared us. But decade after decade, century after century, legislation betrayed all the intolerance and bitterness bred of ignorance, nervousness, and fear. "The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge."

Time forbids examination of the results on education and other matters due, for instance, to the Penal Laws, interference with "hollydays," suppression of Sunday games, —the national game of hurling was forbidden, and it is even recorded in the histories of Galway that "No woman shall make no open noise of an unreasonable chree, after the Irisherie, either before ne yet after, the death of any corpes." The dead were deprived of the rights of burial ceremonies did they belong to the forbidden creed. The Halls mention in their Tour seeing piles of stones by the wayside in Connemara, especially in the neighbourhood of Cong, and give a reproduction of a rough inscription on