Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/366

 336 it was destroyed by fire. Others, who thought themselves great historians, believed it was put there by pious people, and that either the remains of Queen Eleanor or King John had been borne to the church as a resting-place, and the cross erected to commemorate the event.

"Well, the 'fool' mounted the steps of the cross and made a speech. He soon got down, and he and the boggans and the crowd went just outside the town on the hill, where all the open fields are. The head boggan, called 'The Lord Duke,' then said a few rhyming words and ' threw ' the hood up three times. The third time the crowd may have it. It went up into the air like a bolt, and dozens of hands were outstretched to catch it, as it was not possible to calculate where it would come down, any more than if they had tried to catch a sky rocket. As soon as a man got it, he tried to run away with it, and of course was balked by the crowd, unless he had plenty of his own friends round him. The red-coated boggans always kept pretty well round the outside of the crowd, much as cricketers field, and whenever the crowd threw the hood from one to another and it was possible for a boggan to catch it, or even touch it, it had to be taken back to the Lord Duke and thrown up again from the middle of the field.

"The play was a dangerous, jostling scrimmage, and the modern leather hood was sharper when it hit anyone in the eye than the old sackcloth one. At four o'clock the last or 'Sway Hood' is put up. When I saw it, it appeared to be handed, or passed about, or along, by one party—say Haxey men—and snatched at and scuffled for by another—perhaps Epworth men—and then they shouted loudly, 'Sway, boys, sway,' and a surging crowd, pushing two different ways, and divided into two large masses of people, looked as if they swayed. And it was not safe for women and children to be anywhere but at a fair distance from the players.

"When the 'swaying' begins the boggans no longer try