Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 8, 1897.djvu/199

Rh particulars regarding churchyard games in the PrincipaUty. The writer, Mr. E. L. Barnwell, says: "Old people can remember when the clergyman gave notice that the game must cease by putting the ball into his pocket, and marched his young friends into church. This was particularly the case on the festivals of the Church, and is said to have generally commenced on Easter Eve."

The connection between amusements and Church festivals is further indicated in the course of the same article (p. 337), in the following passage:

"There was formerly in Pembrokeshire, and particularly in the hundred of Cemmaes, a custom of playing the game of cnapan, generally five times in the year, viz. Shrove Tuesday, Easter Monday, Low Easter Day, Ascension and Corpus Christi Days, between two rival parishes or districts. The combatants were clothed only with a pair of drawers or light trousers, as otherwise in the struggle their clothes would be torn to rags. They were also barefooted. The game was a kind of football, which whoever could get hold had to keep possession of it and run off with it to a certain distance. Sometimes two thousand men joined in the game, and great violence was used.

"The game of soule, formerly played in Brittany, was identical with this, except that horsemen did not join in the game as in Pembrokeshire. On account, however, of the ferocity displayed, and the lives lost among the Bretons, the Government of the day put a stop to it, and it has never since been permitted.

"The identity of this Welsh game of cnapan and the Breton soule is remarkable, for there are apparently no traces of it in other parts of France or in England. Nor is there any evidence that it was in existence in the northern counties of Wales. It had grown out of use in Wales in the time of Elizabeth, but continued very much later on the other side of the channel."

The relation between games and holy-days undoubtedly deserves more attention than it has yet received.

, F.S.A. (Lond. and Scot.).

Glasgow.