Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/204

192 such as the Peak, a completer text could be collected. Three boys from different localities supplied the greater part of it, and their renderings were almost identical. Two other boys supplied the single incident of the fight, death, and resurrection. So far as I know, it is now only played by boys, usually of about twelve or thirteen years.

It is noticeable that one character may be elaborated into several, as Beelzebub, Devil Doubt, Slip-Slop, or Slasher and Hector. And sometimes lines will be reft from the one and given to another. So to find such close agreement in three renderings shows some tenacity of tradition. According to one boy, however, Devil Doubt becomes Little Chucker Out, and the Fool may become Father Christmas; St. George may become King George, and the slain man may have a mother instead of a father. A rather delightful rendering is when the saint becomes King George of Paradise. There would seem to be the elements of three plays in this one text: the original Nature drama of life, death and re-birth, with the powers of day and night, winter and summer, or good and evil, typified by the white or black faces of the players, or, as they call themselves, "guisers"; the play of the Seven Champions of Christendom reduced to a solitary representative; and the play of the Nine Worthies, of which only Hector remains to remind us of the masque in Love's Labour's Lost. Until fairly lately the Hobby-horse figured in this same colliery district, but now I fear "the Hobby-horse is forgot." But the town of Derby specialises in an animal called "The Old Tup."

It is a common sight at Christmas to see groups of little boys with blacked and painted faces and scraps of fancy dress "guising," but I was agreeably surprised to find so full a text forthcoming from the heart of strikeland and social upheaval. Nothing later than the Crusades seems to have shaped the story. According to one boy the Black Prince should be called the Black Prince of Paladine (Paladin? or Palestine?). Slasher seems to be the Green