popular festivals and festivities.

what a revolution of taste has taken place in the english people as it regards popular festivals and festivities! our ancestors were passionately fond of shows, pageants, processions, and maskings. they were fond of garlands and ribbons, dancing and festive merriment. may-day, easter, whitsuntide, st. john’s day, yule, and many other times, were times of general sport and gaiety. music and flowers abounded; mumming, morris-dancing, and many a quaint display of humour and frolic spread over the country. the times, and the spirit of the times, are changed:—we are become a sober people. england is no longer merry england, but busy england; england full of wealth and poverty—extravagance and care. there has been no small lamentation over this change; and many of our writers have laboured hard to bring us once more to adopt this state of things. they might as well attempt to bring back jousts and tourneys[26], popery, and government without representation. the times, and the spirit of the times are changed. strutt, hone, leigh hunt, miss laurence, and many others, may expatiate on the poetic beauty of these things: they may deplore the extinction of this graceful rite, that jocund festivity, and pray us earnestly to resume them once more; but can they give us our light hearts again? can they make the nation young again? can they make us the simple, ignorant, confiding people, living in the present, careless of the future, as our ancestors were? till they can do this, they must lament and exhort us in vain. as soon might they bid the sun to retrace his path; the seasons[415] reverse their course; earth and heaven turn back in the path of their years. what our ancestors were, they were from circumstances that are gone for ever; and what we are, we are from another mighty succession of circumstances, of which the memory and effect may no more be blotted out, than the stars can be blotted out of the clear heavens of midnight. the country has passed through deep baptisms, and processes of fermentation which have worked out the lighter external characters, and totally reorganised the moral as well as the political constitution of the kingdom. the better qualities of the old english character i trust we fully retain, but the more juvenile and fantastic ones are irrevocably destroyed in the shock of most momentous convulsions.

[26] since the former edition of this work was written, that even has been attempted.

amongst the many attempts to account for the sedater cast of the modern popular mind, sir e. bulwer, in “england and the english,” has attributed it to the spread of methodism. had he attributed it to puritanism he would have been nearer the mark. methodism may possibly have done something towards it, but it neither began early enough, nor spread universally enough, to have the credit of this change. the decay of popular festivities has been noticed and lamented by writers for the last century. it has been going on both before and since the rise of methodism, with much the same pace of progression, and is equally felt where methodism is not allowed to shew its face, as where it exercises its fullest power. over what a great extent of this country does the influence of high-church landlords prevail, where methodism cannot get footing; where the people are all expected to go soberly to church as in the good old times; and yet there the people are just as grave, have grown out of the sports and pastimes of their ancestors, just as much as in the most methodistic districts. in the manufacturing districts, where the methodists have gained most influence, it is true enough that they have helped to expel an immense quantity of dog-fighting, cock-fighting, bull-baiting, badger-baiting, boxing, and such blackguard amusements; but maying, guising, plough-bullocking, morris-dancing, were gone before, or would have gone had not methodism appeared.

mighty and many are the causes which have wrought this great national change; causes which have been operating upon us[416] for the last three hundred years; and are so intimately connected with our whole national progress, political and intellectual—with all our growing greatness, with all our glory and our sorrows, that had not methodism existed, that character would have been exactly what it is.

the reformation laid the foundation of this change. while we had an absolute pope, and an absolute king; while the people were neither educated, nor allowed to read the bible, nor to be represented in parliament; while the monarch and a few noble families held all the lands of the kingdom, the lower classes had nothing to do but to follow their masters to the wars, or live easily and dance gaily in times of peace. the retainers of great houses, the labourers in the fields, foresters and shepherds, following their solitary occupations, constituted the bulk of the nation. merchants and merchandise were few; our great trading towns and interests did not exist; the days of newspapers, of religious disputes, of literature and periodicals, were not come. the people were either at work or at play. when their work was over, play was their sole resource. they danced, they acted rude plays and pantomimes, with all the zest and gaiety of children, for their heads were as unoccupied with knowledge and grave concerns as those of children. they lived in poverty it may be, but still they lived in that state of simplicity and dependence which left them little care; and they were cut off, by the impossibility of rising out of their original rank, from all troublesome excitement. it was equally the concern of the civil government and the hierarchy to encourage sports and festivities, to keep them out of dangerous inquiries into their own condition, or rights. in the great feudal halls, the minstrel, the jongleur, the jester, and other ministers of gaiety; hawks and hounds abroad, jollity and drinking at home, kept the minds of all idlers occupied with matters to their taste. the clergy and monks promoted with an equal zeal of policy, the festivals of saints, keeping of high days and holidays, processions, games, and even acting the mysteries and miracle-plays. while the system continued, this spirit and national character must have continued likewise; but the reformation burst like a volcano from beneath, and scattered the whole smiling surface into disjointed fragments, or buried it beneath the lava of ruin.

[417]

henry viii. at once destroyed monkery and the catholic church. he at once seized on the ecclesiastical lands, and snapped asunder the ecclesiastical policy. the translation of the bible let in a flood of light that revealed all the phantasmagoria of the past, and prepared a train of everlasting inquiries, disquietudes, and intellectual and political triumphs for the future. the people saw they had been treated as children, but they now awoke to the passions and the conscious power of men. they had tasted of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and their eyes were opened to their actual condition, never more to be closed. the lands that were rudely seized and arbitrarily distributed, created a new class in the community—the gentry—a link between the aristocracy and the people;—possessing the knowledge of the one, and sharing the interests of the other. henry’s predecessors had hastened this new era by curtailing the wealth and power of the nobility; and the long wars of the houses of york and lancaster had already done much of this work for him; exterminating some, humbling others, and embarrassing with debts the remainder. so were the elements of a more popular career thrown into the midst of the nation; and the religious persecutions on the continent, by sending us swarms of jewellers, weavers, and other artificers, laid the foundation of those trading propensities which have now carried us to such a marvellous length. we came to be a trading and colonizing people, and to possess a fleet in order to protect our new interests. how rapidly this navy grew, indicating by its own growth that of the general wealth and commercial enterprise of england, of which it was the consequence, is seen by this circumstance. in that fine old ballad of sir andrew barton, lord howard is made to say to henry viii. in 1511—

sir andrew’s shipp i bring with mee;

a braver shipp was never none;

now hath your grace two shipps of warr,

before in england was but one!

this one was the great harry, built in 1504. in about 80 years only afterwards, the english had thirty vessels of war at sea, and with these dared to attack the invincible armada of spain, consisting of one hundred and thirty vessels, and by the assistance of a providential tempest, totally dispersed and destroyed it. then[418] howard of effingham, drake, frobisher, hawkins, were the names of our commanders,—names which thenceforward filled all the known world with terror, and gave to england the empire of the seas. with this extension of national interests, a more active and earnest spirit was diffused through the people. the struggle with enemies abroad, and with the rapidly maturing spirit of religious freedom at home, kept elizabeth engaged, and induced in her a rigour of persecution, and in the people a rigour of resistance and the soul of martyrdom. before the development of these antagonist powers, all lightness fled; singing gave way to preaching and listening; dancing, to running anxiously to know the fate of sufferers, and the doctrines of fresh-springing teachers. so completely had the old relish for merriment and pastimes died out, that her successor, james, endeavoured to compel the people, by the publication of his “book of sports” to be jocose and gamesome. but it would not do. the soul of the people was now up in arms for their rights; and the despotic nature of himself and his son, resisting their claims, kept up such a fever of political strife in the kingdom as would have put out all jesting and capering if they had not gone before. the hierarchy fell,—fell in one wide chaos of civil contention; and, as if torrents of blood and volumes of fire, and the trampling hoofs of thousands of careering cavalry had not been enough to overwhelm and dash to pieces every remaining fragment of jollity and popular fête,—in came puritanism from geneva, and the solemn league and covenant from scotland. there was a final close to all the pageantry of processions and the merry saintliness of festivals: they were denounced and abhorred as the carnality of anti-christ and the rags of the scarlet woman. charles ii. indeed, could revive licentiousness, but he could not bring back the holiday guise of “the old profession.” and what has been the course of england since? one ever-widening and ascending course of mighty wars, expanding commerce, vast colonization, and the growth of science, literature, and general knowledge. we are no longer a nation of feudal combatants, of piping shepherds, and thoughtless peasantry,—but of busy, scheming, money-collecting, family-creating men. our last tremendous war put the climax to this amazing career. in it all europe seemed torn to pieces and organized anew. we, as a people, were led by[419] circumstances to put forth the most stupendous energies that perhaps any nation ever did. to defend our colonies; to support the interests of our allies with arms and subsidies; to supply the whole of europe with all species of manufactures, and almost all species of merchandise, and through this demand stimulating into existence the powers of steam and machinery, a population of amazing numbers to maintain. and then, the shock and the revulsion when this great war-system suddenly ceased! an immense debt, vast taxes, the necessity of maintaining high prices, the necessity of boundless competition and low wages that we might so compete with the continent, returning to its old habits.

who does not know with what a fiery force this has fallen on the working classes? what distress, what pauperization, what desperation, brought to the very pitch of rebellion, they have gone through; and recollecting this, can any one think otherwise than that it has been enough to sober any people that is not destitute of every element of high character. if we could, after a baptism like this, be still like the french, a dancing, dissipation-loving people, we should, like them, have but a fitful care to secure our liberties, and the comforts of good government; like them, at this moment, we should be the victims of successive revolutions, yielding no fruit but tyranny. but we are a sober and a thoughtful people, and are therefore working out of the mass of our difficulties the form of a renewed constitution, adapted to our present enlarged views and experience. but besides this, our energies have not been called forth for this good end alone; they have brought with their exercise a high relish for intellectual pleasures. our minds have been stirred mightily, and, like animals that during their wintry torpor feel no hunger, yet feel it keenly the moment they are awake, they have become hungry for congenial aliment. we have fed on much knowledge, and are no longer children, but full-grown men, with manly appetites and experienced tastes. could we now sit, as our ancestors did, for nine hours together at a mystery? could we endure to read through the chronicles and romances of the middle ages,—books which spun out their recitals to the most extraordinary length, and were never too long; for books then were few? if we could not, so neither could the simple pleasures and rural festivities satisfy the peasantry of this.[420] we are the creatures of new circumstances, and of a higher reach of knowledge. a combination of causes, too puissant to be resisted, has made hopeless all return to the juvenilities of the past. and after all, happiness—of which the people, however unwisely, are always in quest, does not consist in booths and garlands, drums and horns, or in capering round a may-pole. happiness is a fireside thing. it is a thing of grave and earnest tone; and the deeper and truer it is, the more is it removed from the riot of mere merriment:

the highest mood allowed

to sinful creatures, for all happiness

worthy that holy name, seems steeped in tears,

like flowers in dew, or tinged with misty hues,

like stars in halo.

john wilson.

and the more our humble classes come to taste of the pleasures of books and intellect, and the deep fireside affections which grow out of the growth of heart and mind, the less charms will the outward forms of rejoicing have for them. beautiful and poetical, i grant, are many of the old rites and customs of which we have been speaking; but they are beautiful and poetical as belonging to their own times,—and many of them, i am inclined to believe, as seen in the distance; for, seen at hand, there is a vulgarity in most popular customs that offends invariably our present tastes. nor do i mean to say that our present population cannot be cheerful. a more truly cheerful people never existed; and they can dance and be merry too when they will; as christmas, and whitsuntide, and their annual village feasts and their harvest-homes can testify. since the reformation, the saints of the calendar having become mere names in this country, their festivals have accordingly died away. whitsuntide, easter, and christmas seem almost all that have maintained their stand; and of these we will speak a little; but in the first place let us have a few words on may-day.