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their seats until the ceremony was concluded. The zealous priest, 

 after long and ineffectual endeavours to make his congregation 

 sensible of the indecency of such practices, undertook a journey 

 to London, on foot, for the purpose of petitioning the king to have 

 the market day held on Tuesday : which favour he is said to have 

 had interest enough to obtain. Though such practices as these 

 have been long discontinued, there are people now living who can 

 recollect hearing the clerk give out in the churchyard, before the 

 congregation dispersed, the advertisements of the various sales 

 about to be held in the neighbourhood. In some places it was 

 the custom for the churchwardens to go round the village during 

 divine service, and drive all the loungers into church. In large 

 churches there was usually a choir of singers, but seldom, until 

 quite recently, in the smaller ones. The clerk was generally leader 

 of the band, and after blowing the pitch-pipe, he used to intone on 

 the key-note the first line of the psalm to be sung. Some twenty 

 or thirty years ago, the inhabitants of a parish in this district 

 engaged a singing-master to teach the church singers some new 

 tunes. He found his pupils not inapt — most of them being able 

 to read music. But when the music came to be wedded to Tate 

 and Brady's "immortal verse," certain old gentlemen who sang 

 bass were detected in substituting for the sacred words the 

 inappropriate and monotonous syllables "boom, boom." One of 

 them, on being remonstrated with, thus replied : " Yer ways may 

 be aw varra weel, but they dunnet suit me ; I alius dud sing bum^ 

 bum, an' I alius will sing buin, bum I" 



Our dalesmen have always been more or less musical. Some 

 songs that were in vogue several hundred years ago, are still 

 occasionally sung — chiefly at the hiring fairs, by itinerant ballad 

 singers. As a proof of the extreme antiquity of some of the tunes, 

 I may adduce the curious fact, that the air of " St. Dunstan's 

 Hunt's up," mentioned by Sir Walter Scott as long lost and 

 forgotten, is still played on the fiddle from house to house every 

 Christmas eve, in many of the dales. In pursuance of a very 

 ancient custom, a fiddler goes the round of the vale on that 

 evening, bids "good night !" to each member of every household 



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