290 Customs of Wishford and Barf or d in Grovely Forest. 



(2) As to Ascension Eve, Dom E. Martene mentions two Churches 

 where there were special ceremonies. Liege, where ten congrega- 

 tions of clergy met at the mother Church for evensong. Vicnne, 

 where the (prelates) officiating as deacon and subdeacon to the 

 Archbishop wore their mitres. At the mass there was another 

 procession ad elemosynam, a sermo ad populum, the blessing of a 

 lamb, and on their return a henedictio panis caristiae (IV., xxviii .,18 

 = t. iii., p. 193). 



At a city Church in London there were rose garlands for the 

 crosses and the choir bought for Ascension Day and Whitsun-Day ; 

 and " for the crosses and choir and other strangers that did bear 

 copes on Corpus Christi Day"; in 1524, 15.39, &c., and birch at 

 Midsummer.^ Also, garlands for St. Barnabas' Day, 11th June. 

 Stow likewise mentions that the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's 

 wore rose-garlands in procession on St. Peter and St. Paul's Day, 

 29th June, and that in London every man's door was shadowed 

 with green birch, long fennel, St. John's wort, orpin (Sedum 

 tclephium), white lilies, and such like on the Vigil of St. John 

 Baptist (Midsummer-eve), and on St. Peter and St. Paul's Day.^ 

 Also, that on holidays after evening prayer the prentice lads 

 exercised their wasters (or cudgels) and bucklers before their 

 masters' doors, and maidens, to the timbrell, danced for garlands 

 hanging thwart the shrubs. (Surveij of London, ed. 1720, iii., 165 ; 

 ii., 256, and 251, cited by Kock, Ch. of our Fathers, ii., 59, 340 = 

 pp. 71, 421, old edition). 



Anxious prelates like Richard Poore, in 1217, St. Edmund and 



' Accounts of St. Mary at Hill, H. Littlehales, 322-3 (facsimile), 382. 

 (E. E. T. Soc, 1905). 



- In his Mayor of Troy (written perhaps not without some reference to 

 Fowey, in Cornwall) Mr. A. T. Quiller Couch tells how " On a Regatta Day 

 . . . . once every August on a Monday .... at 8 o'clock in the 

 morning .... the streets breathed festival. Sir Felix's coppices had 

 been thinned as usual for the occasion, and scores of small saplings, larch 

 and beech and hazel, lined the narrow streets, their sharpened stems planted 

 between the cobbles, their leafy tops braced back against the house-fronts 

 and stayed with ropes, which, leading through the upper windows, were made 

 fast within to bars of grates, table-legs, and bed-posts. Over them from house 

 to house, strings of flags waved in the light morning breeze." (ch. xxii.) 



