THE GIANT AND THE MAYPOLE OF CERNE. 105 



The maple, then, was used, like other trees, for a boundary 

 mark ; but, assuredly, the maypole never (19). 



It would seem that no function, however simple, or pastoral, 

 or divine, has been free at all times from debauchery. Of the 

 celebration of the central Sacrament of the Christian religion 

 St. Paul had to complain that " one was hungry and another 

 drunken " (20). Church ales were often denounced as the cause 

 of unseemly revels ; and the festival of the maypole called forth 

 ample invective. " Hundreds of men, women, and children go 

 off to the woods and groves, and spend all the night in pastimes, 

 and in the morning they return with birche boughes and branches 

 of trees to deck their assemblies withal. And they bring home 

 with great veneration the Maie-pole, their stinking idol rather, 

 covered all over with flowers and herbes, and then fall they to 

 leaping and dauncing about it, as the heathen people did. I 

 have heard it crediblie reported by men of great gravity that, of 

 an hundred maides going to the wood, there have scarcely the 

 third part of them returned home againe as they went" (21). 



The Long Parliament, mainly composed of "men of great 

 gravity," made an ordinance in April, 1644, that all maypoles were 

 to be taken down and removed by the constables, churchwardens, 

 and other parish officers ; but it met with no little resistance. 



The parishioners of Cerne seem to have been subject to 

 violent alternations of the conservative and the iconoclastic 

 spirit ; and it is remarkable that they anticipated this Puritan 

 enactment, for in their churchwardens' accounts of the year 1635 

 occurs the entry, "Paid Anth. Thome and others for taking down 

 ye maypole and making a town ladder of it, oo. 03. 10 " (22). 



(19) It maybe noted that in a charter of the year 972 is the word maivpul. The 

 sentence runs : " ondlang ftaere straet to mawpul, andlang pulles on temedan." 

 Here the word is clearly mewpool, the pond or lake of the mew, a seafowl, but 



not necessarily the gull. 



(20) I. Cor. ii., 21. 



(21) Philip Stubbes, Anatomic of Abuses, 1583. 



(22) The Cerne maypole was destroyed in 1635 ; the existing altar in the 

 parish church was erected in 1638, the pulpit in 1640 ; and the Long Parliament's 

 Ordinance was issued in 1644. 



