1920.] SOCIAL LIFE IN GUERNSEY. 249 



dolmens and menhirs, now destroyed ; while the country was 

 thickly dotted over with wayside crosses, crucifixes and cal- 

 varies, and also with small chapels or oratories, all demolished 

 at the Reformation. We can imagine how lovely it must have 

 looked with open streams and fountains, trees and furze, and 

 the masses of spring flowers for which Guernsey has always 

 been noted, instead of the " mean streets r ' by which these beau- 

 tiful slopes are now covered. 



In this isolated spot, herded together in this tiny narrow 

 town, what manner of men were our ancestors of the sixteenth 

 century ? 



These old documents take us back to a very different 

 world ; a world, which though curiously mingled with the 

 roaring, ruffling, rushing earth of Villon and of Commines, is 

 still the gracious earth of the Golden Legend and the Roman 

 de la Rose ; an earth gay with poetry and haunted by old 

 gods, filled with " antique fables and fairy toys," with the love 

 of God, and the passions of men. 



Roman Catholicism had but super-imposed its feasts on the 

 pagan festivals of heathen days, its Churches on the sites of 

 heathen altars. Men and women still danced round fires at 

 the Roque Balan on St. John's Eve, more in commemoration 

 of. the Solar Solstice than of the Christian Saint; they pro- 

 cessed, under auspices of Church and State, dancing and 

 singing round the Island, nominally to see that the ways 

 were clear for the passage of the Host on the day of Corpus 

 Christi ; but nevertheless, pagan altars we-re visited and 

 pre-Christian rites maintained. Witchcraft, which in itself 

 was but a survival of ancient worships, was an underlying 

 force, and, as long as it did not openly interfere with 

 Christianity, was not prosecuted until Puritanism was 

 established. It was the Puritans also who forbade 

 the dances, the merrymakings, the holidays, the songs 

 and games, the balls, the cards and the dice in which pre- 

 Reformation Guernsey delighted, and we can only judge by the 

 number and severity of the ordonnances that the Royal Court 

 were obliged to pass, how hard it was to kill the natural gaiety 

 of the people. 



In the sixteenth century, in Guernsey as in England, after 

 the suicidal strife of the Wars of the Roses, in which the 

 greater part of the old nobility was entirely wiped out, a new 

 middle class sprang into being ; merchants and manufacturers, 

 they were the founders of the prosperity of Great Britain. In 

 mediaeval times men had worked together, and Feudalism had 

 instituted the principle of service, for this the sixteenth 



