COUNTRY FAIRS AND REVELS. 
G5 
converts from their idolatrous practices, and some indulgence was 
permitted. Fuller wittily observes :* 
" As careful mothers and nurses, on condition they can get their children 
to part with knives, are contented to let them play with rattles ; so they 
permitted ignorant people still to retain some of their fond and foolish 
customs, that they might remove from them the most dangerous and 
destructive superstitions." 
The Venerable Bede records f the special orders sent by Gregory 
to Augustine, as follows : 
" I have, upon mature deliberation on the affair of the English, determined 
that the temples of the idols in that nation ought not to be destroyed ; but 
let the idols that are in them be destroyed. Let holy water be made and 
sprinkled in the said temples ; let altars be erected, and relics placed. That 
seeing their temples are not destroyed, the people may the more familiarly 
resort to the places to which they have been accustomed. And because they 
have been used to slaughter many oxen in the sacrifices to devils, some 
solemnity must be exchanged for them on this account, as that on the day of 
the dedication, or the nativities of the holy martyrs, whose relics are there 
deposited. They may build themselves huts of the boughs of trees about 
those churches, which have been turned to that use from temples, and cele- 
brate the solemnity with religious feasting, and no more offer beasts to the 
devil, but kill cattle to the praise of God in their eating, and return thanks 
to the giver of all things for their sustenance." 
This license, direct from the Bishop of Eome, we may be sure was 
neglected neither by the mass of converts, nor by enterprising 
missionaries, who gauged their usefulness by the numbers of their 
converts, and became really a charter from the highest spiritual 
authority for a new form of religious festival — Christian only in 
name, but heathen and grossly sensual in practice, which still 
lingers among us in the country village revel. Every parish seems 
to have held its revel, wake, or dedication feast. 
The Puritan Stubbs, writing in 1585, describes them thus :J 
" Every town, parish, and village, some at one time of the year, some at 
another (but so that every one keeps his proper day assigned and appropriate 
to itself which they call their wake-day), useth to make great preparation 
and provision for good cheer, to which their friends and kinsfolks far and 
near are invited, insomuch as the poor men that bear the charges of these 
feasts keep the worse houses a long time after." 
At first they were kept on the saint's day of the dedication of 
* "Church History," p. 375, xvi. Century, book vii. 
f Bede's "Ecclesiastical History," book i. c. 30. 
J Stubbs' "Anatomie of Abuses." 
VOL. VII. E 
