They hurle him vp into the ayre, nor suffring him to fall,
And this they doe at diuers tymes the citie over all."

This alludes to a sport at least similar to that of "Holly-Boy and Ivy-Girl," practised in East Kent, already adverted to. The writer in the Gentleman's Magazine, from which it is noticed, says: "Being on a visit on Tuesday last in a little obscure village in this county, I found an odd kind of sport going forward: the Girls, from eighteen to five or six years old, were assembled in a crowd, and burning an uncouth effigy, which they called an Holly-Boy, and which it seems they had stolen from the Boys, who, in another part of the village were assembled together, and burning what they called an Ivy-Girl, which they had stolen from the Girls: all this ceremony was accomplished with loud huzzas, noise, and acclamations. What it all means I cannot tell, although I inquired of several of the oldest people in the place, who could only answer that it had always been a sport at this season of the year." This is dated East Kent, Feb. 16th. The Tuesday before Shrove Tuesday in 1779 fell on February the 9th.

"The peasantry of France" (says the Morning Chronicle, March 10, 1791) "distinguish Ash Wednesday in a very singular manner. They carry an Effigy of a similar description to our Guy Faux round the adjacent villages, and collect money for his funeral, as this day, according to their creed, is the death of good living. After sundry absurd mummeries, the corpse is deposited in the earth." This may possibly be a relic of the same usage.

Armstrong, in his History of Minorca, says: "During the Carnival, the Ladies amuse themselves in throwing oranges at their lovers ; and he who has received one of those on his eye, or has a tooth beat out by it, is convinced, from that moment, that he is a high favourite with the fair-one who has done him so much honour. Sometimes a good hand-full of flour is thrown full in one's eyes, which gives the utmost satisfaction, and is a favour that is quickly followed by others of a less trifling nature."—" We well know that the holydays of the ancient Romans were, like these Carnivals, a mixture of devotion and debauchery."—"This time of festivity is sacred to pleasure, and it is sinful to exercise their calling until Lent arrives, with the two curses of these people, Abstinence and Labour, in its train."

Among the sports of Shrove Tuesday, cock-fighting and throwing at cocks appear almost everywhere to have prevailed.

Moresin informs us that the Papists derived this custom of exhibiting cock-fights on one day every year from the Athenians, and from an institution of Themistocles. It was retained in many schools in Scotland within the last century; perhaps it is still in use. The schoolmasters were said to preside at the battle, and claimed the runaway cocks, called Fugees, as their perquisites.

Du Cange, in his Glossary, says that although this practice was confined to schoolboys in several provinces of France, it was nevertheless forbidden in the Council of Copria (supposed to be Cognac) in the year 1260. The decree recites "that although it was then become obsolete, as well in Grammar Schools as in other places, yet mischiefs had arisen," &c.

Fitzstephen, as cited by Stow, informs us that anciently on Shrove Tuesday the schoolboys used to bring cocks of the game, now called game-cocks, to their master, and to delight themselves in cockfighting all the forenoon. "After dinner," he continues, "all the youths go into the fields, to play at the Ball. The Scholars of every School have their Ball, or Bastion, in their hands. The ancient and wealthy men of the city come forth on horseback to see the sport of the young men, and to take part of the pleasure in beholding their agility." It should seem that football is meant here.

In Sir John Sinclair's Statistical Account of Scotland (1795), the minister of Kirkmichael, in Perthshire, says: "Foot-Ball is a common amusement with the School-boys, who also preserve the custom of Cock-fighting on Shrove Tuesday."

Hutchinson, in his History of Cumberland, speaking of the parish of Bromfield, and a custom there that, having now fallen into disuse, will soon be totally forgotten, tells us: "Till within the last twenty or thirty years, it had been a custom, time out of mind, for the Scholars of the Free-School of Bromfield, about the beginning of Lent, or in the more expressive phraseology of the country, at Fasting's Even, to bar out the master; i.e., to depose and exclude him from his school, and keep him out for three days. During the period of this expulsion, the doors of the citadel, the School, were strongly barricadoed within and the Boys, who defended it like a besieged city, were armed, in general, with bore-tree, or elder, pop-guns. The Master, meanwhile, made various efforts, both by force and stratagem, to regain his lost authority. If he succeeded, heavy tasks were imposed, and the business of the School was resumed and submitted to; but it more commonly happened that he was repulsed and defeated. After three days' siege, terms of capitulation were proposed by the Master and accepted by the Boys. These terms were summed up in an old formula of Latin Leonine verses; stipulating what hours and times should, for the year ensuing, be allotted to study, and what to relaxation and play. Securities were provided by each side for the due performance of these stipulations: and the paper was then solemnly signed both by Masters and Scholars.

One of the articles always stipulated for and granted was the privilege of immediately celebrating certain Games of long standing; viz., a Foot-Ball Match, and a Cock-Fight. Captains, as they were called, were then chosen to manage and preside over these games: one from that part of the parish which lay to the Westward of the School; the other from the East. Cocks and Foot-Ball Players were sought for with great diligence. The party whose Cocks won the most battles was victorious in the Cock-pit; and the prize a small silver bell, suspended to the button of the victor's hat, and worn for three successive Sundays. After the Cock-fight was ended, the Foot-Ball was thrown down in the Church-yard; and the point then to be contested was, which party could carry it to the house of his respective Captain; to Dundraw, perhaps, or West Newton, a distance of two or three miles every inch of which ground was keenly disputed. All the honour accruing to the conqueror at Foot-Ball, was that of possessing the Ball Details of these matches were the general topics of con

versation among the villagers; and were dwelt on with hardly less satisfaction than their ancestors enjoyed in relating their feats in the Border Wars.

"It never was the fortune of the writer of this account to bear the Bell; a pleasure which, it is not at all improbable, had its origin in the Bells having been the frequent, if not the usual reward of victory in such rural contests."

"Our Bromfield Sports were sometimes celebrated in indigenous songs. One verse only of one of them we happen to remember

"At Scales, great Tom Barwise gat the Ba' in his hand,
And t' wives aw ran out, and shouted, and bann'd:
Tom Cowan then pulch'd and flang him 'mang t' whins,
And he bledder'd, Od-white-te, tou's broken my shins.

"One cannot but feel a more than ordinary curiosity to be able to trace the origin of this improvement on the Roman Saturnalia: and which also appears pretty evidently to be the basis of the Institution of the Terræ filius in Oxford, now likewise become obsolete: but we are lost in a wilderness of conjectures: and as we have nothing that is satisfactory to ourselves to offer, we will not uselessly bewilder our Readers."

One rejoices to find no mention of throwing at cocks on the occasion; a horrid species of cowardly cruelty, compared with which cock-fighting, savage as it may appear, is to be reckoned among "the tender mercies" of barbarity.

THROWING AT COCKS.

The writer of an anonymous pamphlet entitled Clemency to Brutes (1761), after some forcible exhortations against the use of this cruel diversion, in which there is "an abuse of time so much the more shocking as it is shewn in tormenting that very creature which seems by Nature intended for our remembrancer to improve it: the creature, whose voice, like a trumpet, summoneth man forth to his labour in the morning, and admonisheth him of the flight of his most precious hours throughout the day," has the following observation : "Whence it had its rise among us, I could never yet learn to my satisfaction, but the common account of it is that the crowing of a Cock prevented our Saxon ancestors from massacring their conquerors, another part of our ancestors, the Danes, on the morning of a Shrove Tuesday, whilst asleep in their beds.” ↑

*

In an old jest-book entitled Ingenii Fructus, or the Cambridge Jests, &c., by W. B. (no date), is given what is called the original of "the throwing at Cocks on Shrove Tuesday," in which the rise of this custom is traced up to an unlucky discovery of an adulterous amour by the crowing of a cock.

+ In The British Apollo, (1708) is the following query: "How old and from whence is the custom of throwing at Cocks on Shrove Tuesday? A. There are several different opinions concerning the original of this custom; but we are most inclined to give credit to one Cranenstein, an old German author, who, speaking of the customs observed by the Christian nations, gives us the following account of the original institution of the ceremony :

"When the Danes were masters of England, and lorded it over the nations

In the preface to Hearne's edition of Thomas Otterbourne he tells us that this custom of throwing at cocks must be traced to the time of King Henry V., and our victories then gained over the French, whose name in Latin is synonymous with that of a cock, and that our brave countrymen hinted by it that they could as easily, at any time, overthrow the Gallic armies as they could knock down the cocks on Shrove Tuesday. To those who are satisfied with Hearne's explication of the custom we must object that from the very best authorities it appears also to have been practised in France, and that, too, long before the reign of our Henry V.

Carpentier, under the year 1355, mentions a petition of the scholars to the master of the school of Ramera to give them a cock, which they asserted the said master owed them upon Shrove Tuesday, to throw sticks at, according to the usual custom, for their sport and entertainment.*

Hogarth has satirised this barbarity in the first of the prints called the Four Stages of Cruelty. Trusler's description is as follows: "We

of the island, the inhabitants of a certain great city, grown weary of their slavery, had formed a secret conspiracy to murder their masters in one bloody night; and twelve men had undertaken to enter the town-house by a stratagem, and, seizing the arms, surprise the guard which kept it; at which time their fellows, upon a signal given, were to come out of their houses and murder all opposers: but, when they were putting it in execution, the unusual crowing and fluttering of the Cocks, about the place they attempted to enter at, discovered their design; upon which the Danes became so enraged that they doubled their cruelty, and used them with more severity than ever. Soon after they were forced from the Danish yoke; and, to revenge themselves on the Cocks for the misfortune they involved them in, instituted this custom of knocking them on the head on Shrove Tuesday, the day on which it happened. This sport, though at first only practised in one City, in process of time became a natural divertisement, and has continued ever since the Danes first lost this Island."

In The Gentleman's Journal; or the Monthly Miscellany, for January 1692-93, is given an English epigram "On a Cock at Rochester," by Sir Charles Sedley, wherein occur the following lines, which would seem to imply that the Cock suffered this annual barbarity by way of punishment for St Peter's crime in denying his Lord and Master

"May'st thou be punish'd for St Peter's crime,
And on Shrove Tuesday perish in thy prime."

A writer in the Gentleman's Magazine for July 1783 says: "The barbarous practice of throwing at a Cock tied to a stake at Shrove-tide, I think I have read, has an allusion to the indignities offered by the Jews to the Saviour of the World before His Crucifixion.'

* Among the games represented in the margin of the Roman d'Alexandre, preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, is a drawing of two boys carrying a third on a stick thrust between his legs, who holds a cock in his hands. They are followed by another boy, with a flag or standard emblazoned with a cudgel. Strutt has engraved the group in Pl. XXXV. of his Sports and Pastimes. He supposes that it represents a boyish triumph; the hero of the party having either won the cock, or his bird escaped unhurt from the dangers to which he had been exposed. The date of the illumination is not 1433, as Strutt mentions, but 1343.

have several groups of Boys at their different barbarous diversions ; one is throwing at a Cock, the universal Shrove-tide amusement, beating the harmless feathered animal to jelly."

The custom of throwing at cocks on Shrove Tuesday was long retained at Heston in Middlesex, in a field near the church. Constables were often directed to attend on the occasion, in order to put a stop to so barbarous a custom, but in vain. The following particulars were gathered from a person who in his younger years had often been a partaker of the sport. The owner of the cock trains his bird for some time before Shrove Tuesday, and throws a stick at him himself, in order to prepare him for the fatal day, by accustoming him to watch the threatened danger, and, by springing aside, avoid the fatal blow. He holds the poor victim on the spot marked out by a cord fixed to his leg, at the distance of nine or ten yards, so as to be out of the way of the stick himself. Another spot is marked, at the distance of twenty-two yards, for the person who throws to stand upon. He has three shys, or throws, for twopence, and wins the cock if he can knock him down and run up and catch him before the bird recovers his legs. The inhuman pastime does not end with the cock's life, for when killed it is put into a hat, and won a second time by the person who can strike it out. Broomsticks are generally used to shy with. The cock, if well trained, eludes the blows of his cruel persecutors for a long time, and thereby clears to his master a considerable sum of money.

In Men-Miracles, with other Poems, by M. Lluellin, Student of Christ-Church, Oxon (1679), is the following song, in which the author seems ironically to satirise this cruel sport-

"Battering with missive weapons a Cock tied to a stake, is an annual diversion," says a writer in the Gentleman's Magazine for Jan. 1737, "that for time immemorial has prevailed in this island." A cock has the misfortune to be called in Latin by the same word which signifies a Frenchman. "In our wars with France, in former ages, our ingenious forefathers," says he, "invented this emblematical way of expressing their derision of and resentment towards that nation; and poor Monsieur at the stake was pelted by Men and Boys in a very rough and hostile manner."

Another writer in the same Magazine for Jan. 1751 says: Some, yet more brutal, gratify their cruelty on that emblem of innocence the Dove, in the same manner, to the reproach of our country and the scandal of our species." That hens were thrown at as well as cocks appears from many unquestionable evidences. In the same work for April 1749 is "A strange and wonderful Relation of a Hen that spake at a certain ancient Borough in Staffordshire, on the 7th of February, being Shrove Tuesday, with her dying Speech."

Dean Tucker wrote An earnest and affectionate Address to the Com