POPULAR PLACES OF RESORT.—WAKES, STATUTES, AND FAIRS.  
Besides the remains of the ancient festivals, the country people find a great source of amusement in these gatherings. The Wake is the parochial feast of the dedication of the church. It has now dwindled into a village holiday, shorn by the Reformation of all its ecclesiastical and sacred character. But it furnishes a certain point in every year, in every individual parish, to which the rural people can look forward as a point of rest and mutual rejoicing. It is a time which leads them to clean up their houses, to look forward and prepare for a renewal of their wardrobe; and which cheers the spirit of many an otherwise solitary and labouring person with the prospect of a short season of relaxation, a short pause in the otherwise ever-going machinery of servitude. The old people—parents, and grand-parents, say—when telling of their children out at service, in some distant place, or married and settled far off: “Well, well, we shall see them at the wake. They’ll all be here, thank God, well and hearty, I hope.” The children, as they groan at times under the tedium of perpetual labour, suddenly cheer up, and say,—“Well, but we shall go home at the wake;”—a thing which is regularly stipulated for at hiring; and the vision of that joyful time, though but a moment in itself, puts out all the twilight of their weary waiting. The time comes. The merry[494] bells of the church are ringing on the anniversary of that church’s completion, perhaps five or seven hundred years ago. Merrily they ring; and simple and glad creatures, young maidens, and youths, and comely pairs with a troop of children round them, hear them, as they come over hill and dale, approaching from all quarters the place of their nativity, and the place of their ancestors: the one place, however small and however obscure, tinged all over with the memories of childhood, and filled with the stories and legends that were interwoven with the very grain of their minds by their parents’ recitals in early life—the one place, therefore, which seems the most important in the universe. They, like the Chinese, always place in the maps of their simple thoughts their native village in the centre of the earth. Over hill and dale they are coming, all in their holiday array; and in many a bright little cottage, basking in the sunshine of morning, are eager hearts looking out for them; wondering how Grace and Thomas will look; whether they are much altered; and whether the children of the married ones will be much grown. The beauty of these village feasts is, that they do not occur all at one time, so that the friends and acquaintance of the inhabitants of one place, come pouring in to see them, and are ready in their turn to receive them at their feast.
They are times of pleasant exchange of hospitalities and renewals of simple friendships. Out of doors there are stalls of toys and sweetmeats, and whirligigs for the children; within, there is, for once, plum-pudding and roast beef, and an infinity of such talk as best pleases their tastes. Old notes of by-gone years are compared. Many are recalled to remembrance who have not been thought of for a long time. The hearts of the old are warmed by retracing their early exploits, and early acquaintance, with all the pleasant exaggerations of memory; and the young listen, and think with wonder on those good old times.
In some old-fashioned places, these feasts are named from and mingled with the remains of other old church rites. At Ilkeston in Derbyshire, it is called the Cross-Dressing, and the cross in the village is dressed up with oaken boughs, with their leaves gilt and spangled. At Tissington, near Dovedale, the Well-Dressing or Well-Flowering, when they dress up a beautiful spring with[495] flowers, and have dances and processions and much merriment, is their great feast, though it may not happen to fall exactly on the day of the dedication of the church. At Blidworth, in the old demesnes of Sherwood, it is their Rocking; I suppose from its happening to fall on the day after Twelfth-day, or St. Distaff’s-day, the custom of which is described by Herrick:—
Partly work, and partly play,
Ye must on St. Distaff’s-day:
From the plough soone free your teame,
Then come home and fother them.
If the maides a spinning goe,
Burn the flax and fire the tow.
Bring in pails of water then,
Let the maides bewash the men:
Give St. Distaff all the right,
Then bid Christmas sport good night.
And next morrow every one,
To his owne vocation.
In different villages, different customs have allied themselves to the great annual feast, the season of meeting of friends and relatives. Long may these meetings remain bound up with, at least, one bright day in the year. I trust, however knowledge and refinement may extend themselves, they will never refine these rural holidays away. Let them root out cruelty and rudeness, and drunkenness, as they have done already in a great degree—for where now are bull-baitings, bear-baitings, dog-fights, and cock-fights, which twenty years ago were the invariable accompaniments and great attraction of these wakes? Let Christian knowledge root out these things, and thus perfect this one white season of the cottager’s year—making it entirely an occasion for cultivating the best affections, and knitting together family ties.
STATUTES.
 
These, which are called provincially Statitz, or Statice, are meetings for hiring of farm and household servants, “according to statutes made and provided,” and are held in certain central and convenient places. They are attended merely by farmers, and people who happen to want men or maid-servants, and by the[496] servants themselves. By the latter they are looked forward to with much interest. They furnish occasion for a holiday. They are for the time their own masters, having left, or being about to leave their places, and either to re-engage themselves, or to seek new ones. They here meet their old acquaintances, and compare notes of the past year, of the character of the different places they have had; of what extraordinary has befallen them; and are full of new schemes and speculations as to where they shall go; what advance of wages they shall obtain; in what capacity they shall hire themselves. In many parts of the country he who offers himself as a shepherd appears with a lock of wool in his hat, placed under the band; the wagoner has a bit of whipcord stuck there; the groom a bit of sponge; the milkmaid in her bonnet a tuft of cow-hair; and the general run of farm-servants are conspicuous enough as to what they are, by their carters’-frocks, or slops, hob-nailed ankle boots, and out-of-door, half-waggish, half-sheepish looks.
It is a true country scene, to see all these rude sons of the soil collected together from their farm-yards and solitary fields, where, far from towns, they have gone whistling after the plough, sowing, or gathering in harvest; and the girls that have been scrubbing, churning, and milking, and occasionally helping in the hay or corn fields, here dressed out in their rustic finery, and shewing such robust forms and rosy faces as might astonish our over-delicate citizens. To see the farmers going amongst them, inquiring after their accomplishments and qualities, and cheapening them much as they would cheapen a horse; and their no less wary wives negotiating with the buxom damsels of the mop and pail. These matters all satisfactorily disposed of, and the Earnest, or money given on account of future services, or as it is otherwise called, the Fastening-penny, from its formerly being a penny, though now a shilling, being given, away go the farmers and farmeresses, and leave the lads and lasses to a day of jollity and fun. The swains lose no time in selecting each his chere-amie for the day; and the afternoon is spent in eating, flirting, drinking, and dancing, and then all separate their several ways, for at least another year.
Some of these Statutes in agricultural districts bring together a vast concourse of people. In Warwickshire, Oxfordshire,[497] and many other parts of the country, these statutes are held about Old Michaelmas-day, when all the servants, men and women, are at liberty from their servitude, and have a week’s holiday to attend the different neighbouring statutes, mops, or bull-roastings, as they are called. All work is at an end. Day-labourers are the only men who can be got to do out-of-doors offices; charwomen take the place of housemaids within; and good housewives are often at their wits’ end what to do. As you enter towns you find them swarming with the country lads and lasses, and oxen roasting in the streets; booths, shows, eating, treating, and dancing the order of the day. As you go along the highways you meet the young country people streaming along in their rustic finery to or from the towns; and when you arrive at a country inn, probably the door is barred and bolted, if it be towards evening,—the servants being all gone to be hired, the master to hire, and the mistress left alone, and no little afraid of the loose strolling fellows who are abroad at this unsettled time. I once went, when a boy, with my schoolmaster to Polesworth Statute, in Warwickshire, and well remember that such was the crowd, that although I saw a penny on the ground, and made many attempts to stoop down and pick it up, I found it impossible to do it. In Northumberland, Durham, and the south of Scotland,............