Correspondence. 465
occasion), and he and his bearers were treated to beer. As they were generally in a state of " doubtful ebriety " at the beginning of ■the function, I think the poor fellow often came to grief at the finish.
Was not this a degraded remains of the " Whitsun Lord ? " I remember the custom from 1846 to 52 or 53. I am not certain whether it was kept up in the latter year. It has now gone to the limbo of forgotten things, as have the village club and the Whit- suntide merry-making, which are replaced by the " Manchester Unity of Oddfellows " and Bank Hohday respectively.
W. Henry Jewitt.
Another locale of this not very uncommon custom was Emble- ton, in Northumberland. Mrs. Creighton gives the following account of its extinction in the year 1875: "An unpleasant custom prevailed on one of the days of the village feast [the week after Trinity Sunday], of getting hold of some tramp or wandering labourer and dubbing him the mayor of the village. He was first maae thoroughly drunk and then put on a trolley and pushed round the village by a crowd of men and boys, who demanded, and generally received, money for drink at all the houses. The first year [of Creighton's incumbency] they even rolled him down to the vicarage. The vicar happened to be away that day ; but he determined to put an end to the performance another year, and told the policeman that if either the ' mayor ' or those who pushed him about got drunk over the performance he was to summon them for being drunk and disorderly. I believe they used still to drag the man about, but there was an end of the public exhibition of drunkenness." — Life of Mandell Creighton, Bishop of London, Vol. I., p. 171.
Charlotte S. Burne.
A Swiss Charm.
I spent a short time this summer in the Val de Morgins (on the Savoy border of the Canton de Valais). The peasants of
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