Bring iuo in the Fly!' 201
Coll. 1642) I sawe them drinke their mornings draughts, and on Michaelmas day they rode thither again to convey the Fly away." '
We have here, I think, several of the essential features of those Oxfordshire Maytide or Whitsuntide agricultural festivals, which survived into the middle of last century.^'* The company sets out on a May morning, with a great uproar, at or before the earliest hour of daylight. They are mounted on horseback, like the followers of the "Whit Hunt" in W\-chwood Forest. They march up to Strowell, and there engage in a ceremony which reminds us of the Derbyshire custom of " well-dressing. " The "little porch set before so great a door," i.e. before the College gateway, is evidently such a bower of green branches and Ma}' blos- som, as Herrick describes in " Corinna's going a ]\Iaying ": —
" Come, my Corinna, come ; and coming mark How each field turns a street, each street a park
Made green, and trimmed with trees ; see how
Devotion gives each house a bough
Or branch ; each porch, each door, ere this,
An ark, a tabernacle is. Made up of white thorn neatly interwove."
In this bower, I take it, was b.eld the customarv* feast at which the "company of the round table" drank till it did "goe round with them." Booths like this, made of, or decorated with, boughs, and known as " boweries," where unlimited eating and drinlcing went on, sometimes for several days together, formed the centre of the festivities at the AVoodstock Whitsun Ale, the Kirtlington Lamb Ale, and many other such celebrations. The hint of lawless love-making, so common at these periods, finds its parallel in Herrick's poem.^^
'J. Aubrey, Kemaines of Centilisine aud/iidaisme, ed. J. Britten, p. 202. '" Folk-Lore, vol. viii., pp. 307-24.
"J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 3rd ed. ; The Magic Arl, vol. ii., pp. 67, 104.
