2. They entail a procession between a place of venerable antiquity outside the town and the house of the chief townsman (mayor or parson).
3. The leading motive of both processions is a hare. In the one case, the hare is followed to the Mayor's house, where a feast is eaten. Whether this feast originally comprised hare's flesh, I have not been able to ascertain, though, from an entry in the Chamberlains' accounts, it appears that at one Easter Hunting a great many hares were caught,[1] and these would presumably be used for the Mayor's banquet. At Hallaton, the hare is carried in procession (sometimes in the shape of hare-pies, sometimes also mounted on a pole) from the parson's house to a sacred spot on the boundary of the parish, where the feast of hare-pies is eaten.
4. At the Hallaton festival penny loaves are distributed to the people—a common form of survival in sacrificial customs.
5. Both these rites take place on Easter Monday, at a season, that is, of special religious solemnity in the spring of the year.
Thus the customs under review possess features which correspond upon the whole to the most prominent traits which we know must have distinguished certain religious ceremonies of prehistoric man. For, one of the greatest festivals observed by our early Aryan, perhaps by our pre-Aryan ancestors, must have comprised a similar public and communal procession, in which a god was carried round the district, and afterwards slain and eaten, and this festival took place in the spring of the year.[2]
- ↑ Anno 1671. "Itm̄ pd to two and twenty men that brought and carried hares before Mr. Maior and the Aldermen by Mr. Mayor's order."
- ↑ It may indeed appear strange, at first sight, that a sacrificial procession should have resolved itself into a hunt; but there are many instances of this amongst analogous customs, where the hunting of the wren, the squirrel, and the ram have been shown to owe their origin
