Page:Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne.djvu/178

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164
TIME AND TIDE.

it should be a point of somewhat distinguished honour with both sexes to gain their permission of marriage in the eighteenth and twenty-second year; and a recognised disgrace not to have gained it at least before the close of their twenty-first and twenty-fourth. I do not mean that they should in any wise hasten actual marriage; but only that they should hold it a point of honour to have the right to marry. In every year there should be two festivals, one on the first of May, and one at the feast of harvest home in each district, at which festivals their permissions to marry should be given publicly to the maidens and youths who had won them in that half-year; and they should be crowned, the maids by the old French title of Rosières, and the youths, perhaps by some name rightly derived from one supposed signification of the word "bachelor," "laurel fruit," and so led in joyful procession, with music and singing, through the city street or village lane, and the day ended with feasting of the poor.

126. And every bachelor and rosière should be entitled to claim, if they needed it, accord-