S.R. (1926)

Main Variant

Transcription
THE MUMMERS' PLAY

More Light on the Origin
of Plough Monday Masque

MRS. CHAWORTH MUSTERS' ver-
sion of the Plough Monday play
which was recently reproduced in these
columns receives honourable mention
from Mr. E. K. Chambers in his learned
volume on "The Mediaeval Stage," but
it would be a mistake to regard it as
having any special importance, or in
fact as being other than a fairly modern
corruption of a very old play.

There are two types of the play - the
one, the play of St. George, which has
been connected with the Christmas
season proper from time immemorial,
and the other, the Plough Monday play,
into which some of the incidents and
several of the characters of the St.
George plays have been introduced.

The Genesis of the Plough Monday
play can be easily imagined. The St.
George play was very popular, but like
the carols and hymns of the season it
had a distinct Christmas flavour. The
players who found it very profitable at
Christmas time were naturally anxious
that their touring season - for the bands
who played it journeyed from village
to village and manor house to manor
house - should be long as possible.

The happy idea then occurred to them
of producing what in modern panto-
mime times was called a "second
edition." The Plough Monday play is
the second edition, and very, poor stuff
it frequently is, as local people have
lately had cause to recognise. The
village wit and the village poet have
been turned on to it, and the best that
can be said of their handiwork is that
they use here and there a phrase which
only a good countryman would use.
For instance, one needs more than the
townsman's acquaintance with the
country to write:

  How straight I go from end to end,
  I scarcely make a baulk or bend.

But it was in the village inn that some-
one said:

  My old dad learned me this trade
  Just ninety years ago.

And a frequenter of its fire side who
thought of the lines: "The overseer
of the parish who told me to bring it
to the biggest fool I could find, and
I think you be him."

The St. George play proper is very
old, but the evidence to this effect is
internal rather than documentary. The
late Mr. Cecil Sharpe and other ex-
perts have dated it back to pagan times,
but probably this is only true of the
plot or structure of the play. We are
on safer ground when we look to the
Crusades, and regard the play as one

[-- column break --]

of the earliest of those mystery plays
which were the delight of the common
people before the great days of the
Elizabethan drama.

In the Selston, district there is a
version of the play current in which
St. George, on entering, begins his
speech thus:

  I am St. George who from old
  England sprung,
  My famous name throughout the
  world hath rung;
  Many great deeds and wonders I
  have made known,
  And made the tyrants tremble on
  their throne.

An earlier version of this speech col-
lected, In Sussex sixty years ago, ran:

  In comes I, St, George,
  That noble champion bold;
  With my long and glittering sword
  I won my crown of gold

Similar words are found in a North
Notts. version of a more recent date.

St. George has an enemy who is
variously named. In the older ver-
sions of the play he is often called the
Turk or the Turkish Knight. His
later and more popular name is
Slasher, or Bold Slasher, which is self-
explanatory. It is Slasher who
properly says in reply to St. George's
challenge.

  How can'st thou break my head?
  My head is made of iron,
  My body is made of steel,
  My hands and feet of knuckle bone.

Despite all this, Slasher is slain by
St. George. Then enters the doctor, in
whom learned professors have found a
likeness to the medicine man of primi-
tive ages. There is nearly always a
curious argument about the amount of
the doctor's fee, which is followed by
George's question: "Where hast
thou travelled?' The doctor replies:

  Through England, Scotland, France,
  and Spain,
  And now I've come to England again.

The doctor avers, in words which are
nearly the same in all versions, that
he can cure "the itch, the stitch, the
palsy and the gout, pains within and
pains without," and he thereupon
brings back the dead man to life. In
some of the old versions there is a
suggestion that the man who is killed
is the only son of the character who
presides over the drama, or of the one
who slays him, and in this circum-
stance some investigators into the
play's history have found a certain
significance.

The King of Egypt and his daughter,

[-- column break --]

Beelzebub, and the Fool, are among the
other old characters in the play. In
Gloucestershire there were versions
current into which Robin Hood and
Maid Marian were introduced, but
strangely enough neither of these two
characters has, been found in the play
as acted in Nottinghamshire.

In North Notts. round Retford some
fifty years ago the fiery dragon, with
which St. George boosts that he has
fought, was sometimes introduced. The
dragon strangely enough was gifted
with speech. The lines he spoke were
probably those which are recorded of
an 18th century version used round
London:

  I am the dragon, here are my jaws,
  I am the dragon, here are my claws,
  Meat, meat, meat for to eat,
  Stand on my head, stand on my feet.

The same version closes with a prayer
in rhyme which the writer has not met
with elsewhere:

  God Almighty bless your hearth and
  gold,
  Shut out the wolf, and keep out the
  cold,

In the 18th cenrury and the early years
of the 19th St George as often as not
became King George, and the old
characters received new names with the
prefixes of colonel and captain. It was
now that Napoleon and Nelson were
introduced into some versions, but none
is known in which Wellington was so
honoured, which is somewhat hard on
our national hero, especially as there
is at least one version extant with the
King of Prussia as the chief character!
The Recruiting Sergeant of the Crop-
well version, and the Drummer of
others are both survivals of the same
period.

Though it is true that there is no
authoritative version of either the St.
George or the Plough Monday play,
many versions of both have been
printed during the last few years. One
little pamphlet of a Manchester pub-
lishing house had a large circulation in
the eighteen-seventies, and to it some
of the Derbyshire versions call no doubt
be attributed.

It is a good service to folk lore
when a recorder can be found to gather
up these native versions of the play.
But one must distinguish between the
old and the modern, and between the
valuable and the worthless, It was a
very modern person who thought of
improving the play by a reference to
pork pies!

  - S.R.