The morris-dancers who go about from village to village about Twelfth Day, have their fool, their Maid Marian (generally a man dressed in woman’s clothes, and called “the fool’s wife,”) and sometimes the hobby-horse; they are dressed up in ribbons and tinsel, but the bells are usually discarded.--_Jour. of Arch. Assoc._ 1852, vol. vii. p. 201. DORSETSHIRE. The rector of Piddle Hinton gives away on Old Christmas Day a pound of bread, a pint of ale, and a mince pie, to every poor person in the parish. This distribution is regularly made by the rector to upwards of three hundred persons.--Edwards, _Old English Customs and Charities_, 1842, p. 6. LINCOLNSHIRE. Anciently the Mowbrays had great possessions in and about the Isle of Axholme, and a seat, at which they principally resided, and were considered the greatest folks in that part of the country. It so happened that on Old Christmas Day, while a young lady (the daughter of the then Mowbray) was riding over the Meeres to the church by an old road (at that time the principal one across the village) a gale of wind blew off her hood. Twelve farming men who were working in the fields saw the occurrence, and ran to gather up the hood, and in such earnest were they that the lady took so much amusement at the scene she forbade her own attendants joining in the pursuit. The hood being captured, and replaced on the lady’s head, she expressed her obligation to the men, giving them each some money, and promised a piece of land (to be vested in certain persons in trust) to throw up a hood annually on Old Christmas Day.[7] She also ordered that the twelve men engaged to contest the race for the hood should be clothed (_pro temp._) in scarlet jerkins and velvet caps: the hood to be thrown in the same place as the one where she lost hers. The custom is yet followed; and though the Meeres on which she was riding has long ago been brought into a state of cultivation, and the road through been diverted, yet an old mill stands in the field where the road passed through, and is pointed out as the place where the original scene took place, and the hood is usually thrown up from this mill. There is generally a great concourse of people from the neighbouring villages who also take part in the proceedings; and when the hood is thrown up by the chief of the _boggons_, or by the officials, it becomes the object of the villagers to get the hood to their own village, by throwing or kicking it, similar to the foot-ball. The other eleven men, called _boggons_, being stationed at the comers and sides of the field to prevent, if possible, its being thrown out of the field; and should it chance to fall into any of their hands it is “boggoned,” and forthwith returned to the chief, who again throws it up from the mill as before. Whoever is fortunate enough to get it out of the field, tries to get it to his village, and usually takes it to the public house he is accustomed to frequent, and the landlord regales him