Besides the plays, there were disguisings and banquets; and Walter Alwyn and Jakes Haute had, at different Christmasses, each £20 and upwards, for the disguisings or revels. In 1493, on Twelfth Night, there was a great banquet and wassail, and a pageant of Saint George with a castle; and twelve lords, knights, and esquires, with twelve ladies, danced after the wassail. Henry the Eighth at this time was but a fat-cheeked child, so could scarcely reckon his taste for this sort of amusement—in which he afterwards so much delighted—from so early a date, but had plenty of opportunities subsequently of maturing it. On Twelfth Day the king made the accustomed offerings of gold, myrrh, and frankincense: the dean of the chapel sent to the Archbishop of Canterbury the offering by a clerk or priest, who was to have the next benefice in the gift of the archbishop. The king was to wear his crown and his royal robes, kirtle, surcoat, furred hood, and mantle, with long train, and his sword before him; his armills of gold set with rich stones on his arms, and his sceptre in his right hand. The wassail was introduced in the evening with great ceremony: the steward, treasurer, and comptroller of the household went for it with their staves of office; the king’s and the queen’s sewers, having fair towels round their necks, and dishes in their hands, such as the king and queen should eat of; the king’s and queen’s carvers following in like manner. Then came in the ushers of the chamber, with the pile of cups—the king’s, the queen’s, and the bishop’s—with the butlers and wine, to the cupboard, or sideboard as we should now call it; and squires of the body to bear them. The gentlemen of the chapel stood at one end of the hall, and when the steward came in with the wassail, he was to cry out three times, “Wassail, wassail, wassail!” to which they answered with a good song—no doubt a wassail song or a carol, as they were prevalent at this time. The terms wassail and wassailing are, as before mentioned, of very early date. Mr. Hunter, in his interesting essay on Robin Hood, notices a payment of a hundred shillings made, in the time of Edward the Second, to Isabelle del Holde and Alisoun Conand, damsels of the queen, for crying Noël and Wessel. They were not, however, absolutely confined to Christmas, but were used to indicate any convivial and festive meetings:— “The king doth wake to-night, and takes his rouse, Keeps wassel.” The meetings indeed were themselves called after them— “He is wit’s peddler, and retails his wares At wakes and wassels, meetings, markets, fairs.” One of the earliest wassail songs is that introduced by Dissimulation, disguised as a religious person, in Bale’s old play of Kynge Johan, about the middle of the sixteenth century. He brings in the cup by which the king is poisoned, stating that it “passith malmesaye, capryck, tyre, or ypocras,” and then sings—