Although in these days the word folk-lore has become part of the common speech, and the subject is in some degree familiar to everybody, little original research is done. Even the Folk-lore Society, instead of collecting fresh material—and there is plenty to be had—has been printing, under the name of _County Folk-lore_, a farrago of material from local histories and guide-books, of which not one item in twenty was worth reproducing. Far different is the work of such men as Kristensen, whose labours in Denmark should have been taken as a model of what should be done in England. Not every day could a man be found to dine on potatoes or sleep on the table of a workman’s cottage, as Kristensen has done, in order to secure a ballad or a tradition. But at least it should be possible to make some effort to collect the lore which is passing away from us for ever. The old books are not likely to perish; the men and women who know the old tales are dying every year. But where you have one man ready and willing to collect folk-lore or dialect, you find a hundred who want to advance theories or to write little grammars. The armchair of the study is so much more comfortable than a rush-bottomed chair in a cottage. In Derbyshire we have folk-lore which is common to other parts of Great Britain, just as Great Britain has folk-lore which is common to other parts of Europe. But every country has preserved items which are to be found in no other, or which, if found elsewhere, appear in such a modified shape that they contain much that is new. For folk-lore has been compared to a mosaic which has been broken and scattered, some fragments lying here and others there. In Derbyshire we have the garland or ceremony of the May King, which is performed at Castleton on the 29th of May—an ancient rite which seems to have survived in no other part of Great Britain.[99] And then we have the Derby Ram or Old Tup, which may occur in other counties, but which, at all events, is so much associated with Derby as to have taken its name from that town. It is remarkable that these ceremonies are connected with ancient boroughs, for there were burgage tenements both in Castleton and Hope in the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.[100] In Castleton there was Peak Castle, older than the Norman Conquest; in Hope there was the Roman town of Burgh or Brough. [99] First mentioned in literature by Dr. Cox, _Churches of Derbyshire_, ii., 132; see _Folk-lore_, xii., p. 394 _seq._ [100] Jeayes, _Derbyshire Charters_, Nos. 560, 1429.