extensively in them.[36] And it would appear that when, in 1415, the 23d April, St. George's Day, was "made a major double feast and ordered to be observed the same as Christmas day, all labour ceasing," his play was no new thing. From that time on, at any rate, the procession of St. George was one of the "pastimes yearly used," of which Stow tells us that they were celebrated "with disguisings, masks, and mummeries." Gilds were organized in his name, and the ceremony of 'Riding the George' spread over England. When Henry V. visited Paris, in 1420, he was appropriately welcomed with a St. George show, and the saint appears again in a pageant of 1474 performed at Coventry in honour of young Prince Edward. We have already mentioned Sir John Paston's reference to the play in 1473. A long-winded and serious German dramatization of the legend exists in an Augsburg manuscript of the end of the same century. In all probability the expensive miracle play of the saint that was acted in the croft or field at Bassingbourne in Cambridgeshire, in 1511, was of the same didactic kind, but enlivened by _impromptus_ of the villagers who took part. St. George and the dragon were features of the May-games at London, evidently in procession, as late as 1559. There appears in Warburton's list a play of _St. George for England_, by Wentworth Smith, of the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and in the latter part of that century, a droll called _St. George and the Dragon_ was by way of being acted at Bartholomew Fair. The play seems from an early date to have been performed on the occasion of other festivals besides that of the Saint himself. The versions of the play best known of recent years are the Oxfordshire, acted during the eighteenth century and taken down from an old performer in 1853, and the Lutterworth (Leicestershire) Christmas play, acted as late as 1863.[37] Professor Child, in his _Ballads_, mentions another, which was regularly acted on All Souls' Day at a village a few miles from Chester. I would call attention, in addition, to four others of interest; the Derbyshire Christmas play,[38] acted by mummers as late as 1849, which is fuller than any other and appears to me to retain traces of a fifteenth-century original; the two Bassingham (Lincoln) Christmas plays,[39] 1823, and the Shetland play from a 1788 Ms., recounted in Scott's novel of _The Pirate_. The last three make the connection between the St. George play proper and the sword play, which was undoubtedly common in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and of which the Revesby version of 1779 is still extant.[40]