With the play just described the Lutterworth is identical in some seven or eight passages, and save that there is no Black Prince, and that a Turkish Champion takes the place of St. Gay, the principal characters are the same. The introduction of Beelzebub and a clown, with remarks appropriate to each, would, however, indicate that this part of the play is earlier than the amalgamated Beelzebub-clown of the Derbyshire. Both plays preserve reminiscences of the crusades. As to the Oxfordshire, I can say only that it is a rigmarole from history, legend, and nursery tale, culminating in the destruction of the dragon (or Old Nick) and the appearance of Father Christmas. The Bassingham plays present the stock characters, but little of the original story. They add elements of scandal and love, however,--the former in connection with Dame Jane, who tries to fasten the paternity of her child on a "Father's Eldest Son, And heir of all his land"; and the latter in connection with a Fair Lady, who is wooed by Eldest Son, Farming Man, Lawyer, Old Man, and refuses them all, in the end apparently to accept the Fool. This part of the story is a link between the St. George plays and the sword-dance plays, as is also the Shetland, where St. George himself sustains the part of principal dancer. In the Revesby sword-dance play, acted in 1779 by morris-dancers, the Fair Lady of the Bassingham reappears as Cicely to refuse Pepper-breeches, "My father's eldest son, And heir of all his land," Ginger-breeches, Blue-breeches, the Knight of Lee, and Pickle Herring, the Lord of Pool, in favour of Rafe the Fool. Though the phraseology of the Bassingham and Revesby is occasionally the same, the latter is utterly removed from the St. George original save in the mention of dragon and worm which accompany the morris-dancers. How far back the Revesby sword-dance play may date I do not know. The dance was common on the continent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and a similar performance with a fool in the middle is recorded as taking place in Ulm in 1551. The name of the merry-andrew, Pickle Herring, may possibly take us back to the first quarter of the sixteenth century. For, as is well known, it is the usual designation for the clown in the 1620 collection of plays acted by the so-called English comedians in Germany. According to Creizenach,[43] the character was introduced by Robert Reynolds, who was perhaps himself the Robert Pickelhäring mentioned in connection with an entertainment given at Torgau in 1627. Floegel and Ebeling speak of "der alte Pickelhering aus der Moralititäten des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts," as if he were the "old Vice"; but surely without justification. I know of no mention of Pickle Herring before 1620, and since he still held the stage in Löwen's _Prinz Pickelhering_, about the middle of the eighteenth century, it is not impossible that the character was borrowed by the English sword play at a comparatively recent date.