The book of Christmas : $b descriptive of the customs, ceremonies, traditions, superstitions, fun, feeling, and festivities of the Christmas seasonHervey, Thomas K.
Religion
The book of Christmas : $b descriptive of the customs, ceremonies, traditions, superstitions, fun, feeling, and festivities of the Christmas season
Hervey, Thomas K.
Christmas
There is a curious story told in Baker's Chronicle of an awkward
predicament into which the society of Gray's Inn brought themselves by a
play which they enacted amongst their Christmas revels of 1527. The
subject of this play was to the effect that "Lord Governance was ruled
by Dissipation and Negligence; by whose evil order Lady Public-Weal was
put from Governance." Now, if these gentlemen did not intend, by this
somewhat delicate moral, any insinuation against the existing state of
things (which, being lawyers, and therefore courtiers, there is good
motive to believe they did not), it is, at all events, certain that, as
lawyers, they ought to have known better how to steer clear of all
offence to weak consciences. That respectable minister, Cardinal Wolsey,
felt himself (as we think he had good right to do) greatly scandalized
at what, if not designed, was, by accident, a palpable hit; and, in
order to teach the gentlemen of Gray's Inn that they were responsible
for wounds given, if they happened to shoot arrows in the dark, he
divested the ingenious author, Sergeant Roe, of his coif, and committed
him to the Fleet, together with one of the actors, of the name of
Moyle,--in order to afford them leisure for furnishing him with a
satisfactory explanation of the matter.
In Dugdale's "Origines Juridiciales," we have an account of a
magnificent Christmas which was kept at the Inner Temple, in the fourth
year of Queen Elizabeth's reign; at which the Lord Robert Dudley,
afterwards Earl of Leicester, presided, under the mock-title of
Palaphilos, Prince of Sophie, High Constable Marshal of the Knights
Templars, and Patron of the honorable order of Pegasus. A potentate with
such a title would have looked very foolish without a "tail;" and
accordingly he had for his master of the game no less a lawyer than
Christopher Hatton, afterwards Lord Chancellor of England, with four
masters of the revels, a variety of other officers, and fourscore
persons forming a guard. Gerard Leigh, who was so fortunate as to obtain
the dignity of a knight of Pegasus, describes, as an eye-witness, in his
"Accidence of Armorie," the solemn fooleries which were enacted on the
occasion by these worthies of the sword and of the gown.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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