Besides music, many other recreations were indulged in. These were the days of archery, casting of the bar, wrestling, and such martial sports as fighting with swords and battle-axes. For rural pastimes there were hunting and hawking—and in these the ladies were often as enthusiastic as the gentlemen. Card-playing was highly popular, and in the reign of Henry VIII. a prohibitory statute was found necessary to prevent apprentices from using cards, except in the Christmas holidays, and then only in their masters’ houses. The same statute forbade any householder to permit card-playing in his house, under the penalty of six shillings and eightpence for every offence. May Day was a general holiday, and Maypoles were set up in every town and village. The observance of May Day differed no doubt in minor particulars in different places, but in general it consisted in people of all ranks going out early in the morning into the “sweet meadows and green woods,” where they broke down branches from the trees, and adorned them with nosegays and crowns of flowers. “This done, they returned homewards with their booty, and made their doors and windows triumph in the flowery spoil.” The Maypole was set up, and the rest of the day was spent in dancing round it, and in sports of different kinds. When evening came, bonfires were lighted in the streets. Even the reigning sovereign joined in these amusements. On May Day, 1515, Henry VIII. and Queen Katherine, his wife, rode a-Maying from Greenwich to the high ground of Shooter’s-hill, accompanied by many lords and ladies. There was a famous London Maypole in Cornhill before the parish church of St. Andrew, which thus got the name of St. Andrew Undershaft. The pole or shaft, Stow tells us, was set up by the citizens “every year, on May Day, in the morning, in the midst of the street, before the south door of the said church; which shaft, when it was set on end and fixed in the ground, was higher than the church steeple.” When its annual day of usefulness was over, the pole was taken down again and hung on iron hooks above the doors of the neighbouring houses. This pole was destroyed in 1550, the fourth year of Edward VI.’s reign, in an outburst of Puritanism, after a sermon preached at St. Paul’s Cross against May games. The inhabitants of the houses against whose wall the pole had found shelter sawed it in pieces, and every man took a bit and made use of it to light his fire. Mingled with the festivities of May Day there was a distinct set of sports, very popular in the early part of the sixteenth century, intended to represent the adventures of the renowned woodland hero, Robin Hood. The enthusiasm with which the common people entered into these sports may be seen from the reception Bishop Latimer met with when he once proposed to preach in a town on the 1st of May. He tells the incident himself in a sermon he preached in 1549 before Edward VI.