Christmas was a great time for merry-making. One of the affairs at the time was mumming. Masks were used and disguises put on so as to impersonate all kinds of people and even animals. These mummers would make calls on people and sometimes even on high personages, making their entrances and exits without saying anything. May-day was a great occasion. Upon this day the houses would be decorated with flowers and branches from trees. There would be the dance about the May-pole and many games and plays. There were fair days, when people came together for traffic and for sports. There were sack races for the young men and smock races for the young women. Also there were wheelbarrow races and other kinds of races and contests. One such contest was the grinning match, where each person in the contest would thrust his head through a horse's collar and they would then vie with one another in grinning. In the yawning match, they would wait till late at night when all were tired and sleepy and then each would try to yawn the greatest. The one that yawned the widest and the most naturally and would thereby cause the most yawns from all present would win the prize. It was a custom during this period for kings and great nobles to have Fools, who were the butt of all and who made all the butt of their jokes. They also kept minstrels in their households. Sometimes these minstrels played on different kinds of musical instruments and formed a musical band. Among the musical instruments were the ruible (a two-stringed instrument played with a bow), the veille (an instrument somewhat like a violin), the gitern (a kind of guitar), the harp, bagpipe, trumpet, pipe, lute, dulcimer, tambourine, and cymbals. There were a number of other kinds of entertainers, as, acrobats, rope-walkers, jugglers, contortionists, and conjurers. There was wire-dancing, rope-dancing, ballet-dancing, and sword-dancing. There were dancing bears and trained monkeys. There were entertainers who disguised themselves as birds and other animals and imitated their actions and cries. Dancing was, also, an amusement of the middle ages and it was indulged in by the nobility and all classes of the people. There were plays acted in the castles and the towns and the colleges and the schools and even in the churches in the way of mysteries and moralities. There were strolling bands of players that attended wakes and fairs and played in barns and taverns and even in the farmhouse kitchen, wherever they might find place. "I shall transcribe out of Hall a description of a play which was acted by the boys of St. Paul's School, in 1527, at Greenwich. The occasion was the despatch of a French embassy to England, when Europe was outraged by the Duke of Bourbon's capture of Rome, when the children of Francis I. were prisoners in Spain, and Henry, with the full energy of his fiery nature, was flinging himself into a quarrel with Charles V. as the champion of the Holy See.