of blood was therefore no longer essential, these rites were adapted and given new life as alternative methods of effecting the sacrifice. It is not surprising that there should be but few direct and evident survivals of sacrifice in English village custom. For at the time of the conversion the rite must have borne the whole brunt of the missionary attack. The other elements of the festivals, the sacred garlands, the water-and fire-charms, had already lost much of their original significance. A judgement predisposed to toleration might plausibly look upon them as custom rather than worship. It was not so with sacrifice. This too had had its history, and in divers ways changed its character. But it was still essentially a liturgy. Oblation or sacrament, it could not possibly be dissociated from a recognition of the divine nature of the power in whose honour it took place. And therefore it must necessarily be renounced, as a condition of acceptance in the Church at all, by the most weak-kneed convert. What happened was precisely that to which Gregory the Great looked forward. The sacrificial banquet, the great chines of flesh, and the beakers of ale, cider, and mead, endured, but the central rite of the old festival, the ceremonial slaying of the animal, vanished. The exceptions, however, are not so rare as might at first sight be thought, and naturally they are of singular interest. It has already been pointed out that in times of stress and trouble, the thinly veneered heathenism of the country folk long tended to break out, and in particular that up to a very late date the primitive need-fire was occasionally revived to meet the exigencies of a cattle-plague. Under precisely similar circumstances, and sometimes in immediate connexion with the need-fire, cattle have been known, even during the present century, to be sacrificed[453]. Nor are such sporadic instances the only ones that can be adduced. Here and there sacrifice, in a more or less modified form, remains an incident in the village festival. The alleged custom of annually sacrificing a sheep on May-day at Andreas in the Isle of Man rests on slight evidence[454]; but there is a fairly well authenticated example in the ‘ram feast’ formerly held on the same day in the village of Holne in Devonshire. A ram was slain at a granite pillar or ancient altar in the village ‘ploy-field,’ and a struggle took place for slices which were supposed to bring luck[455]. Still more degenerate survivals are afforded by the Whitsun feast at King’s Teignton, also in Devonshire[456], and by the Whitsun ‘lamb feast’ at Kidlington[457], the Trinity ‘lamb ale’ at Kirtlington[458], and the ‘Whit hunt’ in Wychwood Forest[459], all three places lying close together in Oxfordshire. These five cases have been carefully recorded and studied; but they do not stand alone; for the folk-calendar affords numerous examples of days which are marked, either universally or locally, by the ceremonial hunting or killing of