To begin with, it is possible that athletic sports and horse-racing are largely an outcome of sacrificial festivals. Like the Greeks around the pyre of Patroclus, the Teutons celebrated games at the tombs of their dead chieftains[486]. But games were a feature of seasonal, no less than funeral feasts. It will be remembered that the council of Clovesho took pains to forbid the keeping of the Rogation days with horse-races. A bit of wrestling or a bout of quarter-staff is still _de rigueur_ at many a wake or rushbearing, while in parts of Germany the winner of a race or of a shooting-match at the popinjay is entitled to light the festival fire, or to hold the desired office of May-king[487]. The reforming bishops of the thirteenth century include public wrestling-bouts and contests for prizes amongst the _ludi_ whose performance they condemn; and they lay particular stress upon a custom described as _arietum super ligna et rotas elevationes_. The object of these ‘ram-raisings’ seems to be explained by the fact that in the days of Chaucer a ram was the traditional reward proposed for a successful wrestler[488]; and this perhaps enables us to push the connexion with the sacrificial rite a little further. I would suggest that the original object of the man who wrestled for a ram, or climbed a greasy pole for a leg of mutton, or shot for a popinjay, was to win a sacrificial victim or a capital portion thereof, which buried in his field might bring him abundant crops. The orderly competition doubtless evolved itself from such an indiscriminate scrimmage for the fertilizing fragments as marks the rites of the earth-goddess in the Indian village feast[489]. Tug-of-war would seem to be capable of a similar explanation, though here the desired object is not a portion of the victim, but rather a straw rope made out of the corn divinity itself in the form of the harvest-May[490]. An even closer analogy with the Indian rite is afforded by such games as hockey and football. The ball is nothing else than the head of the sacrificial beast, and it is the endeavour of each player to get it into his own possession, or, if sides are taken, to get it over a particular boundary[491]. Originally, of course, this was the player’s own boundary; it has come to be regarded as that of his opponents; but this inversion of the point of view is not one on which much stress can be laid. In proof of this theory it may be pointed out that in many places football is still played, traditionally, on certain days of the year. The most notable example is perhaps at Dorking, where the annual Shrove Tuesday scrimmage in the streets of the town and the annual efforts of the local authorities to suppress it furnish their regular paragraph to the newspapers. There are several others, in most of which, as at Dorking, the contest is between two wards or districts of the town[492]. This feature is repeated in the Shrove Tuesday tug-of-war at Ludlow, and