In all these cases, even where the significant whipping or sprinkling is absent, the meaning is the same. The binding with ropes, the loss of the shoes, the lifting in the air, are symbols of capture. And the capture is for the purposes of sacrifice, for which no more suitable victim, in substitution for the priest-king, than a stranger, could be found. This will, I think, be clear by comparison with some further parallels from the harvest field and the threshing-floor, in more than one of which the symbolism is such as actually to indicate the sacrifice itself, as well as the preliminary capture. In many parts of England a stranger, and sometimes even the farmer himself, when visiting a harvest field, is liable to be asked for ‘largess’[525]. In Scotland, the tribute is called ‘head-money,’ and he who refuses is seized by the arms and feet and ‘dumped’ on the ground[526]. Similar customs prevail on the continent, in Germany, Norway, France; and the stranger is often, just as in the ‘hocking’ ceremony, caught with straw ropes, or swathed in a sheaf of corn. It is mainly in Germany that the still more elaborate rites survive. In various districts of Mecklenburg, and of Pomerania, the reapers form a ring round the stranger, and fiercely whet their scythes, sometimes with traditional rhymes which contain a threat to mow him down. In Schleswig, and again in Sweden, the stranger in a threshing-floor is ‘taught the flail-dance’ or ‘the threshing-song.’ The arms of a flail are put round his neck and pressed so tightly that he is nearly choked. When the madder-roots are being dug, a stranger passing the field is caught by the workers, and buried up to his middle in the soil[527]. The central incident of ‘hocking’ appears therefore to be nothing but a form of that symbolical capture of a human victim of which various other examples are afforded by the village festivals. The development of the custom into a play or mock-fight at Coventry may very well have taken place, as the town annals say, about the beginning of the fifteenth century. Whether it had previously been connected by local tradition with some event in the struggles of Danes and Saxons or not, is a question which one must be content to leave unsolved. A final word is due to the curious arrangement by which in the group of customs here considered the rôles of sacrificers and sacrificed are exchanged between men and women on the second day; for it lends support to the theory already put forward that a certain stage in the evolution of the village worship was marked by the merging of previously independent sex-cults. CHAPTER VIII THE MAY-GAME