In many places, even during the Middle Ages, and still more afterwards, the summer feast dropped out or degenerated. It became a mere beer-swilling, an ‘ale[606].’ And so we find in the sixteenth century a ‘king-ale[607]’ or a ‘Robin Hood’s ale[608],’ and in modern times a ‘Whitsun-ale[609],’ a ‘lamb-ale[610]’ or a ‘gyst-ale[611]’ beside the ‘church-ales’ and ‘scot-ales’ which the thirteenth-century bishops had already condemned[612]. On the other hand, the village festival found its way to court, and became a sumptuous pageant under the splendour-loving Tudors. For this, indeed, there was Arthurian precedent in the romance of Malory, who records how Guenever was taken by Sir Meliagraunce, when ‘as the queen had mayed and all her knights, all were bedashed with herbs, mosses, and flowers, in the best manner and freshest[613].’ The chronicler Hall tells of the Mayings of Henry VIII in 1510, 1511, and 1515. In the last of these some hundred and thirty persons took part. Henry was entertained by Robin Hood and the rest with shooting-matches and a collation of venison in a bower; and returning was met by a chariot in which rode the Lady May and the Lady Flora, while on the five horses sat the Ladies Humidity, Vert, Vegetave, Pleasaunce and Sweet Odour[614]. Obviously the pastime has here degenerated in another direction. It has become learned, allegorical, and pseudo-classic. At the Reformation the May-game and the May-pole were marks for Puritan onslaught. Latimer, in one of his sermons before Edward VI, complains how, when he had intended to preach in a certain country town on his way to London, he was told that he could not be heard, for ‘it is Robyn hoodes daye. The parishe are gone a brode to gather for Robyn hoode[615].’ Machyn’s _Diary_ mentions the breaking of a May-pole in Fenchurch by the lord mayor of 1552[616], and the revival of elaborate and heterogeneous May-games throughout London during the brief span of Queen Mary[617]. The Elizabethan Puritans renewed the attack, but though something may have been done by reforming municipalities here and there to put down the festivals[618], the ecclesiastical authorities could not be induced to go much beyond forbidding them to take place in churchyards[619]. William Stafford, indeed, declared in 1581 that ‘May-games, wakes, and revels’ were ‘now laid down[620],’ but the violent abuse directed against them only two years later by Philip Stubbes, which may be taken as a fair sample of the Puritan polemic as a whole, shows that this was far from being really the case[621]. In Scotland the Parliament ordered, as early as 1555, that no one ‘be chosen Robert Hude, nor Lytill Johne, Abbot of vnressoun, Quenis of Maij, nor vtherwyse, nouther in Burgh nor to landwart in ony tyme to cum[622].’ But the prohibition was not very effective, for in 1577 and 1578 the General Assembly is found petitioning for its renewal[623]. And in England no similar action was