A curious thing about the St. George play is the width of its range. All the versions, with the possible exception of that found at Brill, seem to be derived from a common type. They are spread over England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and only in the eastern counties do they give way to the partly, though not wholly, independent Plough Monday type. Unfortunately, the degeneracy of the texts is such that any closer investigation into their inter-relations or into the origin and transmission of the archetype would probably be futile. Something, however, must be said as to the prominence, at any rate outside Scotland, of the character of St. George. As far as I can see, the play owes nothing at all to John Kirke’s stage-play of _The Seven Champions of Christendom_, printed in 1638[767]. It is possible, however, that it may be a development of a sword-dance in which, as in the Shetland dance, the ‘seven champions’ had usurped the place of more primitive heroes. If so the six champions, other than St. George, have singularly vanished[768]. In any case, there can have been no ‘seven champions,’ either in sword-dance or mummers’ play, before Richard Johnson brought together the scattered legends of the national heroes in his _History of the Seven Champions_ in 1596[769]. This fact presents no difficulty, for the archetype of our texts need certainly not be earlier than the seventeenth century[770]. By this time the literary dramatic tradition was fully established, even in the provinces, and it may well have occurred to Holophernes to convert the sword-dance into the semblance of a regular play.