their swords, and by ‘Dick Fools,’ in motley and decked with cats’ tails and small bells. There is one more point of interest about the Norwich guild. In the fifteenth century it included many persons of distinction in Norfolk. Sir John Fastolf gave it an ‘angell silver and guylt.’ And amongst the members in 1496 was Sir John Paston. I have already quoted the lament in the _Paston Letters_ over William Woode, the keeper, whom the writer ‘kepyd thys iij yer to pleye Seynt Jorge and Robyn Hod and the Shryff off Nottyngham,’ and who at a critical moment went off to Bernysdale and left his master in the lurch[774]. I have also identified his Robin Hood play, and now it becomes apparent where he played ‘Seynt Jorge.’ It is curious how the fragments of the wreckage of time fit into one another. The riding of the George is not peculiar to Norwich. We find it at Leicester[775], at Coventry[776], at Stratford[777], at Chester[778], at York, at Dublin[779]. An elaborate programme for the Dublin procession is preserved. It included an emperor and empress with their train, St. George on horse-back, the dragon led by a line and the king and queen of Dele. But no princess is mentioned. The ‘may’ or maiden figured at York, however, and there was also a St. Christopher. At other places, such as Reading, Aston[780] and Louth[781], an equestrian figure, called a ‘George,’ is known to have stood on a ‘loft’ in the church, and here, too, an annual ‘riding’ may be presumed. There is no proof that the dramatic element in these ‘ridings’ was anything more than a _mystère mimé_, or pageant in dumb show. On the other hand, there were places where the performance on St. George’s day took the form of a regular miracle-play. The performance described by Collier as taking place before Henry V and the Emperor Sigismund at Windsor in 1416 turns out on examination of Collier’s authority to be really a ‘soteltie,’ a cake or raised pie of elaborate form. But the town of Lydd had its St. George play in 1456, and probably throughout the century; while in 1490 the chaplain of the guild of St. George at New Romney went to see this Lydd play with a view to reproducing it at the sister town. In 1511 again a play of St. George is recorded to have been held at Bassingbourne in Cambridgeshire, not on St. George’s, but on St. Margaret’s day[782].