Nobles and even private gentlemen would set up a Lord of Misrule in their houses. The household regulations of the fifth earl of Northumberland include in a list of rewards usually paid about 1522, one of twenty shillings if he had an ‘Abbot of Miserewll’ at Christmas, and this officer, like his fellow at court, was distinct from the ‘Master of the Revells’ for whom provision is also made[1521]. In 1556 the marquis of Winchester, then lord treasurer, had a ‘lord of mysrulle’ in London, who came to bid my lord mayor to dinner with ‘a grett mene of musysyonars and dyssegyssyd’ amongst whom ‘a dullvyll shuting of fyre’ and one ‘lyke Deth with a dart in hand[1522].’ In 1634 Richard Evelyn of Wotton, high sheriff of Surrey and Sussex, issued ‘Articles’ appointing Owen Flood his trumpeter ‘Lord of Misrule of all good Orders during the twelve dayes[1523].’ The custom was imitated by more than one municipal ape of gentility. The lord mayor and sheriffs of London had their Lords of Misrule until the court of common council put down the expense in 1554[1524]. Henry Rogers, mayor of Coventry, in 1517, and Richard Dutton, mayor of Chester, in 1567, entertained similar officers[1525]. I have regarded the Lord of Misrule, amongst the courtly and wealthy classes of English society, as a direct offshoot from the vanished Feast of Fools. The ecclesiastical suggestion in the alternative title, more than once found, of ‘Abbot of Misrule,’ seems to justify this way of looking at the matter. But I do not wish to press it too closely. For after all the Lord of Misrule, like the Bishop of Fools himself, is only a variant of the winter ‘king’ known to the folk. In some instances it is difficult to say whether it is the folk custom or the courtly custom with which you have to do. Such is the ‘kyng of Crestemesse’ of Norwich in 1443[1526]. Such are the Lords of Misrule whom Machyn records as riding to the city from Westminster in 1557 and Whitechapel in 1561[1527]. And there is evidence that the term was freely extended to folk ‘kings’ set up, not at Christmas only, but at other times in the year[1528]. It was a folk and a Christmas Lord whose attempted suppression by Sir Thomas Corthrop, the reforming curate of Harwich, got him into trouble with the government of Henry VIII in 1535[1529]. And it was folk rather than courtly Lords which, when the reformers got their own way, were hardest hit by the inhibitions contained in the visitation articles of archbishop Grindal and others[1530]. So this discussion, _per ambages atque aequora vectus_, comes round to the point at which it began. It is a far cry from Tertullian to Bishop Grosseteste and a far cry from Bishop Grosseteste to Archbishop Grindal, but each alike voices for his own day the relentless hostility of the austerer clergy during all ages to the ineradicable _ludi_ of the pagan inheritance. END OF VOL. I FOOTNOTES: