The dumb-show pageants, which in many cities glorified the ‘ridings’ on the day of St. George (April 23), have been described in an earlier chapter[481]. These ‘ridings,’ of curiously mingled religious and folk origin, stand midway between the processions just mentioned and such seasonal perambulations as the ‘shows’ and ‘watches’ of Midsummer. Even in the latter, elements borrowed from the pageants of the miracle-plays occasionally form an odd blend with the ‘giants’ and other figures of the ‘folk’ tradition[482]. The ‘wache and playe’ went together at Wymondham, and also apparently at Chelmsford, in the sixteenth century. At York we find the pageants of some of the crafts borrowed for a play, though apparently a classical and not a religious one, at the Midsummer show of 1585. At Chester, when the Whitsun plays were beginning to fall into desuetude, the crafts were regularly represented in the Midsummer show by some of their _dramatis personae_, who, however, rode without their pageants. The smiths sent ‘the Doctors and little God,’ the butchers sent ‘the divill in his fethers,’ the barbers sent Abraham and Isaac, the bricklayers sent Balaam and the Ass, and so forth. These with the giants, a dragon, a man in woman’s clothes, naked boys, morris-dancers and other folk elements, made up a singular cavalcade. In London, pageants were provided for the Midsummer show by the guilds to which the lord mayor and sheriffs for the year belonged. Thus the drapers had a pageant of the Golden Fleece in 1522, and pageants of the Assumption and Saint Ursula in 1523[483]. To a modern imagination the type of civic pageantry is the annual procession at the installation of the lord mayor in November, known familiarly as the lord mayor’s show. This show was important enough from the middle of the sixteenth century, and the pens of many goodly poets, Peele, Dekker, Munday, Middleton, and others, were employed in its service[484]. But its history cannot be taken much further back, and it is exceedingly probable that when the Midsummer show came to an end in 1538, the pageants were transferred to the installation procession. The earliest clear notice is in 1540, when a pageant of the Assumption, perhaps that which had already figured at the Midsummer show of 1523, was used[485]. The ironmongers had a pageant when the lord mayor was chosen from their body in 1566. It was arranged by James Peele, father of the dramatist, and there were two ‘wodmen’ in it, but unfortunately it is not further described[486]. In 1568, Sir Thomas Roe, merchant tailor, had a pageant of John the Baptist[487]. William Smith, writing an account of city customs in 1575, mentions, as a regular feature of the procession, ‘the Pagent of Triumph richly decked, whereupon, by certain figures and writings, some matter touching Justice and the office of a Magistrate is represented[488].’ And about ten years later the series of printed ‘Devices’ of the pageants begins.