In our own islands, as every one knows, the oak-tree played a salient part in the old Druidical worship, and Pliny[44] even derives the name Druid fromδρῦς, an oak, as some still connect it with _darach_, the Celtic word for that tree. The important rites with which the mistletoe was severed from the parent tree and dedicated at the altar furnish evidence of the veneration paid to the spirit of the tree, who, according to the teaching of the Druids, retreated into the parasite-bough when the oak leaves withered. The Teutons no doubt brought with them to Britain the religion of the sacred grove, and we find King Edgar condemning the idle rites in connection with the alder and other trees, and Canute fifty years later forbidding the worship entirely.[45] The ceremonies once connected with the worship of the tree survived in the form of a picturesque symbolism long after their origin had been forgotten. In 1515, at a Twelfth-Night pageant held at his palace of Greenwich by order of Henry VIII., tree-spirits represented by “VIII wylde-men, all apparayled in grene mosse sodainly came oute of a place lyke a wood” and engaged in battle with the royal knights.[46] It was also a custom of this king in the early years of his reign to resort to the woods with a richly-apparelled retinue in order “to fetche May or grene bows,”—the spirit of vegetation, whose renewed vigour was symbolised, unconsciously no doubt, in the green boughs with which the courtiers decked their caps.[47] May-day ceremonies to celebrate the new life in the forest can be traced in England as far back as the thirteenth century, and the importance still attached to them by the people as late as the seventeenth century is indicated by the rancour with which the Puritans attacked the Maypole, “a heathenish vanity greatly abused to superstition and wickedness.” These and other survivals will be more fully treated in a later chapter, and are only mentioned here as showing the ancient prevalence of a belief in tree-spirits, which indeed is alone competent to account for such customs.