The sports and pastimes of the people of England including the rural and domestic recreations, May games, mummeries, shows, processions, pageants, and pompous spectacles, from the earliest period to the present time / By Joseph Strutt. Illustrated by one hundred and forty engravings.

  • Joseph Strutt
Date:
183l
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The sports and pastimes of the people of England including the rural and domestic recreations, May games, mummeries, shows, processions, pageants, and pompous spectacles, from the earliest period to the present time / By Joseph Strutt. Illustrated by one hundred and forty engravings. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    INTllODUCTION. different artificers were kept, at the city’s expense, to furnish the machinery for the pageants, and to decorate them. Stow tells us that, in his memory, great part of Leaden Hall was appropriated to the purpose of painting- and depositing the pageants for the use of the city. The want of elegance and propriety, so glaringly evident in these temporary exhibitions, was supplied, or attempted to be supplied, by a tawdry resemblance of splendour. The fronts of the houses in the streets through which the processions passed were covered with rich adornments of tapestry, arras, and cloth of gold; the chief magistrates and most opulent citizens usually appeared on horseback in sumptuous habits and joined the cavalcade; while the ringing of bells, the sound of music from various quarters, and the shouts of the populace, nearly stunned the ears of the spectators. At certain distances, in places appointed for the purpose, the pageants were erected, which were temporary buildings representing castles, palaces, gardens, rocks, or forests, as the occasion re- quired, where nymphs, fawns, satyrs, gods, goddesses, angels, and devils, appeared in company with giants, savages, dragons, saints, knights, buffoons, and dwarfs, surrounded by minstrels and choristers; the’ heathen mythology, the legends of chivalry, and Christian divinity, were ridiculously jumbled together, without meaning; and the exhibition usually concluded with dull pedantic harangues, exceedingly tedious, and replete with the grossest adulation. The giants especially were favourite performers in the pageants; they also figured away with great applause in the pages of romance; and, together with dragons and necromancers, were created by the authors for the sole purpose of displaying the prowess of their heroes, whose busi- ness it was to destroy them. Some faint traces of the processional parts of these exhibitions were retained at London in the lord mayor’s show about twenty or thirty years ago; ‘ but the pageants and orations have been long discontinued, and the show itself is so much contracted, that it is in reality altogether unworthy of such an appellation. ' [Before 1801.]