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
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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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    and the elephants; but we do not see the men that carry them : M'e see the judges look big like lions; but we do not see -who moves them.” XXIV.—PROCESSIONS OF QUEEN IMARY AND KING PHILIP OF SPAIN IN LONDON. In the foregoing quotations, we have not the least necessity to make an allowance for poetical licence: the historians of the time will justify the poets, and perfectly clear them from any charge of exaggeration; and especially Hall, Grafton, and Ilolinshed, who are exceedingly diffuse on this and such like popular subjects. The latter has recorded a very curious piece of pantomimical trickery exhibited at the time that the princess Mary Avent in procession through the city of London, the day before her coronation:—At the upper end of Grace-church- Street there Avas a pageant made by the Florentines; it Avas very high; and “ on the top thereof there stood foure pictures ; and in the midst of them, and the highest, there stood an angell, all in greene, Avith a trumpet in his hand; and Avhen the trum- petter Avho stood secretlie within the pageant, ' did sound his trumpet, the angell did put his trumpet to his mouth, as though it had been the same that had sounded.” A similar deception, but on a more extensive scale, was practised at the gate of Kenehvorth Castle for the reception of queen Elizabeth.' Holinshed, speaking of the spectacles exhibited at London, Avhen Philip king of Spain, with Mary his consort, made their public entry in the city, calls them, in the margin of his Chronicle, “ the vaine pageants of London; ” and he uses the same epithet twice in the description immediately subsequent; “ Now,” says he, “ as the king came to London, and as he entered at the draAvbridge, [on London Bridge,] there was a vaine great spectacle, Avith tAvo images representing tAvo giants, the one named Corinens, and the other Gog-magog, holding betAveene them certeiue Latin verses, Avhich, for the vaine osten- tation of flatterye, I overpasse.” ^ He then adds: “ From the * See further on, p. xlvi. * These passages do not prove that the historian was disgusted with the pageantry, abstractedly considered, but rather with the occasion of its exhibition j for, he speaks of j^the same kind of spectacles, with commendation, both anterior and sub- sequent to the present show, which do not appear to have had the least claim for superiority in point of reason or consistency.