“Wife, make us a dinner; spare flesh, neither corn,
     Make wafers and cakes, for our sheep must be shorn;
     At sheep-shearing, neighbours none other things crave,
     But good cheer and welcome like neighbours to have.”

We have in many villages and towns a feast called “the Wakes,” which is one of the oldest of our English festivals.  The day of “the Wakes” is the festival of the Saint to whom the parish church is dedicated, and it is so called because, on the previous night, or vigil, the people used to watch, or “wake,” in the church till the morning dawned.  It was the custom for the inhabitants of the parish to keep open house on that day, and to entertain all their relations and friends who came to them from a distance.  In early times the people used to make booths and tents with the boughs of trees near to the church, and were directed to celebrate the feast in them with thanksgiving and prayer.  By degrees they began to forget their prayers, and remembered only the feasting, and other abuses crept in, so at last the “waking” on the eve of the festival was suppressed.  But these primitive feasts were the origin of most of our fairs, which are generally held on the dedication festival of the parish church.[13] The neighbours from the adjoining villages used to attend the wakes, so the peddlers and hawkers came to find a market for their wares.  Their stalls began to multiply, until at last an immense fair sprang into existence, which owed its origin entirely to the religious festival of “the wakes.”  Fairs have degenerated like many other good things, and we can hardly realize their vastness in the middle ages.  The circuit of a fair sometimes was very great, and it would have been impossible in those days to carry on the trade of the country without them.  The great Stourbridge Fair, near Cambridge, I have described in my former book on English Villages.  The booths were planted in a cornfield, and the circuit of the fair, which was one of the largest in Europe, was over three miles.  All kinds of sports were held on these occasions:  plays, comedies, tragedies, bull-baiting, &c., and King James was very wroth with the undergraduates of Cambridge who would insist upon frequenting Stourbridge Fair rather than attend to their studies.

The “Wakes,” or village feast, was a great day for all sports and pastimes.  A writer in the Spectator describes the “country wake” which he witnessed at Bath.  The green was covered with a crowd of all ages and both sexes, decked out in holiday attire, and divided into several parties, “all of them endeavouring to show themselves in those exercises wherein they excelled.”  In one place there was a ring of cudgel-players, in another a football match, in another a ring of wrestlers.  The prize for the men was a hat, and for the women, who had their own contests, a smock.  Running and leaping also found a place in the programme.  In Berkshire back-sword play and wrestling were the