One of my fondest memories of growing up in the small cathedral city of Wells is the November carnival. We lived on the High Street, and our upstairs bay window gave us a splendid view of the procession—the bands and fire engines, the elaborate floats and tableaux, the colorfully costumed horsemen and women, the shambling comic characters, and all the rest. As the flaming torches came round the corner from Broad Street, we in the comfort of our living room shared the excitement of the spectators standing in the autumn drizzle below. The carnival told us that we were part of a community; it united the people in the procession, the crowd below us in the High Street, the watchers in the windows, and the others we could not see—those waiting expectantly in Sadler Street, those watching the tail end of the carnival as it left the Cattle Market. And to remind us that all this was designed for a worthy cause, there were the collectors, disguised under their giants' heads, working the crowd for contributions for the local hospital.

Wells is not unique in having its carnival in November, for that is the custom in Somerset, though it may seem a funny time of year to have an open-air procession. In Mediterranean countries, Carnival is associated with Shrove Tuesday, when winter feasting is about to be replaced by Lenten austerity, but at least when spring is on the way. However, the English November festivities are historically connected with Gunpowder Treason (Guy Fawkes) Day on 5 November and also with another originally anti-Catholic festival, the anniversary of Elizabeth I's accession on 17 November. In the early modern period both (like our Carnival) featured ritual processions, ending with a bonfire and fireworks. The Gunpowder Treason celebrations had been brought in as a safely patriotic substitute for an older tradition that the authorities wanted to get rid of. That older one was Halloween, which seventeenth-century Protestants regarded as an evil survival of paganism, or worse yet, of popery.Footnote ¹

Yet, there was another part of the ritual year that the most rigid Protestants (we can call them Puritans, for short) liked even less than Halloween: the festive merrymakings that occupied the late spring and early summer. May Day, Whitsuntide, and Midsummer were all occasions for communal feasting and playing, for drinking and sexual license. Maypoles symbolized the old festive culture that zealous Protestants were trying to stamp out, and there were countless local struggles over whether they should be abolished. But Puritans also took aim at other traditional customs—morris dancing, playacting, and one of their particular bugbears, church ales. Church ales were parish festivals, organized to raise money for keeping the church fabric in repair, a sort of alcoholic version of the modern church bazaar. The profits came from the sale of beer, so it is not surprising that they became known for drunkenness and disorder. Yet, their defenders insisted, they had a useful function even beyond the fund-raising, for by bringing people together for merrymaking, they reinforced the good fellowship that linked them as a community.Footnote ²

Church ales were not the only forms of communal celebration that could also, and too easily, get out of hand. Many English towns had traditionally held processions at midsummer, typically organized by the local craft guilds, through which the identity of the community was annually reinforced and expressed. Some of them—York and Chester are famous examples—were accompanied by elaborate theatrical productions on familiar, usually biblical themes. These celebrations had often originally been connected to the Catholic feast of Corpus Christi. Such celebrations would bring together large crowds of people from the surrounding countryside, to the great profit of the local publicans and with the inevitable opportunities for disorder. It might be tempting for local malcontents to use them to criticize or ridicule prominent members of the town elite, as they often did on other occasions, by the spreading of crude and scandalous mocking rhymes about them. Such malcontents were especially likely to be drawn from the ill-disciplined, unmarried younger sort: mocking authority was a central part of youth culture. At Wells, in the series of events recounted in this article, they went even further, by acting out satirical skits based on their superiors' alleged misdeeds, in the popular modes of carnival and charivari. These were “but the Shows of their Street,” one of their defenders declared.Footnote ³ That they were, indeed, but, as we shall see, they were a lot more besides.

Historians have long been interested in these topics, particularly since they rediscovered the subject of popular culture in the 1970s. Earlier work on English civic pageants and ceremonies had been of interest mainly to literary scholars whose primary focus was to analyze their theatrical components. As late as 1971, David Bergeron's general overview, English Civic Pageantry, 1558–1642, dealt entirely with great occasions such as royal entrances and London Lord Mayors' shows, to the almost total exclusion of the rich processional pageantry of so many provincial towns, which seemed to be worth considering only when royalty were present. Bergeron describes the processions accompanying the visit of Queen Anne to Wells in 1613 but says nothing about the far more interesting events of 1607 in the same city.Footnote ⁴ Yet, by this time Charles Phythian-Adams was already at work on his illuminating analysis of civic ceremonies at Coventry, which soon set an example for other scholars to follow. Phythian-Adams was one of several historians who showed how the insights of anthropologists like Max Gluckman and Victor Turner could help to enhance our understanding of popular rituals in past centuries.Footnote ⁵ It was, however, the appearance of Peter Burke's influential Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, and the work of Natalie Zemon Davis on carnivalesque rituals in France, that did the most to place popular culture at the center of the early modern historical agenda. There were, of course, other contributing factors, including the impact of the work of the Russian literary scholar, Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World had been written years before but managed to slip through Soviet censorship only in 1965; an English translation appeared three years later.Footnote ⁶ Processions like the ones that we shall encounter at Wells are interesting expressions of the sort of popular culture that Burke, Davis, and Bakhtin were talking about and could now be placed in a more meaningful context.

As usually happens when a new paradigm appears, historians were soon beginning to question some of its underlying assumptions, for instance, the common adoption of a simplistic binary structure, in which elite and popular elements were sometimes too conveniently contrasted. With the consequent “cultural turn” that accompanied the linguistic turn of the later 1980s, regional, class, and gender differences have been explored along with issues of language and representation, and the whole subject has been problematized and made more complicated.Footnote ⁷ However, important aspects of the work of pioneers like Bakhtin, Burke, and Davis still remain immensely fruitful as starting points for any investigation of the subject. Among these is the Carnival/Lent distinction, by which the ritual year was divided into times of festivity and austerity. During the former periods, inversionary behavior of almost every possible kind was tolerated, as normal barriers to excess in matters of food, drink, sex, gender, and social distinctions were temporarily removed, and it was not only permitted but expected that customary authority would be lampooned and ridiculed in ways that turned the social and political worlds upside down.Footnote ⁸ The wild scenes that were still repeated at Venice and other Italian cities were no longer permitted in Protestant England, but attempts to perpetuate annual civic festivities of less lurid kinds nevertheless occurred in many late sixteenth-century English towns.Footnote ⁹ It may be a good time to reexamine civic ceremony with the benefit of the new insights that have enriched the study of popular culture. The disorders at Wells in 1607 are of historical importance because they offer an extraordinarily well-documented opportunity to observe a direct collision in street theater: one between traditional modes of civic ceremonial and a more populist, transgressive exercise in charivari.

In 1607 the annual May Games in Wells included a church ale to pay for repairs to St. Cuthbert's church tower. St. Cuthbert's was (and is) the town church, the focus of a community whose history had long been marked by a love-hate relationship to the more grandiose cathedral authorities similar to the town-gown tensions familiar to anyone who has lived in a university town.Footnote ¹⁰ The 1607 celebrations featured the mandatory maypole and street dancing, but there were also processions that in some ways resembled our modern carnivals, with St. Cuthbert's as the object of public charity instead of the hospital. Yet, some Wells people objected, and there were acrimonious divisions, ending in a nasty lawsuit that brought the city to the attention of the Court of Star Chamber at Westminster. For the historian this is lucky, because it means that the affair left a wealth of documentation, splendidly edited by James Stokes in the Somerset volumes of the Records of Early English Drama series.Footnote ¹¹ The controversy was one of those typical early Stuart struggles between Puritans and their enemies over festive celebrations, and several historians have mentioned it in that light.Footnote ¹² But it had other significant features. A traditional civic procession accompanying an elaborate church ale was invaded by youthful malcontents who organized a charivari ridiculing members of the local elite.Footnote ¹³ It is a complicated story, full of ambiguities and apparent contradictions that may be worth the attention even of readers who lack this author's connections with the town and region in which it took place. In this essay I propose to examine the three components of the affair—the May processions, the church ale, and the charivari—and to ask what the outbreaks of street theater that they generated tell us, not only about Wells in 1607, its social life and religious/political divisions, but also about the cultural life of the wider county of Somerset and the kingdom of which it was a part.

The May Games were more elaborate in 1607 than in previous years, but they reflected a long tradition of festive celebration in Wells, often of a none too fastidious kind. As far back as the fourteenth century deans had tried to clean up the plays that were put on in the cathedral at Whitsuntide, Christmas, and on Holy Innocents Day, when it was the custom to elect a “boy bishop” and turn the world upside down in unseemly parodies of the liturgy. In 1330 the dean prohibited plays “contrary to the decency of the church of Wells.” This does not seem to have done much good, as a few years later there were still plays in the cathedral on Holy Innocents Day containing “obscene ravings” and “mockeries.”Footnote ¹⁴ Some of the trouble was the fault of the vicars-choral, whose behavior was far from the respectable decorum that we naturally expect to find in choir members nowadays. In 1337 they were reported to be gambling and haunting taverns, and things were no better in the seventeenth century. In 1601 a vicar-choral was ordered to do penance for fornication, and soon afterward another singing man in trouble with the cathedral authorities announced that “he cared not a fart for any of the doctors of the church.”Footnote ¹⁵

In spite of all this, the dean and chapter had permitted more decorous mystery plays, and these probably continued down to the Reformation.Footnote ¹⁶ By the later fifteenth century the city too was developing its own festivities. We know that church ales were held in St. Cuthbert's parish by 1497, because in that year the corporation investigated the embezzlement of money raised by “the common ale of the church”; the profits of a Robin Hood play and of “the girls dancing” had also disappeared. By 1550 there were street carnivals at midsummer, probably much like those of 1607, in which the craft guilds dressed up and processed through the town as part of a “king's watch.” From what we know of other towns, it seems likely that such midsummer shows had existed at Wells long before 1550.Footnote ¹⁷

Wells was in a region that had a lively festive life. Even at a small place like the nearby village of Croscombe, there were annual Robin Hood plays of the kind so popular in late medieval England. These, and other pageants performed by the women of the village, raised a good deal of money for the church.Footnote ¹⁸ A bit further afield, Yeovil was well known for its colorful Robin Hood plays. After 1578 there are no more references to Robin Hood himself there, but the legend lived on. Occasional church ales continued, and there was a particularly noisy one in 1607, presided over by the “sheriff” (presumably of Nottingham). Puritans who protested were told that if they did not shut up there would be an even bigger church ale the following year, with a Maid Marion and double the amount of ale.Footnote ¹⁹ The sheriff of Nottingham and Maid Marion: the Yeovil church ales still involved playacting on the Robin Hood theme. As we shall see, Robin shows up in Wells in 1607, and he also presided over the church ale at Westonzoyland in the same year. In that case the lead was played by the local parson's son, and the ritual turning of the world upside down was accomplished by putting the parson himself in the stocks; parishioners who wished to have him released had to drink “two pots of strong ale.” All this may raise some questions about any suggestion that Robin Hood games had disappeared during the previous century because people got bored with them.Footnote ²⁰

If Robin Hood declined at all, it was due to the general hostility of the authorities to any story that celebrated resistance to authority and to their dislike of festive traditions associated with popery and paganism. By the latter part of Elizabeth's reign, the justices of the peace everywhere were trying to make the parishes rely on equitably assessed rating systems for the money they needed, rather than the boozy church ales. At a time of rapid population growth and economic dislocation, there were fears that the whole fabric of the ordered society ordained by God was in danger of collapsing. Public occasions at which idleness and drinking were tolerated clearly contributed to the danger, and it was not only Puritans who believed this: the urgent need for a “reformation of manners” was a major preoccupation of godly people across the whole Protestant spectrum.Footnote ²¹ The Somerset JPs were no different from those in other counties. In 1594 they decreed that there should be no more church ales, and the order was repeated two years later. It is doubtful if the prohibitions were fully effective, although the mayor testified that until 1607 Wells had, in fact, obeyed, and that there had been an annual rate for the repair of St. Cuthbert's.Footnote ²² Whether the guilds' midsummer processions had also lapsed is less clear. Witnesses in the lawsuits that followed the games were (perhaps intentionally) ambiguous on this point. One man said that in “divers years” there had been “Pageants, May Games, morris dances and shows,” another that there had been similar shows “three or four times within his memory,” but both were old enough to have had memories going back before 1594. Defenders said the May Games were ancient customs that allowed people “to be merry in such sort as in former time,” and a witness quoted his father and grandfather as saying that the mayor's presence at them was “according to the … usual custom.” I suspect that the May processions probably had been held, though without the church ale, fairly regularly.Footnote ²³

And so in 1607, when St. Cuthbert's needed to repair the tower, the churchwardens decided to raise the money through a church ale. Increasing the parish rate would have been as unpopular as raising rates has always been in our own time, so they asked for permission to hold an ale. The mayor, Alexander Towse, was unwilling to defy the 1594 Sessions Orders, and a neighboring JP, Sir John Rodney, also refused. They did better with the dean of Wells, Dr. Benjamin Heydon, who like Rodney was a county JP but also had good reasons for encouraging the parishioners to look after their church. The dean and chapter owned the rectory of St. Cuthbert's—which is to say that they collected the tithes and paid the vicar out of them. In 1593 they had let the rectory to two Wells citizens, one of them a woolen draper named William Morgan. It was the practice everywhere for the owner of the rectory to be responsible for the chancel end of a church, the parishioners looking after the nave. Obviously both Heydon and Morgan had an interest in seeing that the parish's end of St. Cuthbert's was properly maintained as well as their own end. Paying for it would not be their problem.Footnote ²⁴

The churchwardens decided to combine their church ale with the midsummer pageants put on by the craft guilds. But both the city and the cathedral authorities were deeply divided. Dean Heydon was for it, but the bishop, John Still, was against it. Now that it was not his responsibility, Mayor Towse was for it, and some of his corporation colleagues even more so, but there were some influential citizens on the other side. The most prominent of these, who as we shall see were all Puritans, were John Yarde, a haberdasher, and John Hole, a wealthy clothing manufacturer. Neither Hole nor Yarde were natives of Wells, but they had quickly risen to prominence after they moved in. Yarde was constable in 1592, only two years after his arrival, and Hole was one of the churchwardens of St. Cuthbert's the year after he arrived in 1597. He was the kind of businessman small towns liked to attract: someone who would provide employment and thus reduce the local poor rates. He later claimed to employ at least 400 poor people in “spinning, knitting, and making of cloth and worsted hose.”Footnote ²⁵ But Hole was a prickly character. He was soon quarreling with other members of the corporation and was suspended from his burgessship for speaking “opprobrious words” against William Morgan, the lessee of St. Cuthbert's rectory. But he was befriended by the more puritanically inclined JPs in the county, and they ordered that he be restored to his place. He was constable in 1607 and is therefore at the center of our story.

The festivities lasted from May Day until midsummer. As Professor Stokes points out, they fall nicely into two parts. Most of May was taken up with the traditional spring rituals: the maypole, the Lord and Lady of the May, the dancing in the streets. Then came the second stage, the church ale, including the guilds' processions, which went on until 25 June, just after midsummer, and which were spectacularly invaded by the subversive charivari. Linking the two parts was a Robin Hood play in the Market Place, on Friday, 29 May.Footnote ²⁶

So it all started early one May morning. Some twenty or so young people went “a-maying” in the surrounding fields and woods. They brought back a maypole, had it set up in the High Street, and began dancing along the street. Puritans might have disliked this, but 1 May was a Friday, so there was nothing illegal about it, and trouble began only when the fun and games resumed on Sunday and Constable Hole could invoke the Sabbath-observance laws. Morning service at St. Cuthbert's had scarcely ended when more dancing began, to the accompaniment of fiddles and drums. The Lord of the May was a gentleman named George Greenstreet, and his Lady was Thomasine White, the wife of a barber-surgeon. During the dancing, a witness deposed, Greenstreet and White were “lifted up above the ground to kiss together.” Her husband, Edmund, did not seem to mind, but it was too much for Hole, who told the dancers to disperse and go home. Unfortunately, White already was home. “Master Constable,” she shouted, “I am at my own door and here I will stand.” Hole then tried to arrest the fiddlers, but this brought in the formidable figure of Mr. William Watkins, a member of the corporation. The divisions within the elite reflected the ambiguities of James I's forbidding of “disordered or unlawful Exercises or Pastimes” on the Sabbath: music and dancing were perfectly legal on Sundays, Watkins declared, as long as it was not during service time. Hole disagreed; he lost control and told Watkins that he was “a dog and a rebel,” provoking some corresponding invective from Watkins. Eventually Hole managed to disperse the crowd, and they all left for evensong (church attendance was, of course, compulsory)—except the musicians, who went off to a nearby house to play cards. Hole again had them arrested, but when the dancing resumed after church, they were noisily rescued by the crowd. The dancers, some fifty to a hundred strong, were now deliberately baiting the constable. When they passed Hole's house, Edmund White urged them to make as much noise as possible and himself took the lead, “vehemently whooping and hallooeing and leaping.” The drummers, too, threatened Hole by repeatedly marching at him, though one of them said they were doing nothing hostile, just on their way to play their drums along by the Bishop's Palace moat to see whose were the loudest.Footnote ²⁷

During the following week Hole's friends the Yardes got involved in the controversy. They lived in the Market Place, and Anne Yarde found the maypole so offensive that she could not walk by it when she went down the High Street to St. Cuthbert's. The maypole, she announced, was a “painted calf,” like the one worshipped by the backsliding Israelites in the Old Testament. This was quickly seized on by some of the young sparks of the town, providing another chance for a bit of fun. In a move that anticipates the more elaborate charivari later in the summer, they did a crude painting of a calf, “with red and white spots on a board, suitable to the color of the summer pole,” and staged a derisive procession. Young men headed by morris dancers and trumpeters paraded the “calf” through the streets, stopping outside the Yardes' house, where one of them cried “bah, like a calf.” During the procession they also shot at the board with muskets, saying that “they had killed the painted calf so that Mrs Yarde could go to church.”Footnote ²⁸

Thursday, 14 May, was Ascension Day and an excuse for further merrymaking, in which drummers and morris dancers escorted the traditional procession of children through the streets. The children were elaborately costumed; several mothers missed morning prayer because they were getting them ready. Some of the boys were wearing women's clothes, and Puritans were, of course, particularly horrified by this kind of ungodly cross-dressing, which was one reason for their opposition to the theater. On the following Sunday there was further trouble. A group of morris dancers went to perform at Croscombe. When they got back, they repeated their act at the High Cross in the Market Place. Oliver Martin, one of the dancers, said that people were “laughing, and sporting in merriment,” but this changed when the constable arrived and arrested the drummer. There was some scuffling, during which Hole was pushed into the gutter and Martin got into a punch-up with one of the deputy constables. Later that evening other young men interrupted Hole by blowing trumpets while he was giving instructions to the city watchmen. They too then went on to the moat and continued a rowdy party far into the night.Footnote ²⁹

The struggle was renewed every Sunday. Hole seems to have expected more serious carousing on 24 May, which was Whitsunday, always one of the high points of the festive year. So on Saturday he went to the mayor's house and formally read out the royal proclamation against violations of the Sabbath, hoping to stir Towse into action. But the mayor was unimpressed, replying that the proclamation did not explicitly prohibit sports and pastimes on Sundays except during service time. On Sunday there was more dancing near the maypole, led by the Lord and Lady of the May, but no serious trouble. However, Hole said that on this and other Sundays he found many people from nearby villages illegally drinking in taverns and alehouses, having come into Wells for the festivities.Footnote ³⁰

On 29 May it was at last time for the Robin Hood play. After dinner the drums began to beat, and the Market Place was soon crowded with spectators. There seem to have been two performances: an afternoon matinee and an evening show. All that we know about the play is that a young man named Robert Prinne played Robin, and Stephen Millard, who was also the town serjeant, was one of the merry men. Hole did not intervene, and the Yardes were even willing to allow the mayor to come to their house and watch from “a room where he might conveniently and privately” see the evening performance. This was surely a conciliatory gesture aimed at restoring civic harmony: it is remarkable that Yarde was willing to overlook the long-standing association of Robin Hood with the “Summer Lord” common to traditional May Games, so hated by Puritans of his type.Footnote ³¹

The second phase of the May Games, the St. Cuthbert's church ale, began on Sunday, 14 June, when the leading parishioners met for a breakfast of calves' heads and bacon. After this gastronomic tour de force, they made the final preparations for the event. Following established custom, the five traders' guilds, each associated with a particular street, would offer their pageants on successive evenings. They would process to the High Cross, down to the church house for supper, and then back to the originating street, again by way of the High Cross: five carnivals instead of the modern single one, and in summer weather, too! Throughout the week collectors would work the crowds, as in modern carnivals. Each procession would include the mayor and corporation; other city and parish officers; and, befitting the close connection between the cathedral and St. Cuthbert's, the dean and chapter. It would be a gratifying demonstration of the unity of church and city.Footnote ³²

It was a huge success. Crowds attending the suppers at the church house were so big that they often spilled out into the churchyard. The mayor and his colleagues took the lead in giving “their benevolence for the benefit of the church.” Others needed a bit of pressure. A man who offered four pence was told, in effect, “come on, you can do better than that”: “divers had given twelve pence a piece.” Besides the corporation, those present at the feasts included Sir John Rodney (who must have forgotten his refusal to license the affair), Dean Heydon, several of the cathedral canons, and “all the best sort of the town.” Hole, needless to say, was nowhere to be seen, but although his Puritan friends also stayed away, some were reported to have contributed to the fund for the church tower “very liberally.” It was the merrymaking that they objected to, not the repair of the tower.Footnote ³³

Most of the pageants were based on familiar themes. The Tucker Street cloth workers built theirs around George a' Green, the legendary Pinder of Wakefield, with his men “singing a song of Wakefield Green.” The Pinder was one of those familiar plebeian heroes, comically playing tricks on the authorities and eventually joining Robin Hood's band.Footnote ³⁴ High Street was allowed to display the city's silver plate, which was escorted by cathedral choirboys in their white surplices, singing psalms and anthems. The choirmaster had refused to allow the boys to perform but was overruled by Dean Heydon: a further sign that the cathedral community, like the city, was divided.Footnote ³⁵ The most elaborate pageant was put on by the affluent Mercers' Company, based in Chamberlain Street. They had Hole's enemy, William Watkins, as their parade marshal, and there were two principal tableaux: one based on St. George and the dragon and the other on the classical theme of Diana and Actaeon. Mayor Towse himself took part, accompanying St. George on horseback. After the church house supper, there was a dramatic enactment of the dragon story. This was reasonably respectable, but the Diana and Actaeon pageant was more offensive to Puritans, as the goddess was inevitably a boy, accompanied by six “nymphs” played by cathedral choristers—another sinful example of cross-dressing.Footnote ³⁶

So far, if one could overlook the cross-dressing and the fact that the church ale was in itself illegal, the midsummer shows sound relatively harmless. But on 18 June, the proceedings were taken over by Hole's enemies, who used the Southover show to ridicule the constable and his allies. The Southover pageant was, in effect, an adaptation of the traditional shaming ritual of the skimmington procession, a particular variant of the charivari genre. Skimmingtons were disorderly, semijocular demonstrations outside the houses of families who had flouted community norms, often through the wife inverting the accepted patriarchal order by beating her husband (it was, of course, perfectly all right for the husband to beat the wife). The participants would act out the incident, with two neighbors representing the offending couple riding together on horseback, the man facing the horse's tail, the position of humiliation, holding a distaff—another abdication of male authority, spinning being women's work—while the “wife” (a man, of course, wearing women's clothes) beat him with a skimming ladle. The procession was often led by a figure wearing horns (denoting cuckoldry, on the assumption that a woman who beat her husband would naturally be unfaithful to him), who threw grains to the spectators, presumably as a fertility symbol of the kind later sanitized by rice or confetti at weddings. Skimmingtons could be provoked by other incidents in which the proper moral order had been turned upside down. In The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) Thomas Hardy famously depicts one brought on by sexual misconduct, and in the seventeenth century they were also often directed against antisocial people who enclosed common land or hoarded grain.Footnote ³⁷

The skimmington tradition was particularly strong in the West Country, so it was not surprising that defenders of the May Games adapted it. The Southover show needed no less than five horses. The rider of the first one carried a collection of old hats; he had, he shouted, “as good hats to sell as Mr Yarde in his shop.” The second horse carried a scene directly reminiscent of the skimmington. A young man named Matthew Lancaster was “disguised in women's apparel like a spinster,” Hole complained, “holding a … spinning wheel upon the horse before him and worsted wool upon a distaff turning the said wheel.” Asked whose wool it was, he answered “it was Hole's.” The skimmington allusion (the man in women's clothes using a spinning wheel) was an obvious slight on Hole's masculinity: only an effeminate man could object to the red-blooded male diversions of the May Games.Footnote ³⁸ Next came a man playing a pewterer, that being the trade followed by another of Hole's Puritan friends, Hugh Mead. He had a pewter pot and a skimmer at his girdle and insisted that his product was “as good as any was in Mead's shop.” Again we have a skimmington reference, the skimming ladle, an essential part of the familiar ritual. Another local Puritan, a grocer named Humphrey Palmer, was the target of the fourth skit. Two men, representing a grocer and his assistant, rode on the same horse. They had a pair of scales and a basket of grain from which they threw handfuls at the bystanders—the skimmington ritual again—announcing that Palmer “had no such raisins in his shop as they had.” The procession ended with a scene in which two men rode facing each other on the same horse, this time with a desk and inkwell between them; one of them represented a usurer or moneylender, the other a notary. They had been asked to lend money to the haberdasher, clothier, pewterer, and grocer but were refusing to do so because the credit of the four tradesmen was not good enough, thus implying, Hole spluttered, that he and his friends were poor men and of no account in the city. But the whole show was even more offensive because it so obviously employed the familiar symbols of the skimmington: the “husband” in women's clothes holding the distaff, the riding backward, the skimming ladle, the scattering of grain.

After supper a short play at the church house reenacted the scene with the moneylender. The cast of characters had changed, however, and of the five principals two were women, one of them the wife of a local gentleman named Edward Wadham—a further provocation to the Puritans, who regarded women on the stage as even worse than cross-dressing boys. The procession then reformed and moved on to the High Cross, where Dean Heydon and Mayor Towse benignly presided. Mead was also there and was so enraged by the parody of his trade that he seized the pewterer’s hammer and tried to pull him off his horse. Later that evening he lodged a formal complaint with the mayor. Even Towse thought that the Southover pageant went too far; he was heard to remark that “there was knavery in it.”Footnote ³⁹

The next morning Hole and Mead brought several of the young men from Southover before the magistrates. They had a powerful friend in court: Edward Wadham, husband of the lady who had performed in the skit the previous evening. “They were but the shows of their street,” he told the mayor, and “he would bear them out therein, whatever it cost him.” Angry words were exchanged between Wadham and Hole, but the constable did not renew his complaint when the case was sent to the two county JPs, Rodney and Dean Heydon. Recognizing that he was not likely to get much support in that quarter, Hole referred the charges to the bishop, who was away in London.Footnote ⁴⁰

The last of the pageants came from the Hammermen, who included carpenters and masons, as well as blacksmiths. They were based in East Wells—the modern St. Thomas Street—which was outside the city boundaries but within St. Cuthbert's parish. Exempt from the jurisdiction of the mayor and his officers, East Wells had a reputation for disorder and violence. The Hammermen's contribution was even more offensive than the Southover one. They did present one conventional, and for them appropriate, tableau depicting Noah building the ark. But the high point of their parade was a skit called the “Holing Game.” This consisted of a crude piece of carpentry: a vertical board with a horizontal plank attached at the bottom, the horizontal one having a number of holes bored in it to form the board used in the game of nineholes, or marbles. The upright was decorated with three painted figures recognizably representing Hole, Mead, and Anne Yarde. The contraption was carried by a young fellow named William Gamage, riding on horseback behind the usual drummers. The streets were packed, and not everyone could see the Holing Game very well, but they could all hear the exchanges between Gamage and people in the crowd as he rolled a ball toward the holes in the board. The game reflected widespread rumors that Hole was having an affair with Mrs. Yarde. Such stories of hypocritical sexual misconduct were part of the standard repertoire of anti-Puritan satire, and we find them in many other towns in England. True or false, in this case the invitation to inversionary sexual punning—Master Hole and Mistress Yarde—was too good to miss. Gamage was soon enjoying a raucous dialogue with the bystanders. “He holes it for a crown” (the Yardes lived at the sign of the crown); “he holes it not within a yard”; “if you will hole it, it must be in a mead”: the sexual puns were unmistakable. The chants of “he holes (or holes not) for a crown” were repeated time after time outside the Yardes’ house, and the phrase was soon reported to be “a common proverb in the town and county.”Footnote ⁴¹

Young Gamage was so pleased with his Holing Game that he wrote a libelous poem about it. It contained descriptions of each of the shows, but its main theme was the affair between Hole and Mrs. Yarde:

My loving friends that love to play, [it began]Use not my culver holes [pigeon holes] by day,But in the night I hold it best,When all these birds are in their nest.Yet do I live in quiet rest,And hold my Holing Game the best.Footnote ⁴²

The poem was a great success. Gamage's friends were not able to get it printed in London as they had wished, but it circulated widely in Somerset, sung by “idle boys” at the grammar school, for example. It was recited by adults too, in Wells shops and at a nearby village church ale. Gamage's friend Oliver Martin regularly sang it in alehouses, to the customers' “great delight.” When he was reproved for it by a pious visitor from Stoke St. Michael, Martin angrily turned on him: “A turd in [his teeth] and all those who took Hole's part.” These were not very elevated surroundings, but the Holing Game was also heard in the more respectable precincts of the deanery. One day in July a local scrivener named Richard Bourne was with Heydon in the dean's study. Their conversation was disturbed by laughter in the next room, where the dean's wife and several other women (one of them Thomasine White, the Lady of the May) were reading Gamage's verses to each other amid much hilarity.Footnote ⁴³

The Holing Game was not the only verse libel produced by the local wits. In the absence of newspapers, scurrilous verses, transmitted orally or in writing, were one of the most effective ways by which criticism of authority figures—clergy, local government officials, and the like—could be circulated in this period.Footnote ⁴⁴ The other Wells verse, “Tell Me of Flesh,” had more literary sophistication than Gamage's crude doggerel, even quoting a line from Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine, first published in 1590. It was written by the younger William Morgan, son of the lessee of St. Cuthbert's rectory, and seems to have been intended as a dramatic monologue. The poem said little about the actual content of the May shows, but it was full of satirical wordplay on the constable's hypocrisy, culminating in a slur upon his virility: “He's grown so impotent he cannot wield / His lance, nor pike, nor scarce can bear his shield.” Most of Morgan's satire was far too complex and allusive to rival Gamage's rough ribaldry in the popular repertoire, but it too circulated widely in cathedral circles.Footnote ⁴⁵

Hole was soon out for revenge. Legal proceedings began at Somerset assizes in August 1607, when the St. Cuthbert's churchwardens were bound over for holding an illegal church ale and several of the other perpetrators were fined. Mayor Towse was at first among those in trouble, though he managed to get out of it. Hole's enemies were, of course, not inactive: they had him indicted for assault at the same assizes, though he was evidently not convicted. The constable received further vindication the next year, when the quarter sessions renewed the prohibitions against church ales. The campaign against them, as we have already seen, was not confined to Puritans in any real sense of that term: mainstream Protestant gentry shared the same dislike of popular disorder. The JPs' order was signed by Bishop Still and eleven others, one of whom was the fence-straddling Sir John Rodney.Footnote ⁴⁶ But the Star Chamber was the proper venue for a case involving both libel and contempt of lawful authority, and there the case dragged on until November 1609.

We should not exaggerate the extent to which Puritans at this time were seen as necessarily subversive of authority, though it is probably true that Hole's religious stance did not endear him to some of the judges. Still, as constable he represented the king's government in Wells, and open contempt of law and order could not be tolerated, particularly at a time of widespread popular violence against enclosing landlords in the “Midland Rising” of that same year. Hole's bill of complaint to Star Chamber specifically noted the possible connection, stressing that the events in Wells had taken place just when there were “great insurrections and unlawful assemblies” in Northamptonshire, and when the court began its hearings, Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, always concerned about possible threats to public order, listed it among the cases “specially appointed to be heard this sitting day.”Footnote ⁴⁷ But in the end Star Chamber was more inclined to punish Hole's lower-class enemies than it was to reprove the town elite. Gamage and the younger Morgan received the full shaming ritual, the punishment-fitting-the-crime treatment, common in cases of this kind. They were to ride “two and two upon a horse … their faces one towards another” from the Fleet Prison to Westminster, where they were to stand in the pillory, with a repeat performance from the Fleet to the pillory in Cheapside. Then at Wells they were to “ride in like manner through the chief streets in the city and be set in the pillory,” in addition to paying Hole £100 in damages. They were also heavily fined. Yet the corporation, several of whose members had actively encouraged the disorders, got away scot-free, with the exception of Edmond White. One clue to this is a letter from the earl of Hertford, a powerful figure both at the royal court and in the West Country, written a few days before the sentencing, to Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, who presided over the case. Hertford was careful not to condone the mocking of authority by the Wells lower orders. But he implied that Hole's conflict with the corporation was driven by his connections with Somerset's Puritan gentry, who wished to undermine “the government and authority of that town, and the magistrates there” for their own ends. The result of punishing the city fathers, Hertford pointed out, would be that “the baser and inferior sort of people there will ever be ready to have them and their government in contempt.” The Wells authorities should be let off, so as not to hand Hertford's gentry enemies an easy triumph that might undermine his influence in Wells. Mayor Towse's son, it might be noted, was on Hertford's payroll, and the city's recorder, Thomas Southworth, was also one of his clients.Footnote ⁴⁸

The earl of Hertford's letter suggests that we ought to be careful before we conclude that the 1607 May Games simply amounted to a conflict between a handful of intolerant Puritans and virtually the whole of the rest of the population. The city was, in fact, deeply split, and even the corporation admitted that Hole had some support. In a Star Chamber countersuit brought in retaliation for the constable's original one, they noted that “some others of his faction” had persuaded him to refuse an offer of arbitration and had also contributed to his legal expenses.Footnote ⁴⁹ Obviously Wells contained many people who liked the traditional festivities and saw Hole and his friends as killjoys. But if that was all there was to it, why should Hertford have worried that a Star Chamber reproof would undermine the corporation's authority? If local opinion was virtually unanimous, it would surely have increased their popularity, making them appear the victims of an unjust sentence for standing up for the ancient customs of the place. Hertford's anxiety suggests that a substantial number of Wellensians had no great liking for the disorderly church ale processions (and possibly for the cathedral authorities who promoted them), even if they had no great liking for Hole's party either. They do not appear in the Star Chamber records because there was no particular reason why they should. Hole wanted to create a record in which the virtuous opponents of disorderly street festivities could show that they had been wronged by a set of drunken yobs. The defendants wanted to show that, on the contrary, they were respectable citizens, just out to enjoy themselves, acting only “in merriment”—their favorite phrase—and that there was trouble only because Hole and his friends wanted to impose their version of public morality upon a city that for centuries had managed very well without it. Neither side wanted to muddy the waters by introducing evidence from people in the middle—people who might be tolerant of traditional customs and even church ales but who were not very keen on noisy drumming and roistering going on in the streets far into the night.

The possible existence of a “silent majority” that does not surface in the record is always a problem for historians. We like contrasts and conflict; people who are simply apathetic or ambivalent do not make for a very good story. Yet, I am inclined to believe that there was such a middle ground in Wells on the issue of the May Games. Even in seventeenth-century Dorchester, arguably the most Puritan town in England, a large proportion of the townspeople stood somewhere in between the strict Puritan reformers and the idle, irreligious poor (as the reformers saw them) whose lives they were trying to clean up.Footnote ⁵⁰ Episcopal Wells was, of course, a very different kind of place from Puritan Dorchester, far less critical of the church's “popish” survivals, but the events of 1607 suggest a similar distribution of opinion.

If we fall into the trap of seeing the 1607 events as a simple collision between Puritan bigots and more tolerant traditionalists, we shall miss the cultural complexities of the situation. The city, the cathedral authorities, the county governors, and the rulers of the kingdom were all divided by the “culture wars,” and the resulting conflict was to split the kingdom for more than a generation and help to determine political alignments in the civil wars of the 1640s. I have said enough about the divisions within the city government, and, as for the cathedral folk, we need only to be reminded that the bishop was on one side, the dean on the other, a situation that will not surprise anyone familiar with Trollope's Barchester. Few of the Somerset JPs were Puritans, but they believed in law and order and prohibited church ales for precisely that reason. When in the 1630s Charles I and Archbishop Laud insisted that the prohibitions should be lifted, there was widespread resentment, and in Somerset future Cavaliers were just as indignant about it as future Roundheads. In 1609, the Star Chamber judges were divided over whether Mayor Towse and his colleagues had behaved properly, although in the end Ellesmere carried them with him against punishing them, possibly using arguments similar to those in Hertford's letter.Footnote ⁵¹

Nor did the issues go away in Wells. Disorders during the summer festival months continued to erupt occasionally. There was dispute about taking down a maypole in Chamberlain Street in 1610, “after the maygaming did grow out,” which reveals the survival of street organizations for maintaining the old traditions. Chamberlain Street had a “Cuckoo Lord” who took charge of such matters. Ill-governed East Wells was still the site of disorderly celebrations: there was a violent affray there on Midsummer night in 1612, in which one of the participants narrowly escaped with his life.Footnote ⁵² Elaborate pageants, similar to those of 1607 but without the controversial tableaux and the charivari, were put on for the visit of James I's queen, Anne of Denmark, in 1613. With memories of the embarrassments of 1607 still fresh, the corporation prudently appointed a committee to vet the companies' shows and decide “whether they be fit or not.” This helped to ensure that they passed off without incident, even though several involved female performers and were full of sexual innuendo. The fact that the entertainment was in honor of the queen, and that criticism would thus be seen as disloyal, may account for the Puritans' silence.Footnote ⁵³

It may also be relevant that John Hole was no longer in Wells; his vacant place on the corporation was filled shortly before the queen's visit. The constable won at least part of his case in Star Chamber, but his enemies must have made his life distinctly uncomfortable. In September 1609 the St. Cuthbert's churchwardens went to the ecclesiastical court and accused Hole of adultery with Mrs. Yarde. It is not clear whether the constable had to undergo the humiliating ritual of penance—standing in a white sheet in church before the congregation and confessing his sin. But he soon left the city, and when he died in 1618 he was living at North Cadbury, near the house of his protector Sir Francis Hastings, the most powerful of the Somerset Puritan gentry. His will shows that he had not severed his connections with Wells: he endowed a fund for a sermon at St. Cuthbert's, left a small bequest to the cathedral, and named as overseers of the will his Puritan friends Mead and Palmer. And lest we should think of him simply as a Puritan killjoy, the will suggests that he was fond of music; he owned a pair of virginals.Footnote ⁵⁴

How long the antagonisms aroused by the events of 1607 lingered in Wells is not clear. John Yarde died in 1614, but the surviving Puritans were certainly not isolated in the corporation. Humphrey Palmer was mayor in 1624, and Hugh Mead also had a long career in the city government. Both were gone by the time of the Civil War, but Mead's son Thomas was a strongly committed parliamentarian, mayor in 1653 and, an enemy noted, “a person very powerful in those times.” Members of families hostile to Hole in 1607—the Towses, Wykeses—surface occasionally on the royalist side, no doubt because of their cathedral connections. But most of their colleagues wisely kept their heads down and did whatever the locally dominant power—royalist or parliamentarian at different times—required them to do. When in 1642 Hertford, whose influence in Wells was still thought to be paramount, came down to raise Somerset for the king, he was received politely, and his orders were obeyed, but without much enthusiasm. It is another sign of that “silent majority.”Footnote ⁵⁵

What, in conclusion, do the events of 1607 tell us about the city of Wells and the cultural fields in which it existed? Obviously they make us aware of the forms of representation through which they were described in evidence (particularly in Gamage's libel), and viewed by Lord Chancellor Ellesmere and his Star Chamber colleagues. But through all the fog of controversy, one thing that clearly emerges is the surviving sense of local identity, so clearly expressed in rituals like the May Games. Those rituals had deep historical roots, and they survived long after the early Stuart period. Reviewing the Records of Early English Drama volumes in 1997, Robert Dunning stressed that “church ales did not entirely die, … bands of singers and the plays of St George and the Turk were not simply curiosities of Hardy's Dorset, but [continuing] realities in eighteenth-century Somerset.”Footnote ⁵⁶ There were always fireworks on 5 November, a boisterous occasion even in the sedate Victorian period. I do not know whether the Wells Carnival has an absolutely continuous history all the way from the seventeenth century to the later years of Queen Victoria's reign, when it was undoubtedly flourishing. But in 1735 there was a Guy Fawkes Day procession that included the corporation and the trading companies, “with their ensigns and banners,” which certainly sounds like an annual event.Footnote ⁵⁷

It is no surprise that an early modern community could have a strong sense of identity and yet be beset by divisions both institutional (town/cathedral) and cultural (traditional/Puritan). Obviously this enables us to appreciate the strength of the demons that were to break loose in civil war a generation later. But in Wells in 1607 there were still efforts to bridge the cultural divide: Mayor Towse thought there was “knavery” in one of the anti-Puritan skits, Puritans contributed money for the repair of St. Cuthbert's tower while boycotting the church ale that was the main source of funding, and John Yarde was even willing to let the mayor watch a Robin Hood play from his window. The youthful architects of the most provocative charivari—the painted calf, the holing game—were not held back by any such politic constraints. The affair thus demonstrates the rich vocabulary of the youth culture that was at the heart of so much early modern charivaric performance. The events in Wells in 1607 remind us always to be alert to the continuing connections between the languages of popular festivity, civic ceremony, and charivari in early modern street theater.