Note 576 — Chapter VIII · THE MAY-GAME
Reading edition
Cf. ch. xvii. Local ‘lords of misrule’ in the summer occur at Montacute in 1447-8 (Hobhouse, 183 ‘in expensis Regis de Montagu apud Tyntenhull existentis tempore aestivali’), at Meriden in 1565 (Sharpe, 209), at Melton Mowbray in 1558 (Kelly, 65), at Tombland, near Norwich (Norfolk Archaeology, iii. 7; xi. 345), at Broseley, near Much Wenlock, as late as 1652 (Burne-Jackson, 480). See the attack on them in Stubbes, i. 146. The term ‘lord of misrule’ seems to have been borrowed from Christmas (ch. xvii). It does not appear whether the lords of misrule of Old Romney in 1525 (Archaeologia Cantiana, xiii. 216) and Braintree in 1531 (Pearson, ii. 413) were in winter or summer.