hip. Its
degeneracy in more recent times has been thus described to me by the
Rev. W. Taprell Allen:--"For many years it was customary to bring to the
church on Whitsunday afternoon baskets of the stalest bread and hardest
cheese, cut up into small pieces the size of dice. Immediately after the
service the bread and cheese were scrambled for in the church, and it
was a custom to use them as pellets, the parson coming in for his share
as he left the pulpit. About 1857, or perhaps a year or two later, the
unseemly custom was transferred from the church to the churchyard, the
bread and cheese being thrown down from the church tower. Later on it
was transferred to the road outside the church gates. It now lasts but a
few minutes. A few years ago all the roughs of the Forest used to come
over, and there was much drinking and fighting; but now it is very
different. The custom has in fact been dying out." From these later
stages of decay the Godiva pageant was saved by becoming a municipal
festival. And while at St. Briavels we can watch the progress of
degeneration from a point at which the religious character of the
ceremony had not quite vanished, down to the most unblushing burlesque,
and to its ultimate expulsion from consecrated precincts,--at Coventry
we see but one phase, one moment, at which the rite, if it ever had any
title to that name, seems to have been photographed and rendered
permanent.

It is obvious, however, that a feast is not a dramatic representation of
a ride; and the point requiring elucidation is the intimate relation of
the feast at St. Briavels with a story apparently so irrelevant as that
of the countess' ride. To explain this, we must suppose that the feast
was only part--doubtless the concluding part--of a ceremony, and that
the former portion was a procession, of which the central figure was
identical with that familiar to us at Coventry. But such a procession,
terminating in a sacred feast, would have had no meaning if the naked
lady represented a creature merely of flesh and blood. It is only
explicable on the hypothesis that she was the goddess of a heathen cult,
such as Hertha (or Nerthus), whose periodical progress among her subject
tribes is described in a well-known passage by Tacitus,[57] and yet
survives, as we have seen, in the folklore of Ruegen. Now the historian
tells us that Hertha was Mother Earth, the goddess of the soil, whose
yearly celebration would appropriately take place in