Folk-lore of Shakespeare, Thomas Firminger Thiselton Dyer [e reader comics TXT] 📗

is playfully called, by his favorite Doll: “Thou whoreson little tidy Bartholomew boar-pig.” Dr. Johnson, however, thought that paste pigs were meant in this passage; but this is improbable, as the true Bartholomew pigs were real roasted pigs, as may be seen from Ben Jonson’s play of “Bartholomew Fair” (i. 6), where Ursula, the pig-woman, is an important personage.[679] Gay, too, speaks of the pig-dressers: “Like Bartholomew Fair pig-dressers, who look like the dams, as well as the cooks, of what they roasted.” A further allusion to this season is found in “Henry V,” (v. 2), where Burgundy tells how “maids, well-summered and warm kept, are like flies at Bartholomew-tide, blind, though they have their eyes; and then they will endure handling, which before would not abide looking on.”

Harvest Home. The ceremonies which graced the ingathering of the harvest in bygone times have gradually disappeared, and at the present day only remnants of the old usages which once prevailed are still preserved. Shakespeare, who has chronicled so many of our old customs, and seems to have had a special delight in illustrating his writings with these characteristics of our social life, has given several interesting allusions to the observances which, in his day, graced the harvest-field. Thus, in Warwickshire, the laborers, at their harvest-home, appointed a judge to try misdemeanors committed during harvest, and those who were sentenced to punishment were placed on a bench and beaten with a pair of boots. Hence the ceremony was called “giving them the boots.” It has been suggested that this custom is alluded to in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (i. 1), where Shakespeare makes Proteus, parrying Valentine’s raillery, say, “nay, give me not the boots.”

In Northamptonshire, when any one misconducted himself in the field during harvest, he was subjected to a mock-trial at the harvest-home feast, and condemned to be booted, a description of which we find in the introduction to Clare’s “Village Minstrel:” “A long form is placed in the kitchen, upon which the boys who have worked well sit, as a terror and disgrace to the rest, in a bent posture, with their hands laid on each other’s backs, forming a bridge for the ‘hogs’ (as the truant boys are called) to pass over; while a strong chap stands on each side with a boot-legging, soundly strapping them as they scuffle over the bridge, which is done as fast as their ingenuity can carry them.” Some, however, think the allusion in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” is to the diabolical torture of the boot. Not a great while before this play was written, it had been inflicted, says Douce,[680] in the presence of King James, on one Dr. Fian, a supposed wizard, who was charged with raising the storms that the king encountered in his return from Denmark. The unfortunate man was afterwards burned. This horrible torture, we are told,[681] consisted in the leg and knee of the criminal being enclosed within a tight iron boot or case, wedges of iron being then driven in with a mallet between the knee and the iron boot. Sir Walter Scott, in “Old Mortality,” has given a description of Macbriar undergoing this punishment. At a later period “the boot” signified, according to Nares,[682] an instrument for tightening the leg or hand, and was used as a cure for the gout, and called a “bootikins.” The phrase “to give the boots” seems to have been a proverbial expression, signifying “Don’t make a laughing-stock of me; don’t play upon me.”

In the “Merchant of Venice” (v. 1), where Lorenzo says: