turn to the "Squire's treasury." What remains of the cake at night is divided among the dancers. A slice of cake is reckoned to carry good luck with it, and many people keep pieces of it stored in a box during the ensuing twelve months, in order to ensure their good luck abiding with them.
The account of these ceremonies comes mainly from Mrs. Hannah Wells (mentioned under May Day) whose father, Thomas Radbone, played the pipe and tabour; he was the owner of the "Treasury" exhibited. The words of the songs were dictated to me by Chas. Tanner, also before mentioned, in 1894. He was head morris-dancer in his earlier years. The melodies were sung by Tanner and transcribed for me by Mr. C. Taphouse of Oxford, to whom I must acknowledge my indebtedness. From Henry Wells (aged 50, labourer) of Bampton, now head morris-dancer, were got the costumes, cake-tin, fool's bladder, etc. A short account supplied by me of these two Bampton feasts, from which this paper is expanded, will be found, with the songs and melodies, in the Rev. P. H. Ditchfield's "Old English Customs" pp. 99, 124-7, 327-31.
The "Whit Hunt."
Up to the year 1862 a large extent of country lying between the Rivers Evenlode and Windrush was still forest-land, being a piece of the much larger Forest of Wychwood, which covered at one time a great part of the western border of Oxfordshire.[1] Many of the adjoining towns and villages had and exercised the right of hunting the deer in this forest-land; and in one instance, at Burford, these rights were explicitly recognised by the Crown.[2] The invariable season for these hunting expeditions seem to have been Whitsuntide. I have
- ↑ See J. Y. Akerman's Ancient Limits of Wychwood Forest, in Archæologia, vol. xxxvii.
- ↑ W. J. Monk, History of Burford (1891), pp. 20, 21.
