were also said and dirges sung for the prosperity of the brethren of the guild, and for the repose of the souls of those who had departed this life during the previous year.

On All Saints' Day, the graves of the dead were strewn with flowers and evergreens; and on the commemoration-day of All Souls, the bells were rung for their especial benefit.

The religious ceremonials peculiar to Christmas were of a mixed character, solemnity predominating in some, and a dash of the humorous pervading others. Thus we find among the dramatis persone who figure in the Feast of Asses (as performed on Christmasday), characters who are thus described :

“ Habbabuk, a lame old man, in a dalmatick, with a scrip full of radishes, which he ate while he spoke; and long palms to strike the Gentiles.

“ Balaam, dressed up, sitting upon an ass, spurred, holding the reins, and spurring the ass, which a young man with the sword opposes. Some one under the ass then says “ Why do ye hurt me so with your spurs ?” the young man then added “Do not comply with the command of Balak.”

Matthew Paris states that homicides and traitors were, at Christmas, indulged with peace and joy: and the beneficent influences of the season, as we learn from the concurring testimony of a multitude of writers, were universally diffused.

Such were a few of the observances appropriate to certain periods of the year; and it must be honestly confessed that there was great need of out-of-door festivities to compensate for the utter absence of any. thing like comfort or enjoyment, attainable by the poorer class of people in their own homes.

In a house, rudely built, dimly lighted by horn windows; with an earthen floor or possibly a brick pavement; scantily furnished with a few articles of absolute necessity, constructed in the clumsiest and most primitive fashion, the artizan or labourer of 1450 would eat his meals from a wooden platter by the aid of the forks with which Nature had provided him, drink his “headie" half-fermented beer from a black noggin, fondle a scrofulous baby swathed like a young mummy, and creep to rest on a straw pallet, stretched upon a bedstead like a bier, in a chamber not wholly impervious to the wind, or proof against the insinuating advances of a shower.

He was an earnest believer in charms was this labourer or artizan,—wore rue about his neck to defend himself from the malicious craft of every wrinkled crone who had the misfortune to be very old and very ill-favoured, and who was therefore denounced as a witch,—devoutly believed that the moon danced on certain nights in the year,—that the sound of bells (provided they had been properly baptized, named, crossed, and anointed) could dispel storms and tempests and banish evil spirits from the air, and lived and died, in the enjoyment of the same amount of mental culture as a half-civilized New Zealander or an Irish peasant in Connaught now possesses—Anno Domini 1850. Suppose we turn over a new leaf?

FROM the outbreak of the civil war between the rival houses of York and Lancaster, to the accession of Henry VIII., the history of Wilton is little better than a blank. None of the sanguinary battles, so frequent of occurrence during that disastrous interval, were fought in its immediate neighbourhood ; and we have no evidence that the town supplied any of the “material,” to the army of either party, while the Abbey appears to have escaped the plunder which other and less fortunate monastic institutions experienced at the hands of the Lancastrians.

By the great body of the people, the struggle was probably regarded with indifference, if not with aversion. Whatever might be its issue, to them it simply involved a change of masters, and as the choice (if such it could be called) lay between the feeble and superstitious Henry, and the sensual and dissolute Edward, at the commencement of the strife, and between the unscrupulous Richard and the avaricious Richmond, at its close, none of the candidates for the throne could look for much sympathy from the middle and lower ranks of those over whom they aspired to rule.

A lively narrative, however, of the state of feeling at Wilton, during the contest which was finally terminated on Bosworth field, would be far from destitute of interest, and it is much to be regretted that none of the chaplains of the monastery devoted their leisure hours to the composition of a chronicle like the monk of Croyland's, which, while it recorded the circumstances which fell beneath their own observation, might have remotely indicated the progress of the more important events which were being elsewhere transacted by greater actors on a wider field.

Such a chronicle would probably have told us how great and general was the trepidation of the period, how much mistrust prevailed, not merely in communities, but in the narrower limits of the household, how trade was paralyzed, and mutual confidence had ceased, and commercial dealings with distant towns and eities were suspended owing to the general insecurity of the roads,-how money, plate, and jewellery were hoarded, hidden, buried, and otherwise withdrawn from observation,-how men reverted to the principle of barter in the necessary commerce of daily life,how the Corporation and those who were charged with the administration of justice, the maintenance of the law, and the preservation of the public peace, were often times uncertain in the name of what monarch they performed the functions of their office, while the ministers of religion were similarly in doubt for whom to offer up their prayers,-how evil men found opportunities to gratify their malice, and revenge old grudges, by denouncing their enemies as malcontents to the dominant faction, and how the whole frame

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work of society in Wilton, as elsewhere, was out of joint, and crazy with the rude jars which it received from the collision of the rival families.

We could have wished—and such a narrative would have gratified the wish-to estimate the impressions which the intelligence of the progress of the strife excited, as it found its way, from time to time into this quiet country town and its adjacent monastery. Magnified and distorted as the rumours (which would have been embodied in such a narrative,) unquestionably were, they would nevertheless have constituted a sufficiently interesting epitome. They would have told us how the loss of Normandy and Guienne nourished in the minds of the English gentry a spirit of disaffection to the King (Henry VI.)how he fell sick at Clarendon and continued for a twelvemonth in a state of lethargic idiotcy,—how the feuds between the Dukes of York and Somerset expanded into open war,-how, at the battle of St. Alban’s, Henry was wounded, Somerset was slain, and power passed into the hands of York and Warwick,-how the daring and lion-hearted Queen plotted the destruction of the Yorkist chiefs, and, baffled in her wiles, became more inexorably hostile to the hated house,-how the kindly nature of the king prompted him to mediate between the two,how amity was temporarily restored, and the citizens of London saw their monarch walking in royal state to the Cathedral of St. Paul, followed by the contentious nobles, hand in hand, the queen herself, with gracious seeming, led by the nobleman with whom she was at mortal enmity,-how speedily hostilities broke out afresh, and how lavishly the blood of fellowsubjects was shed on Bloreheath, and at Northampton, -how the Queen fled, and the King passed into the