g that the clergymen
were lying witnesses and false prophets, varying their proceedings by
occasionally running naked through the streets of towns and villages,
and otherwise misbehaving themselves, until they were regarded as public
pests and treated accordingly. In the year 1661, fifty-four Quakers were
in Worcester gaol, and about the same time seven or eight others were in
the lockup at Evesham, where they were confined for fourteen weeks in a
cell 22 ft. square and 6 ft. high, being fed on bread and water and not
once let out during the whole time, so that people could not endure to
past the place; female Quakers were thrust with brutal indecency into
the stocks and there left in hard frost for a day and night, being
afterwards driven from the town. And this went on during the whole of
the time this country was blessed with Cromwell and a Republican
Government.--See "_Friends_."

~Quaint Customs.~--The practice of "heaving" or "lifting" on Easter
Monday and Tuesday was still kept up in some of the back streets of the
town a few years back, and though it may have died out now with us those
who enjoy such amusements will find the old custom observed in villages
not far away.--At Handsworth, "clipping the church" was the curious
"fad" at Easter-time, the children from the National Schools, with
ladies and gentlemen too, joining hands till they had surrounded the old
church with a leaping, laughing, linked, living ring of humanity, great
fun being caused when some of the link loosed hands and let their
companions fall over the graves.--On St. John's Days, when the ancient
feast or "wake" of Deritend Chapel was kept, it, was the custom to carry
bulrushes to the church, and old inhabitants decorated their fireplaces
with them.--In the prosperous days of the Holte family, when Aston Hall
was the abode of fine old English gentlemen, instead of being the
lumber-room of those Birmingham rogues the baronets abominated,
Christmas Eve was celebrated with all the hospitalities usual in
baronial halls, but the opening of the evening's performances was of so
whimsical a character that it attracted attention even a hundred years
ago, when queer and quaint customs were anything but strange. An old
chronicler thus describes it:--"On this day, as soon as supper is over,
a table is set in the hall; on it is set a brown loaf, with twenty
silver threepences stuck on the top of it, a tankard of ale, with pipes
and tobacco; and the two old