n of the Christmas Prince, at St. John's College, Oxford, in
the year 1607.

[Illustration: BRINGING IN THE BOAR'S HEAD WITH MINSTRELSY.]

CHRISTMAS AT THE INNS OF COURT AND GREAT HOUSES.

In the time of Henry the Eighth the Christmases at the Inns of Court
became celebrated, especially those at Lincoln's Inn, which had kept
them as early as the reign of Henry VI. The Temples and Gray's Inn
afterwards disputed the palm with it. Every Corporation appointed a
Lord of Misrule or Master of Merry Disports, and, according to Stow,
there was the like "in the house of every nobleman of honour or good
worship, were he spiritual or temporal." And during the period of the
sway of the Lord of Misrule, "there were fine and subtle disguisings,
masks, and mummeries, with playing at cards for counters, nails, and
points in every house, more for pastime than for gain." Town and
country would seem to have vied with each other as to which should
exhibit the greatest extravagance in the Christmas entertainments, but
(as in the days of Massinger the poet), the town carried off the
palm:--

"Men may talk of country Christmasses--
Their thirty-pound buttered eggs, their pies of carps' tongues,
Their pheasants drenched with ambergris, the carcases
Of three fat wethers bruised for gravy; to
Make sauce for a single peacock; yet their feasts
Were fasts, compared with the city's."

The earliest particular account of the regulations for conducting one
of these grand Christmases is in the 9th of Henry VIII.,[48] when,
besides the King for Christmas Day, the Marshal and the Master of the
Revels, it is ordered that the King of Cockneys, on Childermas Day,
should sit and have due service, and "that Jack Straw, and all his
adherents, should be thenceforth utterly banished, and no more to be
used in this house, upon pain to forfeit for every time five pounds,
to be levied on every fellow hapning to offend against this rule."
"Jack Straw" was a kind of masque, which was very much disliked by the
aristocratic and elder part of the community, hence the amount of the
fine imposed. The Society of Gray's Inn, however, in 1527, got into a
worse scrape than permitting Jack Straw and his adherents, for they
acted a play (the first on record at the Inns of Court) during this
Christmas, the effect whereof was, that Lord Governance was ruled by
Dissipation and Negligence, by whose evil order Lady Public Weal was
put from Governance. Ca