"On Tuesday, the sports will be repeated; also on Wednesday, with the additional attraction of a smockrace by ladies. A main of cocks to be fought on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, for twenty guineas, and five guineas the byes, between the gentlemen of Manchester and Eccles. The wake to conclude with a fiddling-match by all the fiddlers that attend, for a piece of silver." Wakes are probably as ancient as the introduction of Christianity into this county, and were at first purely religious festivals. But in course of time, as the festivities were prolonged into night, the Legend of St John the Baptist says that the attendants "fell to lecherie and songes, dances, harping, piping, and also to glotony and sinne, and so turned holynesse to cursydnesse." In the reign of Elizabeth, wakes were in part suppressed, but were again allowed by James I. in his "Book of Sports." Since then they have been carried on under varied programmes; but even now—

"Tarts and custards, creams and cakes,

Are the junkets still at wakes;

Unto which the tribes resort,

Where the business is the sport."

PART III.

SPORTS AND GAMES.

SPORTS AND GAMES.

INTRODUCTION.

MANY of the old open-air sports and games of Lan. cashire are now altogether lost, the names alone surviving. A few particulars as to the ancient customs in games and sports, as well as to those which still survive, shorn of their ancient garb, may interest the reader.

ANCIENT CUSTOMS IN GAMES USED BY BOYS
AND GIRLS.

MERRILY SET OUT IN VERSE.

"ANY they dare challenge for to throw the sledge,

To jump or leap over ditch or hedge;
To wrestle, play at stool-ball, or to run,
To pitch the bar, or to shoot off a gun;
To play at loggats, nine holes, or ten pins,
To try it out at football, by the shins;

At tick-tacke, seize noddy, maw and ruff;

At hot-cockles, leap-frog, or blindman's buff;

To drink the halper-pots, or deal at the whole can;
To play at chess, or pue, and inkhorn;

To dance the morris, play at barley-brake;

At all exploits a man can think or speak :

At shove-groat, venter-point, or crop and pile;
At 'beshrew him that's last at any stile ;'

At leaping over a Christmas bonfire,

Or at the drawing dame out of the mire ;

At shoot-cock, Gregory, stool-ball, and what not;
Pick-point, top and scourge, to make him hot."

These lines have been erroneously attributed by Baines, in his "History of Lancashire" (ii. 579), to the second Randle Holme, who merely quoted them as descriptive of Lancashire games and sports in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They are from Samuel Rowland's "Letting of Humour's Blood in the Head-Vaine" (1600). Some of these names of games, and indeed the games themselves, having become obsolete, a few brief explanations may be necessary for the general reader :-Stool-ball is a pastime still practised in the North of England. It consists in simply setting a stool on the ground, and one of the players takes his place before it, while his antagonist, standing at a distance, tosses a ball with the intention of striking the