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Popular Culture Review
resulted in the Lord Mayor being summoned to London (REED Chester 109).
After that date, the events usually coupled with Whitsun became subsumed
under the secular festivities associated with the Midsummer Watch when the
militia, accompanied by the town musicians and the city official, paraded about
the city.
A similar secularization of St. George’s Day occurred in 1609. In that
year the Lord Mayor and a former sheriff of Chester established an annual horse
race to be held on St. George’s Day, with prizes of silver bells or cups to be
made annually to the horses who finished first, second, and third in the race. An
elaborate procession was planned to accompany the horserace. Its purported
purpose was for “homage to the kyng & prynce with that noble victor St george
to be Continued for euer” (REED Chester 238). Participants included men on
horseback costumed to represent elves with clubs. Mercury, the City of Chester,
Love, Envy, Peace and Pomp, men carrying the arms of IGng James and Prince
Henry on shields, and men carrying the silver prizes to be awarded at the race.
Most were to deliver “an Oration” in honor of the tokens each carried. And there
was to be “St George himselfe on horseback in Complete Armor with his flagg
and buckle in pompe & before him a noyse of drums” (REED Chester 279-80).
Several years’ records list assessments on a number of the city guilds
for their contributions towards the costs of making the silver prizes (REED
Chester 258, 287, 307, 314, 323, 354, 368). After 1610 little else specifically
related to St. George appears in the records connected to the annual horse race.
In 1621, however, plans were made to add “St. George fighting with ye dragon
&c.” to the annual Midsummer Watch. Plans included men representing St.
George, the Nine Worthies, the Nine Worthy Women, the Four Virtues, and the
Four Seasons. Plans specified “all the showe aboue saide to ryde on v\4iite and
red horses.” The records note that in the end “nothinge was done therein”
(REED Chester 338-40), but reasons for abandoning the show are not given.
Nonetheless, it is clear that the citizens of Chester, like those of Norwich, sought
ways to continue the commemoration of St. George, first through creating an
annual horse race on his feast day that was divorced fi-om any overt religious
connection, and by reintroducing the legend of St. George as “entertainment”
into Chester’s secular, civic Midsummer Watch.
Provincial records suggest most other communities did not preserve
such links to St. George. Or did they? Dramatic records from other localities in
England show an almost universal end to St. George celebrations after 1547. Yet
the cross of St. George remained on the royal standard, was later incorporated
into the Union Jack, and St. George still remains the symbolic patron of the
Order of the Garter. Norland surmises that after Edward VI St. George plays
“seem generally to have been performed indoors at major houses in the
community and later at public houses” (Norland 53). And the descriptions of St.
George mummers’ plays dating from the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries suggest that St. George celebrations may have continued in England