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776 SUMMEE AND WINTER.
in the Schonish and Danish festival. Many towns had regularly
organized majgreve gilde. 1 Bat as the
May-fire in Denmark
was called gadeild/ gate (street) fire, so was the leader of the
May-feast a gadebasse (gate bear), and his maiden partner
gadelam (gate lamb) or gadinde; gadebasse and gadinde there
fore mean the same as maigreve and maigrevinde. 2
There is a
remarkable description in Mundelstrup s Spec, gentilismi etiam-
num superstitis, Hafn. 1684 :
<
Qui ex junioribus rusticis contum
stipulis accensis flammatum efiicacius versus sidera tollere
potuerit, praeses (gadebasse) incondite omnium clamore de-
claratur, nee non eodem tempore sua cuique ex rusticis puellis,
quae tune temporis vernacula appellantur gadelam, distribuitur,
et quae praesidi adjicitur titulum hunc gadinde merebitur. 3
Hinc excipiunt convivia per universum illud temporis, quod inter
arationem et foenisecium intercedit, quavis die dominica celebrari
sueta, gadelams-gilder dicta, in quibus proceriorem circum arborem
in antecessum humo immissam variisque corollis ac signis
ornatam, corybantum more ad tympanorum stridentes sonitus
bene poti saliunt/
Now this May-riding, these May-graves, were an old tradition
of Lower Germany also ; and that apparently is the very reason
why the Mid-German custom of welcoming summer at Laetare
was not in vogue there. How could spring, which does not
reappear in the North till the beginning of May, have been
celebrated there in March ? Besides, this May-festival may in
early times have been more general in Germany; or does the
distinction reach back to the
rivalry between March and May as
the month of the folkmote ? 4 The maigreve at Greifswald, May
1, 1528, is incidentally mentioned by Sastrow in his Lebensbeschr.
1, 65-6; a license to the scholars at Pasewalk to hold a maigraf
\ Hire sub v. majgrefve. SkrSordning for Knutsgillet i Lund an. 1586, 123-7
g S Mo.num -
i?- ^ scSnensia, p. 207-10 the ; same for Malmo, p. 211. Er Tesel s
Hist Gustavi i
1, 119. Nyerup s Danske digtek. 1, 246. 2, 136. 143. Thiele 1,
i ono ; 20 For the Zealand custom see .
Molbech s Hist, tidskrift 1840.
rS Iv 6 ma ^reves in Eibe are mentioned by Terpager in Eipae cimbricae,
7 tne Aalbur
Pil ?lA 8 maigreve in Wilda s Gildewesen ,
p. 285, from a statute of
the 15th century conf. ; Molb. dial. lex. p. 533.
2 Molt^ dial. lex. pp. 150-1-2, where doubt is thrown on the derivation of
gade from ON. gata (gate, road). He has also a midsommers-lam, p. 359.
The italics here are mine. Each man has a gadelam, but only the leader
a gadinde.
TKANS.
4 Conf. EA. 821-6 on the time of assizes.