[Footnote 18: _A Collection of Old English Customs and Curious Bequests and Charities_, London, 1842, p. 24.]
"After the payment of £1 to a solicitor in London, and a small amount for a stamp and postage, the dividends (£24) are expended in the purchase of beef and barley, which is distributed by the Churchwarden on 21st December to all the poor of the parish, in shares of between two and three gallons of barley, and between two and three pounds of beef."
Yet another example of Christmas beef for the poor--this time rather an unpleasant one:[19] "The cruel practice of bull-baiting was continued annually on St. Thomas's Day in the quaint old town of Wokingham, Berks, so lately as 1821. In 1822, upon the passing of the Act against cruelty to Animals, the Corporation resolved on abolishing the custom. The alderman (as the chief Magistrate is called there) went with his officers in procession and solemnly pulled up the bull-ring, which had, from immemorial time been fixed in the market-place. The bull-baiting was regarded with no ordinary attachment by 'the masses'; for, besides the love of 'sport,' however barbarous, it was here connected with something more solid--the Christmas dinner.
[Footnote 19: _Notes and Queries_, second series, v. 35.]
"In 1661, George Staverton gave by will, out of his Staines house, four pounds to buy a bull for the use of the poor of Wokingham parish, to be increased to six pounds after the death of his wife and her daughter; the bull to be baited, and then cut up, 'one poor's piece not exceeding another's in bigness.' Staverton must have been an amateur of the bull-bait; for he exhorts his wife, if she can spare her four pounds a-year, to let the poor have the bull at Christmas next after his decease, and so forward.
"Great was the wrath of the populace in 1822 at the loss, not of the beef--for the corporation duly distributed the meat--but of the baiting. They vented their rage for successive years in occasional breaches of the peace. They found out--often informed by the sympathising farmer or butcher--where the devoted animal was domiciled; proceeded at night to liberate him from stall or meadow, and to chase him across the country with all the noisy accompaniments imaginable. So long was this feeling kept alive, that thirteen years afterwards--viz. in 1835--the mob broke into the place where one of the two animals to be divided was abiding, and baited him, in defiance of the authorities, in the market-place; one enthusiastic amateur, tradition relates, actually lying on the ground and seizing the miserable brute by the nostril, _more canino_, with his own human teeth! This was not to be endured, and a sentence of imprisonment in Reading Gaol gave the _coup de grace_ to the sport. The bequest of Staverton now yields an income of £20, and has for several years past been appropriated to the purchase of two bulls. The flesh is divided, and distributed annually on St. Thomas's Day, by the alderman, churchwardens, and overseers to nearly every poor family (between 200 and 300), without regard to their receiving parochial relief. The produce of the offal and hides is laid out in the purchase of shoes and stockings for the poor women and children. The bulls' tongues are recognised by courtesy as the perquisites of the alderman and town-clerk."