The Vice in the Linton Christmas plays

At Christmas the young men of Linton parish in Craven acted old plays, a practice Dr Whitaker traced back to 1606, when the Earl of Cumberland paid the young men of Skipton to fit them for acting plays that Christmas. Within living memory a favourite piece was Heywood’s The Iron Age, and every play, tragedy or comedy, had its Vice or clown armed with a lath sword and wearing a party-coloured dress, a fur cap and a fox’s brush behind. The rustic actors had no stage or scenery and performed in the main room of an ordinary house. A correspondent sent Hone the extract as a sequel to his account of Tom Airay’s Grassington theatre.