"Tarquin thus Did softly press the rushes, ere he waken'd The chastity he wounded."
And in "Romeo and Juliet" (i. 4), Romeo says:
"Let wantons, light of heart, Tickle the senseless rushes with their heels;"
an expression which Middleton has borrowed in his "Blunt Master Constable," 1602:
"Bid him, whose heart no sorrow feels, Tickle the rushes with his wanton heels, I have too much lead at mine."
In the "Two Noble Kinsmen" (ii. 1) the Gaoler's Daughter is represented carrying "strewings" for the two prisoners' chamber.
Rush-bearings were a sort of rural festival, when the parishioners brought rushes to strew the church.[553]
[553] See Brand's "Pop. Antiq.," 1849, vol. ii. pp. 13, 14.
The "rush-ring" appears to have been a kind of token for plighting of troth among rustic lovers. It was afterwards vilely used, however, for mock-marriages, as appears from one of the Constitutions of Salisbury. In "All's Well that Ends Well" (ii. 2) there seems a covert allusion to the rush-ring: "As Tib's rush for Tom's fore-finger." Spenser, in the "Shepherd's Kalendar," speaks of
"The knotted rush-rings and gilt Rosemarie."
Du Breul, in his "Antiquities of Paris,"[554] mentions the rush-ring as "a kind of espousal used in France by such persons as meant to live together in a state of concubinage; but in England it was scarcely ever practised except by designing men, for the purpose of corrupting those young women to whom they pretended love."
[554] Douce's "Illustrations of Shakespeare," 1839, p. 194.
The "rush candle," which, in times past, was found in nearly every house, and served as a night-light for the rich and candle for the poor, is mentioned in "Taming of the Shrew" (iv. 5):
"be it moon, or sun, or what you please: An if you please to call it a rush candle, Henceforth, I vow, it shall be so for me."
_Saffron._ In the following passage ("All's Well that Ends Well," iv. 5) there seems to be an allusion[555] by Lafeu to the fashionable and fantastic custom of wearing yellow, and to that of coloring paste with saffron: "No, no, no, your son was misled with a snipt-taffeta fellow there, whose villanous saffron would have made all the unbaked and doughy youth of a nation in his colour."
_Spear-grass._ This plant--perhaps the common reed--is noticed in "1 Henry IV." (ii. 4) as used for tickling the nose and making it bleed. In Lupton's "Notable Things" it is mentioned as part of a medical recipe: "Whoever is tormented with sciatica or the hip-gout, let them take an herb called spear-grass, and stamp it, and lay a little thereof upon the grief." Mr. Ellacombe[556] thinks that the plant alluded to is the common couch-grass (_Triticum repens_), which is still known in the eastern counties as spear-grass.