"Your grandfather of famous memory, an't please your majesty, and your great uncle Edward the Plack Prince of Wales, as I have read in the chronicles, fought a most prave pattle here in France.
_Flu._ Your majesty says very true: if your majesties is remembered of it, the Welshmen did goot service in a garden where leeks did grow, wearing leeks in their Monmouth caps; which, your majesty know, to this hour is an honourable padge of the service; and I do pelieve, your majesty takes no scorn to wear the leek upon Saint Tavy's day."
It has been justly pointed out, however, that this allusion by Fluellen to the Welsh having worn the leek in battle under the Black Prince is not, as some writers suppose, wholly decisive of its having originated in the fields of Cressy, but rather shows that when Shakespeare wrote Welshmen wore leeks.[650] In the same play, too (iv. 1), the well-remembered Fluellen's enforcement of Pistol to eat the leek he had ridiculed further establishes the wearing as a usage. Pistol says:
"Tell him I'll knock his leek about his pate Upon Saint Davy's day."
[650] See Hone's "Every Day Book," vol. i. p. 318; "British Popular Customs," pp. 110-113.
In days gone by this day was observed by royalty; and in 1695 we read how William III. wore a leek on St. David's Day, "presented to him by his sergeant, Porter, who hath as perquisites all the wearing apparel his majestie had on that day, even to his sword." It appears that formerly, among other customs, a Welshman was burned in effigy upon "St. Tavy's Day," an allusion to which occurs in "Poor Robin's Almanack" for 1757:
"But it would make a stranger laugh, To see th' English hang poor Taff: A pair of breeches and a coat, Hat, shoes, and stockings, and what not, Are stuffed with hay, to represent The Cambrian hero thereby meant."
_St. Patrick's Day_ (March 17). Shakespeare, in "Hamlet" (i. 5), makes the Danish prince swear by St. Patrick, on which Warburton remarks that the whole northern world had their learning from Ireland.[651] As Mr. Singer[652] observes, however, it is more probable that the poet seized the first popular imprecation that came to his mind, without regarding whether it suited the country or character of the person to whom he gave it. Some, again, have supposed that there is a reference here to St. Patrick's purgatory, but this does not seem probable.