ABSTRACT
Corpus Christi Eve was one of the four occasions in the year when the Sheriffs were statutorily obliged to ride and proclaim the King's Peace. This seems originally to have taken the form of drawing public attention to the Statute of Winchester, the locus classicus of provisions for the maintenance of public order. The Sheriffs rode to make proclamation, as prescribed, four times a year. The first and presumably the most important marked the election, and oath-taking of the new Sheriffs. The antiquarian Francis Drake gives a version of the winter proclamation which he says is taken from 'a manuscript which is in hands, the collector unknown'. By Drake's time it was becoming a self-conscious 'heritage' event – it seems unlikely that the common women of New York in the eighteenth century wore striped hoods and carried wands – but at the time in which interested it was a serious legal instrument.
