EUROPEAN CONDITIONS
There are obviously conditions attaching to European culture history
which do not apply elsewhere, and as obviously the most important,
perhaps the only important one, which it is necessary to consider in
connection with the problems of folklore is that resulting from the
introduction of a non-European religion and the adoption of this
religion as part of the state machinery in the several countries. This
religion is, of course, Christianity. It came into the home of a
decaying, corrupt, and impossible state religion wherever the Roman
Empire was established and into the homes of purer and sterner faiths,
faiths that had belonged to the people through all the years of
conquest and settlement, migration and resettlement, wherever the
empire of Rome had not become established.
Until the advent of Christianity into Britain the Celtic peoples
possessed their own customs, their own religious beliefs, their own
usages. Until the Anglo-Saxons came into contact with Christianity in
their new settlements in England, they also possessed their own
customs, usages, and beliefs. So far as Celt and Teuton were
responsible for continuing or allowing to continue the still older
faiths, the faiths of savagery as we have accustomed ourselves to
term them, they brought these faiths also into contact with
Christianity, and Christianity dealt with the problem thus presented
exactly as it dealt with the Celtic and Teutonic faiths, namely, by
treating all alike as pagan, all equally to be set aside or used in
any fashion that circumstances might demand. Let it be particularly
noted that Christianity did not distinguish between the various shades
of paganism. All that was not Christian was pagan.
Christianity was both antagonistic to and tolerant of pagan custom and
belief. In principle and purpose it was antagonistic. In practice it
was tolerant where it could tolerate safely. At the centre it aimed at
purity of Christian doctrine, locally it permitted pagan practices to
be continued under Christian auspices. In the earliest days it set
itself against all forms of idolatry and non-Christian practices; in
later days, after the fifth century, says Gibbon,[444] it accepted
both pagan practice and pagan ritual.
The relationship of Christianity to paganism is, therefore, a very
complex subject, and it would not be possible in this place to work
out one tithe of it. Nor is it needed. The two cardinal facts with
which we are now concerned are the principle of antagonism and the
practice of toleration. As to the former there need not be any
discussion on the fact. Everywhere throughout Europe its effect is to
be seen. It formed the most solid and systematic arresting force
against the natural development of pagan belief and practice, and it
is this fact of arrested development in pagan belief and practice
which is of great importance. We can ascertain the point of stoppage,
note the stage of arrested development, and trace out the subsequent
history of a custom, belief, or rite so arrested. As a survival in a
state of arrested development, a custom or belief is observable
throughout its later history. All it does is to decay, and decay
slowly, and each stage of decay may oftentimes be discovered. On the
other hand, if no arrest of development had taken place there would
have been no survival and no decay. The custom or belief which is not
arrested by an opposing culture becomes a part of the religion or of
the institutions of the nation, and the history of its development
becomes, as a rule, lost in the general advance of religion and
politics--custom develops into law, belief develops into religion,
rite develops into ceremonial, and tradition ceases to be the force
which keeps them alive. The two classes of custom and belief thus
contrasted are of different value to the student. The one is important
because it contains the germs and goes back to the origin of existing
institutions. The other is important because, having been arrested by
a strong opposing force, unable to destroy it altogether, it remains
as evidence of custom and belief at the time of its arrestment. It
will be seen at once how far this evidence may take us. It stretches
back into the remotest past. It survives in the stage at which it was
arrested, not of course in the form in which it then appeared, but in
the decayed form which years of existence beneath the ever-opposing
forces of the established civilisation must have brought about.
These opposing forces can be detected in working order. What can be
more indicative of a dual system of belief than the cry of an old
Scottish peasant when he came to worship at the sacred well?--"O Lord,
Thou knowest that well would it be for me this day an I had stoopit my
knees and my heart before Thee in spirit and in truth as often as I
have stoopit them afore this well. But we maun keep the customs of our
fathers." It appears over and over again in the lives of early
Christian saints who were only just parting from a living pagan faith.
Thus St. Bega was the patroness of St. Bees in Cumberland, where she
left a holy bracelet which was long an object of profound veneration;
and in a prefatory statement by the compiler of a small collection of
her miracles, written in the twelfth century, we learn among other
things that whosoever forswore himself upon her bracelet swiftly
incurred the heaviest punishment of perjury or a speedy death. It is
to be observed that Beagas, the French Bague, is the Anglo-Saxon
denomination for rings, and Dr. William Bell suggests that holy St.
Bega was but a personification of one of the holy rings which, having
gained great hold upon the minds of the heathen Cumbrians, it was not
politic in their first Christian missionaries wholly to subvert.[445]
These rings are, of course, the doom rings of the Scandinavian temples
which are so often referred to in the Sagas.[446]
Baptism, an essentially Christian ceremony, might off-hand be supposed
to contain nothing but evidence for Christianity. It might at most be
expected that the details of the ceremony would contain relics of
adapted pagan rites, and this we know is the case. But we can go
beyond even this, and discover in the popular conception of the rite
very clear indications of the early antagonism between Christianity
and paganism--an antagonism which is certainly some eighteen hundred
years old in this country, and though so old is still contained in the
evidence of folklore.
An analysis of baptismal folklore shows us that its most important
section is contained under the group which deals with the effect of
non-baptism. In England we have it prevailing in the border counties,
in Cornwall, Devonshire, Durham, Lancashire, Middlesex,
Northumberland, and Yorkshire, and in North-East Scotland, that
children joined the ranks of the fairies if they died unchristened, or
that their souls wandered about in the air, restless and unhappy,
until Judgment Day. Various penalties attended the condition of
non-baptism, but perhaps the most significant is the Northumberland
custom of burying an unbaptised babe at the feet of an adult Christian
corpse--surely a relic of the old sacrifice at a burial which is
indicated so frequently in the graves of prehistoric times,
particularly of the long-barrow period. In Ireland we have the effect
of non-baptism in a still more grim form. In the sixteenth century the
rude Irish used to leave the right arms of their male children
unchristened, to the intent that they might give a more ungracious and
deadly blow.[447]
[Illustration: RITE OF BAPTISM, ON FONT AT DARENTH, KENT]
These, and their allied and variant customs, are relics, not so much
of the absorption by Christian baptism of rites belonging to early
paganism as of the struggle between Christianity and paganism for the
mastery, of the anathemas of Christians against pagans, and of the
terrible answer of the pagan. And what are we to say to it? Is it that
the struggle itself has lasted all these centuries, or only its
memory? My belief is that the struggle itself has lasted in reality
though not in name.
But if we have been able to look through the very portals of
Christianity to the regions of paganism behind, can we not boldly pass
through altogether and recover from folklore much of the lost evidence
of our prehistoric ancestors? I put the question in this way
purposely, because it is the way which is indicated by the methods and
data of folklore, and it is a question which has much to do with the
different views held of the province of folklore.
I will answer by referring to the pre-baptismal rites of washing. In
Northumberland we meet with the analogue of the sixteenth-century
Irish practice, for there the child's right hand is left unwashed that
it may gather riches better[448]--the golden coin taking the place of
the ancient weapon in this as in other phases of civilisation. Not
only is the water used for this purpose heated in the old-fashioned
way by placing red-hot irons in it (_i.e._ the modern equivalent for
stone-boiling), but in Yorkshire we have the custom that the newborn
infant must be placed in the arms of a maiden before any one else
touches it, two practices represented exactly in the customs of the
Canary Islanders, who were in the stone age of culture and are
considered to be the last remnants of a race which once included
Britain among its lands of occupation.[449]
The Rev. C. O'Connor, in his third letter of Columbanus, gives a very
interesting statement of Irish well-worship in a letter addressed to
his brother, the late Owen O'Connor Don, and which shows the living
antagonism between Christian and pagan belief. He says:--
"I have often enquired of your tenants what they
themselves thought of their pilgrimage to their wells
of Kill Orcht, Tobbar-Brighde, Tobbar-Muire, near
Elphin, and Moore, near Castlereagh, where multitudes
assemble annually to celebrate what they, in broken
English, termed Patterns; and when I pressed a very
old man--Owen Hester--to state what possible advantage
he expected to derive from the singular custom of
frequenting in particular such wells as were
contiguous to an old blasted oak, or an upright unhewn
stone, and what the meaning was of the yet more
singular custom of sticking rags in the branches of
such trees and spitting on them, his answer, and the
answer of the oldest men, was that their ancestors
always did it; that it was a preservative against
Geasa-Dravideacht, _i.e._ the sorceries of Druids;
that their cattle was preserved by it from infectious
disorders; that the davini maithe, _i.e._ the fairies,
were kept in good humour by it; and so thoroughly
persuaded were they of the sanctity of these pagan
practices that they would travel bareheaded and
barefooted from ten to twenty miles for the purpose of
crawling on their knees round these wells and upright
stones and oak trees westward as the sun travels, some
three times, some six, some nine, and so on, in uneven
numbers until their voluntary penances were completely
fulfilled. The waters of Logh-Con were deemed so
sacred from ancient usage that they would throw into
the lake whole rolls of butter as a preservation for
the milk of their cows against
Geasa-Dravideacht."[450]
Scarcely less important than the effect of the antagonism of the
Church in the production of arrested development is the effect of the
toleration of the Church for pagan custom and belief. This toleration
took the shape either of allowing the continuation of pagan custom and
belief as a matter not affecting Christian doctrine or of actual
absorption into Church practice and ritual. The story told to the full
is a long and interesting one. And it still awaits the telling.
Gibbon, in a few sentences, has told us the outline.[451] Other
authorities have told us small episodes. I am, of course, not
concerned here with anything more than to adduce sufficient evidence
to establish the fact that Christian tolerance of paganism has been
one of the assistant causes for the long continuance of pagan
survivals.
I shall not hesitate to begin by quoting at length a luminous passage
from Grimm's great work. In the preface to his second edition he
writes as follows:--
"Oftentimes the Church prudently permitted, or could
not prevent, that heathen and Christian things should
here and there run into one another; the clergy
themselves would not always succeed in marking off the
bounds of the two religions: their private leanings
might let some things pass which they found firmly
rooted in the multitude. In the language, together
with a stock of newly-imported Greek and Latin terms,
there still remained, even for ecclesiastical use, a
number of Teutonic words previously employed in
heathen services, just as the names of gods stood
ineradicable in the days of the week; to such words
old customs would still cling silent and unnoticed
and take a new lease of life. The festivals of the
people present a tough material: they are so closely
bound up with its habits of life that they will put up
with foreign additions if only to save a fragment of
festivities long loved and tried. In this way
Scandinavia, probably the Goths also for a time, and
the Anglo-Saxons down to a late period, retained the
heathenish Yule as all Teutonic Christians did the
sanctity of Easter-tide; and from these two the
Yule-boar and Yule-bread, the Easter pancake,
Easter-sword, Easter-fire, and Easter-dance could not
be separated. As faithfully were perpetuated the name
and in many cases the observances of Midsummer. New
Christian feasts, especially of saints, seem
purposely, as well as accidentally, to have been made
to fall on heathen holidays. Churches often rose
precisely where a heathen god or his sacred tree had
been pulled down, and the people trod their old paths
to the accustomed site; sometimes the very walls of
the heathen temple became those of the church, and
cases occur in which idol images still found a place
in a wall of the porch, or were set up outside the
door, as at Bamberg Cathedral there lie Slavic heathen
figures of animals inscribed with runes. Sacred hills
and fountains were rechristened after saints, to whom
their sanctity was transferred; sacred woods were
handed over to the newly-founded convent or the king,
and even under private ownership did not lose their
long-accustomed homage. Law usages, particularly the
ordeals and oath-takings, but also the beating of
bounds, consecrations, image processions, spells and
formulas, while retaining their heathen character,
were simply clothed in Christian forms. In some
customs there was little to change: the heathen
practice of sprinkling a newborn babe with water
closely resembled Christian baptism; the sign of the
hammer, that of the cross; and the erection of tree
crosses the irmensuls and world trees of
paganism."[452]
This passage, written in 1844, has been abundantly illustrated by the
research of specialists since that date, and, of course, Mr. Frazer's
monumental work will occur to every reader. But, after all, the chief
authority for the action of the Church towards paganism in this
country is the famous letter of Pope Gregory to the Abbot Mellitus in
A.D. 601, as preserved by the historian Beda. It is worth while
quoting this once again, for it is an English historical document of
priceless value. "We have been much concerned," writes the good St.
Gregory,
"since the departure of our congregation that is with
you, because we have received no account of the
success of your journey. When, therefore, Almighty God
shall bring you to the most reverend Bishop Augustine
our brother, tell him what I have, upon mature
deliberation on the affair of the English, determined
upon, namely, that the temples of the idols [fana
idolorum] in that nation [gente] ought not to be
destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be
destroyed; let holy water be made and sprinkled upon
the said temples, let altars be erected and relics
placed. For if these temples be well built, it is
requisite that they be converted from the worship of
devils [daemonum] to the worship of the true God; that
the nation seeing that their temples are not destroyed
may remove error from their hearts, and knowing and
adoring the true God may the more familiarly resort to
the places to which they have been accustomed. And
because they have been used to slaughter many oxen in
the sacrifices to devils some solemnity must be
exchanged for them on this account, so that on the day
of the dedication, or the nativities of the holy
martyrs whose relics are there deposited, they may
build themselves huts of the boughs of trees, about
those churches which have been turned to that use from
temples and celebrate the solemnity with religious
feasting and no more offer beasts to the devil
[diabolo], but kill cattle to the praise of God in
their eating, and return thanks to the giver of all
things for their sustenance."[453]
The church of St. Pancras at Canterbury is claimed to be one of the
temples so preserved,[454] and there have survived down to our own
times examples of the animal sacrifice which in early Christian days
may well have been preserved by this famous edict.[455] But beyond
these illustrations of the two stated objects of Pope Gregory's letter
there are innumerable additional results from such a policy,[456]
results which prove that British pagandom was not stamped out by edict
or by sword, but was rather gradually borne down before the strength
of the new religion--borne down and pushed into the background out of
sight of the Church and the State, relegated to the cottage homes, the
cattle-sheds and the cornfields, the countryside and the denizens
thereof.[457]
This is where we must search for it, and I think this important
element in our studies will be better understood if we turn for one
moment to the results of Christian contact with earlier belief in the
one country where Christianity has set up its strongest political
force, namely, Italy. Dr. Middleton wrote a series of remarkable
letters which tell us much on this point, but before referring to
this, I wish first to quote a hitherto buried record by an impartial
observer[458] in the year 1704. It is a letter written from Venice to
Sir Thomas Frankland, describing the travels and observations of a
journey into Italy. The traveller writes:--
"I cannot leave Itally without making some general
observations upon the country in general, and first as
to their religion; it differs in name only now from
what it was in the time of the ancient heathen Romans.
I know this will sound very oddly with some sort of
people, but compare them together and then let any
reasonable man judge of the difference. The heathen
Itallians had their gods for peace and for war, for
plenty and poverty, for health and sickness, riches
and poverty, to whom they addressed themselves and
their wants; and the Christian Itallians have their
patron saints for each of these things, to whom they
also address according to their wants. The heathen
sacrificed bulls and other beasts, and the Christian
ones after the same manner a piece of bread, which a
picture in the garden of Aldobrandina at Rome, painted
in the time of Titus Vespasian, shews by the altar and
the priests' vestments to have been the same as used
now. The Pantheon at Rome was dedicated by the
ancients to all the gods, and by the moderns to all
the saints; the temple of Castor and Pollux at Rome is
now dedicated to Cosmo and Damian, also twin brothers.
The respect they pay to the Virgin Mary is far greater
than what they pay to the Son, and whatever English
Roman Catholics may be made to believe by their
priests or impose upon us, it is certain that the
devotion to the Madonnas in Itally is something more
than a bare representation of the Virgin Mary when
they desire her intercession. Miracles they pretend
not only to be wrought by the Madonnas themselves, but
there is far greater respect paid to a Madonna in one
place than another, whereas if this statue were only a
bare representation of the Virgin to keep them in mind
of her, the respect would be equal. I visited all the
famous ones, and it would fill a volume to tell you
the fopperies that's said of them. That of Loretto,
being what they say is the very house where the Virgin
lived, is not to be described, the riches are so
great, nor the devotion that's paid to the statue....
The Lady of Saronna is another famous one and very
rich; she is much handsomer than she of Loretto and a
whole church-full of the legend of the miracles she
hath wrought. She is in great reputation, and it's
thought will at last outtop the Lady of Loretto; there
is another near Leghorne that I also visited called
_La Madonna della Silva Nera_, to whom all Itallian
ships that enter that port make a present of thanks
for their happy voyage, and salute her with their
cannon, and most ships going out give her something
for her protection during their voyage. I could tire
you with she at the Annunciata at Florence, she within
a mile of Bollognia, for whom the magistracy have
piazza'd the road all the way from her station to the
city, that she may not be encumbered with sun or rain
when she makes them a visit, and hundreds more that
would fill a volume of fopperies that I had the
curiosity to see, but it would be imposing too much
upon your patience."[459]
This only confirms Dr. Middleton's conclusions, which received the
approval of Gibbon, and those of later writers. "As I descended from
the Alps," writes the Rev. W. H. Blunt in 1823,
"I was admonished of my entrance into Italy by a
little chapel to the Madonna, built upon a rock by the
roadside, and from that time till I repassed this
chain of mountains I received almost hourly proof that
I was wandering amongst the descendants of that people
which is described by Cicero to have been the most
religious of mankind. Though the mixture of religion
with all the common events of life is anything but an
error, yet I could not avoid regretting that, like
their heathen ancestors, the modern Italians had
supplied the place of our great master mover by a
countless host of inferior agents."[460]
Mr. Blunt goes on to give interesting details of the close connection
between the modern religious festival, ceremony, or service, and those
of classical times, and the conclusion is obvious. In modern days Dr.
Mommsen has lent the sanction of his great authority to the
identification of the birthday of Christ with that of Mithra,[461]
and Mr. Leland has given such numerous identifications not only of the
cults of pagan and Christian Italy, but of the god-names of ancient
Rome with the saint-names or witch-names of modern times,[462] that it
seems impossible to deny a place for this evidence. "It was," says
Gibbon,
"the universal sentiment both of the Church and of
heretics that the daemons were the authors, the
patrons, and the objects of idolatry; those rebellious
spirits who had been degraded from the rank of angels
were still permitted to roam upon earth, to torment
the bodies and to seduce the minds of sinful men. It
was confessed, or at least it was imagined, that they
had distributed among themselves the most important
characters of Polytheism, one daemon assuming the name
of Jupiter, another of AEsculapius, a third of Venus,
and a fourth perhaps of Apollo."[463]
This, then, is recognition and adoption of pagan beliefs, not the
uprooting of them. If the Roman Jupiter was a Christian daemon, his
existence at all events was recognised. But even this negative way of
adopting the old beliefs gave way as the Church spread further. The
tribe of daemons soon included the popular fairy, elf, and goblin. And
then came the positive adoption of pagan customs. Gibbon describes how
the early Christians refused to decorate their doors with garlands and
lamps, and to take part in the ceremonial of lifting the bride over
the threshold of the house.[464] Both these customs have survived in
popular folklore, in spite of the recorded action of the early
Church, and it would be curious to ascertain whether they have
survived by the help of the Church. We cannot answer that question of
historical evidence just now, but it is a question which, in its wider
aspect, as including many other items of folklore, ought to be
examined into. There is no doubt, however, that by analogy it can be
answered, because we have ample evidence, if the writings of reformers
may be taken as historical facts and not polemical imaginations, that
many very important customs, among the richest as well as the poorest
treasures of folklore, have been, so to speak, Christianised by the
Church, and that the Church has taken part in and adopted
non-Christian customs, the survivors of olden-time life in
Europe.[465]
Now it is clear from these considerations, and from the vast mass of
information which is gradually being accumulated on the subject, that
not only the arresting force of Christianity but also its toleration
has assisted in the preservation of pre-Christian belief and custom.
But the preservation has been in fragments only. The system which
supported the older faith and might, if it had been allowed a natural
growth, have produced a newer religion of its own, was completely
shattered. It left no preservative force except that of tradition,
the traditional instinct to do what has always been done, to believe
what has always been believed. Pre-Christian belief and custom has
thus become isolated beliefs and customs in survival. It has been
broken up into innumerable fragments of unequal character, and
containing unequal elements. It has been forced back into secret
action wherever Christianity was wholly antagonistic, and hence
primitive public worship has tended to become local worship, or
household worship, or even personal worship, while all such worship
which is not the authorised Church worship has tended to become
superstition. Where Christianity was not wholly antagonistic, it
absorbed rites, customs, and even beliefs, and these primitive
survivals have taken their place in the evolution of Christian
doctrine, and thus become lost to the students of Celtic and Teutonic
antiquities. But even so, there are discoverable points where the
dividing line between non-Christian and Christian belief has not been
obliterated by the process of absorption. In all cases it is the duty
of the student to note the stage of arrested development in the
primitive rite, custom, or belief, whether it be caused by antagonism
or by absorption. It is at this point, indeed, that the history of the
survival begins. It is here that we have to turn from the polity, the
religion, or cultus of a people to the belief, practices, or
superstition of that portion of our nation which has not shared its
progress from tribesmen to citizens, from paganism to Christianity,
from vain imaginings to science and philosophy. It is from this point
we have to turn from the dignity of courts, the doings of armies, and
the results of commerce, to the doings, sayings, and ideas of the
peasantry who cannot read, and who have depended upon tradition for
all, or almost all, they know outside the formalities of law and
Church.
FOOTNOTES:
[444] _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ (Bury), iii. 214-15.
[445] _Royal Irish Academy_, viii. 258; _Brit. Arch. Assoc._
(Gloucester volume), 62.
[446] "The Story of the Ere Dwellers," Morris, _Saga Library_, ii. 8.
[447] Camden, _Britannia_, s.v. "Ireland."
[448] Henderson, _Folklore of Northern Counties_, 16.
[449] Glas, _Canary Islands_, 148.
[450] Betham, _Gael and Cymbri_, pp. 236-8.
[451] _Decline and Fall_, iii. p. 214 (edit. Bury).
[452] Grimm, _Teutonic Mythology_, by Stallybrass, iii. pp. 35, 36. A
passage from Hakon's Saga, quoted by Du Chaillu in his _Viking Age_, i.
p. 464, shows that the northern peoples adopted the same measures.
[453] Beda, lib. i. cap. 30; and consult Mr. Plummer's learned notes on
this (vol. ii. 57-61).
[454] Stanley, _Memorials of Canterbury_, 37-38.
[455] _Cf._ my _Ethnology in Folklore_, 30-36, 136-140. Compare St.
Patrick's dedication of pagan sacred stones to Christian
purposes.--_Tripartite Life of St. Patrick_, i. 107.
[456] Thus Henry of Huntingdon records that Redwald, King of the East
Angles, after his conversion to Christianity, "set up altars to Christ
and the devil in the same chapel" (lib. iii.).
[457] _Cf._ Kemble, _Saxons in England_, i. 330-335. Dr. Hearn writes:
"Even as the good Pope Gregory the Great permitted the newly converted
English to retain their old temples and accustomed rites, attaching,
however, to them another purpose and a new meaning, so his successors
found means to utilize the simple beliefs of early animism. Long and
vainly the Church struggled against this irresistible sentiment.
Fifteen centuries ago it was charged against the Christians of that day
that they appeased the shades of the dead with feasts like the
Gentiles. In the Penitentials we find the prohibition of burning grains
where a man had died. In the _Indiculus superstitionum et Paganiarum_
among the Saxons complaint is made of the too ready canonisation of the
dead; and the Church seems to have been much troubled to keep within
reasonable bounds this tendency to indiscriminate apotheosis. At length
a compromise was effected, and the Feast of All Souls converted to
pious uses that wealth of sentiment which previously was lavished on
the dead" (_The Aryan Household_, p. 60). And, to close this short note
upon an important subject, Mr. Metcalfe, speaking of the old poetic
literature of the pagan English, says: "It was kidnapped, and its
features so altered and disguised as not to be recognisable. It was
supplanted by Christian poetical legends and Bible lays produced in
rivalry of the popular lays of their heathen predecessors. Finding that
the people would listen to nothing but these old lays, the missionaries
affected their spirit and language, and borrowed the words and phrases
of heathenism" (Metcalfe's _Englishman and Scandinavian_, p. 155).
[458] For some reason not apparent in the document itself, Mrs. S. C.
Lomas, the editor of this report, says this interesting letter gives "a
curious and evidently prejudiced description of the religious houses
and observances." See preface to _Hist. MSS. Com. Report on the MSS. of
Chequers Court, Bucks_, p. x.
[459] _Hist. MSS. Com., Chequers Court Papers_, pp. 171-2.
[460] _Vestiges of Ancient Manners and Customs in Italy_, p. 1.
[461] _Corpus insc. Lat._, i. 409; and _cf._ Cumont's _Mysteries of
Mithra_ (1903).
[462] Leland, _Etruscan Roman Remains_ (1892).
[463] _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ (Bury), ii. 15.
[464] _Decline and Fall_, ii. 17.
[465] Evidence is scattered far and wide in most of the reliable
studies in folklore. Two special books may be mentioned. A great
storehouse of examples is to be found in _The Popish Kingdoms_, by
Thomas Naogeorgus, Englyshed by Barnabe Googe, 1570, a new edition of
which was published by Mr. R. C. Hope in 1880; and Mr. H. M. Bower has
exhaustively examined one important Italian ceremony in his _The
Elevation and Procession of the Ceri at Gubbio_, published by the
Folklore Society in 1897.