hanging men and the spectral dance must follow.
The rider carries his bride to a churchyard, and plunges down with her
into a vault.
Bürger has utilised for his ballad a tradition of Woden as the God of
the Dead, carrying off the souls on his hell-horse. The story is found
in many places; amongst others in Iceland, and variously modified.
The nightmare is the same horse coming in and trampling on the
sleeper’s chest. The reader will remember Fuseli’s picture of the head
of the spectre horse peering in at the sleeper between the curtains of
her bed, whilst an imp sits on and oppresses her bosom.
But the horse is not always ridden. Modern ideas, modern luxury, have
invaded the phantom world, and now--we hear of death-coaches drawn by
headless horses. These are black, like mourning carriages, and the
horses are sable; a driver sits on the box; he is in black, but he
has no weeper to his hat, because he has not a hat. He has not a hat,
because he is without a head. The death-coach is sometimes not seen,
but heard. At others it is seen, not heard. It rolls silently as a
shadow along the road.
But, indeed, Woden had a black horse as well as one that was white.
Rime-locks (Hrimfaxi) was his sable steed, and Shining-locks (Skinfaxi)
his white one. The first is the night horse, from whose mane falls the
dew; the second is the day horse, whose mane is the morning light.
One of the legends of St. Nicholas refers to these two horses, which
have been transferred to him when Woden was displaced. The saint was
travelling with a black and a white steed, when some evil-minded man
cut off their heads at an inn where they were spending the night. When
St. Nicholas heard what had been done, he sent his servant to put on
the heads again. This the man did; but so hurriedly and carelessly,
that he put the black head on the white trunk, and _vice versâ_. In
the morning St. Nicholas saw, when too late, what had been done. The
horses were alive and running. This legend refers to the morning and
the evening twilights, part night and part day. The morning twilight
has the body dark and the head light; and the evening twilight has the
white trunk and the black head.
St. Nicholas has taken Odin’s place in other ways. As Saint Klaus he
appears to children at Yule. The very name is a predicate of the god
of the dead. He is represented as the patron of ships; indeed, St.
Nicholas is a puzzle to ecclesiastical historians--his history and his
symbols and cult have so little in common. The reason is, that he has
taken to him the symbols, and myths, and functions of the Northern god.
His ship is Odin’s death-ship, constructed out of dead men’s finger and
toe-nails.
[Illustration: _Fig. 8._--A GABLE, CHARTRES.]
In Denmark, a shovelful of oats is thrown out at Yule for Saint Klaus’s
horse; if this be neglected, death enters the house and claims a soul.
When a person is convalescent after a dangerous illness, he is said to
have “given a feed to Death’s Horse.” The identification is complete.
Formerly, the last bundle of oats in a field was cast into the air by
the reapers “for Odin at Yule to feed his horse.” And in the writer’s
recollection it was customary in Devon for the last sheaf to be raised
in the air with the cry, “A neck Weeday!” That is to “Nickar Woden.”
The sheaf of corn, which is fastened in Norway and Denmark to the gable
of a house, is now supposed to be an offering to the birds; originally,
it was a feed for the pale horse of the death-god Woden. And now we see
the origin of the bush which is set up when a roof is completed, and
also of the floral hip-knobs of Gothic buildings. Both are relics of
the oblation affixed to the gable made to the horse of Woden,--corn,
or hay, or grass; and this is also the origin of the “palms,” poles
with bouquets at the top, erected in the Black Forest to keep off
lightning.
A little while ago the writer was at Pilsen in Bohemia, and was struck
with the gables in the great square. Each terminated in a vase of
flowers or fruit, or some floral ornament, except only the Town Hall,
which had three gables, each surmounted by spikes of iron, and spikes
stood between each gable, and each spike transfixed a ball. The floral
representations are far-away remembrances of the bunch of corn and
hay offered to Woden’s horse, but the balls on the spikes recall the
human skulls set up to his honour. That the skulls were offerings to
a god was forgotten, and those set up were the heads of criminals.
The Rath-Haus had them, not the private houses, because only the town
council had a right to execute.
Throughout the Middle Ages, among ourselves down to the end of last
century, heads of traitors and criminals were thus stuck up on spikes
over city gates, and town halls, and castles. Those executed by justice
were treated according to immemorial and heathen custom. A new meaning
was given to the loathsome exhibition. It deterred from treason and
crime. Nevertheless, our Christian mediæval rulers simply carried
out the old custom of offering the heads to Odin, by setting them up
above the gables. Skulls and decaying heads came to be so thoroughly
regarded as a part--an integral ornament of a gate or a gable--that
when architects built renaissance houses and gateways, they set up
stone balls on them as substitutes for the heads which were no more
available. A lord with power of life and death put heads over his
gate; it was the sign that he enjoyed capital rights. The stone balls
on lodge gates are their lineal descendants. Some manors were without
capital jurisdiction, and the lords of these had no right to set up
heads, or sham heads, or stone balls. If they did so they were like
the modern _parvenu_ who assumes armorial bearings to which he has no
heraldic right.
When the writer was a boy, he lived for some years in a town of the
south of France, where was a house that had been built by one of the
executioners in the Reign of Terror. This man had adorned the pediment
of his house with stone balls, and the popular belief was that each
ball represented a human head that he had guillotined. Whether it
was so or not, we cannot say. It was, perhaps, an unfounded belief,
but the people were right in holding that the stone balls used as
architectural adornments were the representatives of human heads.
[Illustration: _Fig. 9._--RIDGE-TILE, TOTNES.]
In the Pilsen market-place, it was remarkable that only the Town Hall
had balls on it, and balls in the place where there had previously been
spiked heads. No private citizen ventured to assume the cognisance of
right of life and death.
At Chartres all the pinnacles of the cathedral are surmounted by carved
human heads.
In the farmhouse of Tresmarrow in Cornwall, in a niche, is preserved a
human skull. _Why_ it is there, no one knows. It has been several times
buried, but, whenever buried, noises ensue which disturb the household,
and the skull is disinterred and replaced in its niche. Formerly it
occupied the gable head.
As already said, these heads were regarded as oracular. In one of
Grimm’s “Folk-Tales” a King marries a chamber-maid by mistake for her
mistress, a princess, who is obliged to keep geese. The princess’s
horse is killed, and its head set up over the city gate. When the
princess drives her geese out of the town she addresses the head, and
the head answers and counsels her. So in Norse mythology Odin had a
human head embalmed, and had recourse to it for advice when in any
doubt. In the tale of the Greek King and Douban, the Physician, in the
Arabian Nights’ Tales, the physician’s head, when he is decapitated, is
set on a vase, where it rebukes the King. Friar Bacon’s brazen head
whereby he conjured is a reminiscence of these oracular heads.
[Illustration: _Fig. 10._--RIDGE-TILE, TOTNES.]
In one of the Icelandic Sagas, the gable ends whistle in the wind, and
give oracles according to the tone or manner in which they pipe.
The busts that occupy niches in Italian buildings are far-off
remembrances of the real human heads which adorned the fronts of the
wigwams of our savage ancestors. So, also, as already said, are the
head corbels of Norman buildings.
On old Devonshire houses, the first ridge-tile on the main gable was
very commonly moulded to represent a horse and his rider. The popular
explanation is that these tiles were put up over the houses where
Charles I. slept; but this is a mistake; they are found where Charles
I. never was.
At one time they were pretty common. Now some remain, but only a few,
at Plymouth, Exeter, Totnes, Tavistock, and at East Looe, and Padstow,
in Cornwall. One at Truro represents a horse bearing skins on the
back, and is so contrived as to whistle in the wind. None are earlier
than the seventeenth century, yet they certainly take the place of more
ancient figures, and they carry us back in thought to the period when
the horse or horse-head was the ornament proper to every gable. These
little tile-horses and men are of divine ancestry. They trace back to
Wuotan and his hell-horse.[11]
The historical existence of the leaders Hengest and Horsa, who led the
Anglo-Saxons to the conquest of Britain, has long been disputed. There
probably never were such personages. What is more likely is that they
were the horse-headed beams of the chief’s house of the invading tribe.
Both names indicate horses. When the Norsemen moved their quarters,
they took the main beams of their dwellings with them, and they took
omens from these beams, when they warped or whistled in wet and wind.
The first settlers in Iceland threw their house-beams into the sea off
Norway, and colonised at the spot where they were washed ashore on the
black volcanic sands of Iceland.
[Illustration: _Fig. 11._--RIDGE-TILE, WEST LOOE.]
The white horse in the arms of Kent, the white horse on the Hanovarian
coat, the white horses on the chalk downs throughout Wessex, have all
reference to Woden and his grey hell-horse. The greatest respect
was paid to the main principals of the roof with their horse-heads.
We can understand how that when the old house in the market-place at
Cologne was rebuilt, the old heads were retained; and when the original
skulls decayed, they were replaced with painted wooden imitations;
just as in the Norman churches the skull-like corbels of stone, and in
Gothic churches the monstrous gaping gurgoyles, and on our Elizabethan
mansions the stone balls, also the figure-heads on ships, all trace
back to real heads of sacrificed beasts and men.
In 1877 it was found necessary to pull down the spire terminating the
bell-turret surmounting the western gable of St. Cuthbert’s Church,
Elsdon, Northumberland. In the spire, immediately over the bell, was
discovered a small chamber, without any opening to it, and within this,
nearly filling the cavity, were three horse-heads, or rather skulls,
piled in a triangular form, the jaws uppermost. The receptacle had
been made for them with some care, and then they had been walled up in
it.[12]
[Illustration: _Fig. 12._--RIDGE-TILE, EXETER.]
On the tower of the Church of Sorau in Lusatia are two heads, one is
that of a woman, the other that of a horse. The story told to account
for them is this. A girl was drawing water at the fountain in the
market-place, when a horse, filled with madness, rushed at her. She
fled round the market-place pursued by the horse, which was gaining on
her, when, seeing the door into the tower open, she ran in, and up the
winding stair. Arrived at the top, she stopped to breathe, when, to
her dismay, she heard the clatter of the horse’s hoofs on the steps;
the creature was pursuing her up the tower. In her terror she leaped
from the bell window, and the horse leaped after her. Both were dashed
to pieces on the pavement. The heads were set up on stone as a memorial
of the event.
In 1429 the town of Budissin was besieged by the Hussites. The town
notary, Peter Prichwitz, promised to open the gates to the investing
forces, but his treachery was discovered in time, and the traitor was
executed on December 6th, in the market-place, and when he had been
drawn and quartered, his quarters were set up over the bastions, and
his head carved in stone above the city gate, and this remains to the
present day.
Here we have two instances, and many more could be adduced, of these
carved heads being made to represent the heads of certain persons who
have died violent deaths.
The first instance is peculiarly interesting. The story, however,
as little explains the figures as does that of Richmod of Adocht at
Cologne. There is a great deal of evidence to show that till a late
period, when a lofty tower or spire was erected, human or animal
victims were cast from the top, to ensure the erection from being
struck by lightning. The woman and the horse at Sorau had been thus
offered. We know that this was a mode of sacrifice to Odin. Victims to
him were flung down precipices.
In North Germany, at the close of the last century, on St. James’s day,
it was customary to throw a goat with gilt horns and adorned with
ribbons from the top of a church or town hall tower. At Ypres, on the
second Wednesday in Lent, cats were flung down from the tower. Abraham
à Santa Clara says that three illustrious Italian families, those of
Torelli, Pieschi, and Gonzaga, have white ladies who appear before
death; these are the spirits of three damsels who were falsely accused
of incontinence, and were precipitated from the topmost battlements
of the towers belonging to these three families. Now it is clear that
Abraham à Santa Clara has got his story wrong. The coincidence would be
extraordinary in all three families. The real explanation is, that when
the several castles of these families were erected, from the highest
tower of each a virgin was cast down as a superstitious insurance
against lightning, actually--though this was forgotten--because from
immemorial times such a sacrifice had been offered.
[Illustration: _Fig. 13._--TOP OF SPIRE, ASSIER.]
In 1514 the spire of the Cathedral Church of Copenhagen was erected. A
carpenter’s assistant had an altercation with his master, as to which
had the steadiest brain. Then the master ran a beam out from the top of
the tower, took an axe in his hand, walked out on the beam, and struck
the axe into the end of it. “There,” said he to his man, on his return,
“go out and recover the axe.”
The assistant instantly obeyed. He walked out; but when he was stooping
to take hold of the axe it seemed to him that it was double. Then he
asked, “Master, _which_ of them?”
The master saw that he had lost his head, and that it was all up with
the man, so he said, “God be with your soul!” At the same moment the
man fell, and was dashed to pieces in the market-place at the foot of
the tower.
It is possible that this may be the true version of the story; but it
is much more likely that the man was flung down by his master, with
deliberate purpose, to secure by his death the stability of the spire
he had erected.
A very similar story is told of the tower of Assier Church in the
Department of Lot. This singular renaissance church was erected by
Galiot de Ginouillac, Grand Master of Artillery under Francis I. On
the roof of the central tower are three wooden pinnacles. The story
goes that De Ginouillac ascended with his son to the top of the tower,
and bade the boy affix the cross. The lad walked along the ledge and
exclaimed, “Father, which of the pinnacles is in the middle?” When
the father heard that, he knew his son had lost his head. Next moment
the boy fell and was dashed to pieces. Popular superstition held that
so high a tower, with so steep a roof, must be consecrated by the
sacrifice of a life.
Countless stories remain concerning spires and towers indicating
similar tragedies; but we are not further concerned with them than
to point out that the heads carved on towers may, and in some cases
certainly do, refer to a life sacrificed to secure the tower’s
stability.
An ancestor of the writer in the seventeenth century visited China,
and brought home a puzzle which became an heirloom in the family.
The puzzle, fast locked, remains; but the secret how to open it is
forgotten. Many a puzzling custom and usage comes down to us from the
remote past; the clue to interpret it has been lost, and wrong keys
have been applied to unlock the mystery, but the patience and research
of the comparative mythologist and the ethnologist are bringing about
their results, and one by one the secrets are discovered and the locks
fly open.
III.
Ovens.
When Tristram and Ysonde were driven from the Court of Mark, King
of Cornwall, they fled to a forest of “holts and hills,” and there
found and inhabited an “erthe house” which “etenes, bi old dayse had
wrought;” that is to say, a house constructed by the giants of old.
King Mark came that way one day when hunting, and looking in saw Ysonde
asleep, with a patch of sunlight about to fall on her closed eyes
through the tiny orifice which alone served as chimney and window to
the “erthe house;” and, very considerately, he stuffed his glove into
the hole, so as to prevent her sleep being broken.[13]
That earth house built by the vanished race of the giants was, there
can be little question, a bee-hive hut such as are to be found over
the Cornish moors. When Thomas of Erceldoune wrote in the thirteenth
century, the origin of these bee-hive huts was already lost in fable.
Of these bee-hive huts there remain thousands--nay, tens of
thousands--in more or less ruinous condition, on the Cornish moors and
on Dartmoor. They are found also in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. The
structure of the bee-hive hut is this:--
A circle was described in the grass, in diameter from 6 feet to 9
feet. Then a second circle, concentric, 3 feet beyond the first,
that is to say, with a diameter 12 feet to 15 feet. Stones were set
up on end in the ground where these circles had been described, and
walls of horizontal slabs were laid between and on these uprights,
their interstices filled in with moss and turf. After the walls had
been carried to the height of four feet, the horizontal courses were
drawn together inwards, so as to form a dome of overlapping slabs,
and in the centre an opening was left to admit light and to serve as
a smoke-hole, but sufficiently small to be easily closed with a stone
or a wad of turf. On the south side of this bee-hive habitation a door
was contrived by planting two jambs in the soil at right angles to the
walls, standing about 2 feet 6 inches high, and placing over these a
broad flat slab as lintel, on which the structure of the dome could be
continued, and could rest.
There are several of these huts still in existence as perfect as when
first made. One is on the Erme on Dartmoor; it is almost buried in
heather, and might be passed without observation as a mere mound. The
door remains, and it will serve the pedestrian, as it has served many
a shepherd, as a place of refuge from a shower. There are three or
four under and on Brown Willy, the highest peak of the Cornish moors.
Connected with one of these is a smaller hut of similar structure that
served apparently as a store chamber.
Comparatively few are perfect. The vast majority have fallen in. All
were not originally domed over with stones, some--the majority--were
roofed over by planting sticks in the walls and gathering them together
in the centre, and then thatching them with reed, or packing turf round
the beams. This we judge from the ruins. Some give evidence of having
been domed, by the amount of stone that has fallen within the circle of
the foundations; others, on the other hand, are deep in turf and peat,
and show no fallen stones within the ring.
[Illustration: _Fig. 14._--GRIMSPOUND, DARTMOOR.]
Very often clusters of these circular hovels are enclosed within a
circular wall of defence. The villages were, in a word, defended
against assault. At Grimspound on Dartmoor is such a walled village.
The pound contains four acres; a stream is ingeniously diverted from
its course and brought within the enclosure. There remain the ruins of
about twenty-five huts, but there are scattered heaps that indicate the
former existence of other habitations which have been destroyed. Near
Post Bridge, in the heart of Dartmoor, are the remains of something
like fourteen village enclosures, whereof one contains about forty of
these huts.[14] An account of a very numerous and remarkable group
within fortifications, near Holyhead, was published by the Hon. W. O.
Stanley in 1871. He explored the settlement with the spade.
Who inhabited these bee-hive huts? Certainly the tin-workers. Mr.
Stanley satisfied himself that the dwellers in the bee-hive huts of
Holyhead were metal-workers. He found their tools, fused metal, and
scoria. The villages in Cornwall and on Dartmoor have unaccountably
been left unexplored, but there is some evidence to show that they were
occupied by those who “streamed” for tin.
It is remarkable how folk-tradition has preserved some reminiscence
of a large and of a small race as existing in Northern Europe before
the Keltic wave, and also before the Scandinavian wave rolled west.
The smallest race is generally associated in tradition with the rude
stone monuments. The dolmens are _cabannes des fees_, or caves of
dwarfs; whereas the giants are spoken of as inhabiting natural caverns.
The early mythical sagas of the Norse are full of such mention, and
the pedigrees give us evidence of the intermarriage between the
newly-arrived Scandinavians and the people they found in the land
before them. It is certainly a remarkable coincidence that the cave
men, as revealed to us by the skeletons of the Vézère, of Solutrè,
and Mentone, should have been men of about seven feet high. When the
Cymri and Gaels invaded our isles, a population of blended blood was
subjugated, and became vassal to the Kelt, worked for it in the mines,
and tended the flocks on the wolds, and the swine in the oak woods for
the new masters. The Kelt knew the use of iron. He had not come from
the East in quite the same way as the people of rude stone monuments.
He came along the shores of the Black Sea, passed up the Danube, and,
crossing the Rhine, poured over the Jura and the Vosges into the plains
of Gaul. He met the stone monument builder at the head waters of the
Seine, and drove him back; he stopped his passage of the Rhine; and it
is possible that it was this arrest which forced the polished-stone man
to cross the Pyrenees and people the Iberian peninsula.
[Illustration: _Fig. 15._--BEE-HIVE HUT, FENNACRE, CORNWALL.]
We have strayed from our subject--the bee-hive hut. On no part of
Dartmoor have the miners worked so vigorously and so continuously as
on the East Webber, at Vitifer. Here, on a slope, is to be found a
collection of bee-hive hut foundations. The ground below, above, and
along one side has been turned up to the depth of fourteen to twenty
feet; but the tin searchers have avoided the little settlement,
leaving the huts on a sort of peninsula of unworked gravel, a clear
evidence that the workers were those who occupied these huts. When we
come to the date of these habitations we are unable to arrive at any
very satisfactory conclusion. Some of these settlements certainly date
back from the age of the rude stone monument builders, and to that of
the polished stone weapons.