'Art thow i-wont at lychwake
Any playes for to make?'
John Myrc's _Instructions for Parish Priests_ (circa 1450).
Aubrey's version of _The Lyke-Wake Dirge_ is printed, more or less
correctly, in the following places:--
i. Brand. _Observations on Popular Antiquities_, ed. Ellis (1813), ii.
180-81. (Not in first edition of Brand.)
ii. W. J. Thoms. _Anecdotes and Traditions_, Camden Society, 1839, pp.
88-90, and notes pp. 90-91, which are reprinted by Britten (see below).
iii. W. K. Kelly. _Curiosities of Indo-European Tradition and Folklore_,
1863, pp. 116-17.
iv. Edward Peacock. In notes, pp. 90-92, to John Myrc's _Instructions
for Parish Priests_, E.E.T.S., 1868. (Re-edited by F. J. Furnivall for
the E.E.T.S., 1902, where the notes are on pp. 92-94.)
v. James Britten. _Aubrey's Remains of Gentilisme and Judaisme:_ the
whole MS. edited for the Folklore Society, 1881, pp. 30-32.
Aubrey's remarks and sidenotes are as follow (Lansdowne MS. 231, fol.
114 _recto_):--
'From Mr. Mawtese, in whose father's youth, sc. about 60 yeares
since now (1686), at country vulgar Funerals, was sung this song.
'At the Funeralls in Yorkeshire, to this day, they continue the
custome of watching & sitting up all night till the body is
inhersed. In the interim some kneel down and pray (by the corps)
some play at cards some drink & take Tobacco: they have also
Mimicall playes & sports, e.g. they choose a simple young fellow to
be a Judge, then the suppliants (having first blacked their hands by
rubbing it under the bottom of the Pott) beseech his Lo:p [_i.e._
Lordship] and smutt all his face. ['They play likewise at
Hott-cockles.' --_Sidenote._] Juvenal, Satyr II.
"Esse aliquos manes, et subterranea regna,
"Et contum, & Stygio ranas in gurgite nigras,
"Atq. unâ transire vadum tot millia cymbâ.
'This beliefe in Yorkshire was amongst the vulgar (& phaps is in
part still) that after the persons death, the Soule went over Whinny
moore ['Whin is a furze.' --_Sidenote_.] and till about 1616 (1624)
at the Funerall a woman came [like a Præfica] and sung this
following Song.'
Then follow several verses scratched out, and then the Dirge, to which,
however, is prefixed the remark,
'This not ye first verse.'
As regards the doubtful reading 'sleete' for 'fleet,' there is curiously
contradictory evidence. Pennant, in his _Tour in Scotland_, MDCCLXIX.
(Chester, 1771, pp. 91-92), remarks:--
'On the death of a Highlander, the corps being stretched on a board,
and covered with a coarse linen wrapper, the friends lay on the
breast of the deceased a wooden platter, containing a small quantity
of salt and earth, separate and unmixed; the earth, an emblem of the
corruptible body; the salt, an emblem of the immortal spirit. All
fire is extinguished where a corps is kept; and it is reckoned so
ominous, for a dog or cat to pass over it, that the poor animal is
killed without mercy.
'The _Late-wake_ is a ceremony used at funerals: the evening after
the death of any person, the relations and friends of the deceased
meet at the house, attended by bagpipe or fiddle; the nearest of
kin, be it wife, son, or daughter, opens a melancholy ball, dancing
and greeting; _i.e._ crying violently at the same time; and this
continues till daylight; but with such gambols and frolicks, among
the younger part of the company, that the loss which occasioned them
is often more than supplied by the consequences of that night. If
the corps remains unburied for two nights the same rites are
renewed.'
The Rev. J. C. Atkinson, on the other hand, states the contrary
regarding the fire,--see his _Glossary of the Cleveland Dialect_ (1868),
p. 595. He supposes 'fleet' to be equivalent to the Cleveland 'flet,'
live embers. 'The usage, hardly extinct even yet in the district, was on
no account to suffer the fire in the house to go out during the entire
time the corpse lay in it, and throughout the same time a candle was (or
is yet) invariably kept burning in the same room with the corpse.'
Bishop Kennett, in Lansdowne MS. 1033, fol. 132, confirms Aubrey's gloss
of 'fleet' = water, in quoting the first verse of the dirge. He adds,
'hence the _Fleet_, _Fleet-ditch_, in _Lond._ Sax. fleod, amnis,
fluvius.'
The 'Brig o' Dread' (which is perhaps a corruption of 'the Bridge of
the Dead'), 'Whinny-moor,' and the Hell-shoon, have parallels in many
folklores. Thus, for the Brig, the Mohammedans have their _Al-Sirat_,
finer than a hair, sharper than a razor, stretched over the midst of
hell. The early Scandinavian mythology told of a bridge over the river
Giöll on the road to hell.
In Snorri's _Edda_, when Hermôdhr went to seek the soul of Baldr, he was
told by the keeper of the bridge, a maiden named Môdhgudhr, that the
bridge rang beneath no feet save his. Similarly Vergil tells us that
Charon's boat (which is also a parallel to the Brig) was almost sunk by
the weight of Æneas.
Whinny-moor is also found in Norse and German mythology. It has to be
traversed by all departed souls on their way to the realms of Hel or
Hela, the Goddess of Death. These realms were not only a place of
punishment: all who died went there, even the gods themselves taking
nine days and nights on the journey. The souls of Eskimo travel to
Torngarsuk, where perpetual summer reigns; but the way thither is five
days' slide down a precipice covered with the blood of those who have
gone before.
The passage of Whinny-moor or its equivalent is facilitated by
Hell-shoon. These are obtained by the soul in various ways: the
charitable gift of a pair of shoes during life assures the right to use
them in crossing Whinny-moor; or a pair must be burned with the corpse,
or during the wake. In one of his Dialogues, Lucian makes the wife of
Eukrates return for the slipper which they had forgotten to burn.
Another parallel, though more remote, to the Hell-shoon, is afforded by
the account of one William Staunton, who, like so many others, was
privileged to see a vision of Purgatory and of the Earthly Paradise, on
the first Friday after the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross in the
year 1409. Accounts of such experiences, it may be remarked here, were
popular from the tenth century onwards amongst the Anglo-Saxons and
English, especially after the middle of the twelfth century, when the
story of the famous 'St. Patrick's Purgatory' was first published.
William Staunton relates (Royal MS. 17 B. xliii. in the British Museum)
that in one part of Purgatory, as he went along the side of a 'water,
the which was blak and fowle to sight,' he saw on the further side a
tower, with a fair woman standing thereon, and a ladder against the
tower: but 'hit was so litille, as me thowght that it wold onnethe
[scarcely] bere ony thing; and the first rong of the ladder was so that
onnethe might my fynger reche therto, and that rong was sharper than ony
rasor.' Hearing a 'grisly noyse' coming towards him, William 'markid'
himself with a prayer, and the noise vanished, and he saw a rope let
down over the ladder from the top of the tower. And when the woman had
drawn him safely to the top, she told him that the cord was one that he
had once given to a chapman who had been robbed.
The whole subject of St. Patrick's Purgatory is extremely interesting;
but it is outside our present scope, and can best be studied in
connection with the mythology of the _Lyke-wake Dirge_ in Thomas
Wright's _St. Patrick's Purgatory_ (1844). The popularity of the story
is attested by accounts extant in some thirty-five Latin and English
MSS. in the British Museum, in the Bodleian, at Cambridge, and at
Edinburgh. Calderon wrote a drama round the myth, _El Purgatorio de San
Patricio_; Robert Southey a ballad; and an early poem of George
Wither's, lost in MS., treated of the same subject. Recently the tale
has received attention in G. P. Krapp's _Legend of St. Patrick's
Purgatory_, Baltimore, 1900.
A correspondent in _Notes and Queries_, 9th Ser., xii. 475 (December 12,
1903), remarks that the 'liche-wake' is still spoken of in the Peak
district of Derbyshire.
INDEX OF TITLES
Page
Adam 123
Allison Gross 9
A Noble Riddle Wisely Expounded 159
Baffled Knight, The 212
Bailiff's Daughter of Islington, The 202
Bonnie George Campbell 95
Bonny Bee Ho'm 100
Bonny Earl of Murray, The 92
Broomfield Hill, The 115
Brown Robyn's Confession 143
Captain Wedderburn 162
Carnal and the Crane, The 133
Cherry Tree Carol, The 129
Clerk Colven 43
Clerk Sanders 66
Clerk's Twa Sons o' Owsenford, The 56
Cospatrick 26
Dæmon Lover, The 112
Dives and Lazarus 139