_COMPARATIVE NOTES._
1.
Belief in the appearance of the Skriker, Trash, or Padfoot, as the
apparition is named in Lancashire, or Padfooit, as it is designated in
Yorkshire, is still very prevalent in certain parts of the two
counties. This boggart is invariably looked upon as the forerunner of
death, and it is supposed that only the relatives of persons about to
die, or the unfortunate doomed persons themselves, ever see the
apparition.
Of quite a distinct class to that of the 'Skrikin' Woman,' an
appearance which, at a but recent period, obtained for a lane at
Warrington the reputation of being haunted, the Padfoot seems to be
peculiar to Lancashire and Yorkshire, unless, indeed, the Welsh
Gwyllgi or Dog of Darkness, and the Shock of the Norfolk seaboard, are
of the same family. In Norfolk, the spectre, as it does in Lancashire,
portends death, but I have been unable to find any Welsh story of the
apparition with a more tragic ending than fright and illness.
As the Trash generally takes the form of a large shaggy dog or small
bear, can the superstition be an offshoot from that old Aryan belief
which gave so important an office to the dog as a messenger from the
world of the dead, and an attendant upon the dying, or has the grim
idea come down to us from the ancient times, when, as the Rev. S.
Baring Gould says, 'It was the custom to bury a dog or a boar alive
under the corner-stone of a church, that its ghost might haunt the
neighbourhood, and drive off any who would profane it--_i.e._ witches
or warlocks'?
2.
In most of these stories of compacts with the Evil One it is singular
how little is received in exchange for the soul. In a few instances
poverty bargains for untold wealth, or ugliness and age for youth and
loveliness, but generally it is for the bare means of prolonging or
supporting life that the daring and despairing one enters into the
everlasting agreement. In fact, as a French authoress has said, it is
'for a mouthful of bread to nourish their debilitated stomachs, and
the bundle of sticks which warms again their benumbed limbs.' In
Sussex it would appear, from what a country-lad told the Rev. S.
Baring Gould, that half-a-crown is the price Satan pays for a soul,--a
letter addressed to the Evil One, and containing an offer of the soul,
bringing a response in that practical form, if placed under the pillow
at night.
In Normandy it is considered sufficient to make the compact binding
for the acceptance to be simply a verbal one; but in Lancashire the
formal parchment deed, with its signatures in blood, is indispensable.
3.
Old Isaac, it would seem, was not disappointed when he came to make
use of his handful of money, and probably, therefore, he had spent it
before he told the story, for in all instances where the fairies are
recorded as rewarding mortals with money, any revelation as to its
source is invariably followed by the gift being turned to bits of
paper or leaves.
4.
Although there appears to have been some little confusion in the mind
of the old farmer as to the rank in the world of faerie held by his
little benefactor, he seems to have designated him correctly, for
although the general idea of Puck is that of a mere mischief-loving
and mischief-working sprite, such as is painted by Drayton, Shakspere
credits Puck not only with wanton playfulness, but also with industry,
for in the second act of the 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' the fairy,
addressing the sprite, says:
'Those that hobgoblin call you, and sweet Puck,
_You do their work_.'
Shakspere and Ben Jonson, however, agree in making Oberon King of the
Fairies--a king, too, with a stately presence, and far above showing
an interest in a farmer's fields. Under any circumstances one is not
prepared to find Puck of royal estate, and doubtless the labouring
spirit of our story was simply one of those goblins who, according to
the author of the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, would 'grind corn for a
mess of milk, cut wood, or do any manner of nursery work'--a Robin
Goodfellow merely, the 'lubber fiend' of Milton, the Bwbach or
household fairy of Wales. Lancashire had many such. Stories of beings
rejoicing in the name of Hobthrust or Throbthrush, but in all other
respects closely resembling the fairy king of the foregoing tradition,
still are told by the farm-house fires in Furness, in South-East
Lancashire, and in the Fylde country. Rewarded night after night with
a supply of oatmeal porridge--strange relic, probably, of the old
libations to the gods--they toiled at the churn till daybreak. A
Furness legend chronicles how a farmer, whose house was the favourite
resting-place of one of these visitors, one evening, when threatening
clouds were gathering, wished that he had the harvest carted. Next
morning the work was found done, but a horse was found dead in the
stable, Hob having been unsparing. As the day was a beautiful one, the
farmer did not appreciate the housing as he ought to have done, and
testily wished that Hob was in the mill-dam. A few hours afterwards,
not Hob, but the grain was found there.
'Crawshaws in Berwickshire,' says the author of the _Popular Rhymes of
Berwickshire_, 'was once the abode of an industrious Brownie, who both
saved the corn and thrashed it for several seasons. At length, after
one harvest, some person thoughtlessly remarked that the corn was not
well mowed or piled up in the barn. The sprite took offence at this,
and the next night threw the whole of the corn over the Raven Crag, a
precipice about two miles off, muttering--
"It's no weel mowed! It's no weel mowed!
Then it's ne'er be mowed by me again.
I'll scatter it o'er the Raven stone,
And they'll hae some wark ere it's mowed again."'
The North Lancashire Hobthrusts, however, do not seem to have been
made to disappear by man's ingratitude, but, like the Irish Cluricaun
and the Scotch Brownie, were to be driven away by kindness. In one
instance, a tailor, for whom a Hobthrust had done some work,
gratefully made him a coat and hood for winter wear, and in the night
the workman was heard bidding farewell to his old quarters--
'Throb-thrush has got a new coat and new hood,
And he'll never do no more good.'
Readers of the Brothers Grimm and lovers of George Cruikshank will not
need to be reminded how the grateful shoemaker deprived himself of the
assistance of the elves. In the German story, however, as in Breton
ones, although the elves depart, prosperity continues to bless the
labours of the people whose practical gratitude has driven the little
beings away.
The Hob which, according to Harrison Ainsworth, haunted the Gorge of
Cliviger, does not appear to have been at all domesticated, the
novelist, in the only allusion he makes to it, characterising it as 'a
frightful hirsute demon, yclept Hobthrust.' In the Fylde country,
however, the lubber fiends seem to have been as industrious as was
that of our legend. Tradition tells of one at Rayscar which not only
housed the grain but also got the horses ready for the journey to the
distant market. At Hackensall Hall one took the Celtic form of a great
horse, and required only a pie in reward for its toil.
The Hobs of the neighbouring county of Yorkshire are credited with
greater powers than those required for the rapid performance of
household duties. One of these beings is still said to haunt a cave in
the vicinity of the old-world hamlet of Runswick. To this place
anxious and superstitious mothers brought their ailing little ones,
and as they stood at the mouth of the cavity, cried, 'Hob, my bairn's
gettent kinkcough (whooping-cough?), takkt off, takkt off!' In the
same district there is a haunted tumulus called 'Obtrash Roque,'
rendered by Walcott 'the Heap of Hob-o'-the-Hurst.' Of the bogle
denizen of this mound a story similar to that told by Mr. Crofton
Croker, in Roby's _Traditions (Clegg Hall Boggart)_, is current in the
district. A farmer who was bothered by the spirit, determined to
remove to a quieter locality, and as the carts were leaving with the
goods and implements a neighbour cried out, 'It's flittin yo' are,'
when the Hob at once replied, from a churn, 'Ay, we're flitting;' upon
which the farmer thought he might as well remain where he was. Similar
flitting stories, however, are told of the Scandinavian _Nis_, the
Irish _Cluricaun_, the Welsh _Bwbach_, and the Polish _Ickrzycki_.
5.
Why the expression of a wish like this should have offended Puck is
not very evident. There is in Sweden a lubber fiend named the _Tomte_,
and of this being the peasantry believe that only by unrewarded toil
can it work out its salvation. Can the Lancashire King of the Fairies
have been one of the same order, and have considered the utterance of
a good wish as a reward, or even as a sarcastic allusion to his 'lost
condition'?
The belief is by no means uncommon that the fairies are the angels who
were neutral during the Satanic rebellion. In Brittany, however
(_Chants Populaires de la Bretagne_, par Th. Hersart de la
Villemarque), they are the Princesses who, in the days of the
Apostles, would not embrace Christianity.
The traditions of most countries agree, however, in attributing to
the fairies extreme sensitiveness on the subject of their condition.
Mr. Campbell has recorded that when the elves, who had grown weary of
crossing the Dornoch Frith in cockle-shells, were engaged in building
a bridge of gold across its mouth, a passer-by lifted his hands and
blessed the tiny workmen, who immediately vanished, the bridge sinking
with them beneath the waves, and its place being at once taken by
quicksands. Almost every district haunted by 'greenies' or 'hill folk'
has its story of a piteous appeal on the subject of their future state
made by visible or invisible fairies. In a Highland story it is an old
man reading the Bible who is accosted, the inquirer screaming and
plunging into the sea upon being answered that the sacred pages did
not contain any allusion to the salvation of any but the sons of Adam.
My friend, Mr. Kennedy, in his valuable _Legendary Fictions of the
Irish Celts_, gives a charming traditionary story of a priest who was
benighted and lost upon a moor, and who was similarly accosted, and
implored to declare that at the last day the lot of the fairies would
not be with Satan. After the appeal had been somewhat ambiguously
answered, 'a weak light was shed around where he stood, and he
distinguished the path and an opening in the fence.'
In Cornwall they are supposed to be the spirits of the people who
inhabited the country long before the birth of Christ, and who,
although not good enough to partake of the joys of Heaven, yet are too
good for Hell. In Wales there is a somewhat similar belief, but it is
said that their probation will end at the day of judgment, when they
will be admitted to Paradise. It is commonly believed by the Cornish
peasants that they are gradually growing smaller, and that at length
they will change into ants. Few people in Cornwall, therefore, are
sufficiently venturesome to destroy a colony of those insects.
6.
Many are the old sacred piles in Lancashire with the building of which
it is believed that goblins had something to do. The parish church of
Rochdale, the old church of Samlesbury, that of St. Oswald's at
Winwick, near Warrington, and the parish church of Burnley, may be
instanced as a few of those which are popularly supposed to have been
interfered with by superhuman labourers. At Rochdale the unexpected
workpeople took the form of 'strange-looking men;' in other cases, as
in those of Winwick and Burnley, pigs removed the materials, it being
traditional that their cry of 'we-week' gave its name to the former
place; while at Newchurch, in Rossendale, although the interloping
builders were invisible, a little old woman with a bottle was not only
seen, but was fraternised with by the thirsty watchers who had been
appointed to guard the foundations. Similar stories of changed site
are told of numerous churches throughout Britain. The legend of
Gadshill church, near Ventnor, like that of Hinderwell, Yorkshire,
attributes the removal of the foundations to supernatural means, the
stones having hopped after each other from their original place at the
foot of the hill to that in which they were afterwards found, the
shins of the watchers having been 'barked' in the most unceremonious
manner by certain little blocks of somewhat erratic tendencies. It is,
however, by no means improbable that at Gadshill, as at Rochdale, the
fact of the building having been erected in a position so difficult of
access, and so trying to aged and infirm parishioners, may have caused
a testy and irreverent, and perhaps asthmatic, worshipper to invent
the Satanic theory. In one case, that of Bredon, in Leicestershire,
the objectors appear to have taken the form of doves. Loth as one may
be to think harm of such sweet messengers, Mr. Kennedy, after telling
the story of the building of the cathedral of Ardfert, in Kerry, by
St. Brendain, and the trouble caused by a large crow, which took the
measuring line in its bill and flew across the valley with it, adds,
'The bird was a fairy in disguise. If the messenger had been _from
another quarter_, he would have made his appearance under snowy
plumes.'[B]
[B] The foundations of the priory church of Christchurch, Hampshire,
were, tradition says, removed by unseen hands, down from the lonely
St. Catherine's Hill to the present site in the valley. The beams and
rafters, too short on the hill, were too long in the vale. In the
valley, too, an extra workman, Christ, always came on the pay-night.
7.
This work of art was one of the gargoyles of the old building, and was
purchased by Mr. Ffarington, the father of the present lady of the
manor, when the church was rebuilt. It bore the name of 'the Cat
Stone.'
Another version of this tradition, of but limited circulation, and
little known even in the immediate locality, credits an angel with the
removal of the foundations and with the utterance of the following
anything but angelic strain:--
Here I have placed thee,
And here shalt thou stand;
And thou shalt be called
The church of Leyland!
8.
This legend appears to have had a Teutonic origin. Mr. Kelly, in his
chapter on the 'Wild Hunt,' quotes a somewhat similar story from a
German source: 'The wild huntsman's hounds can talk like men. A
peasant caught one of them, a little one, and hid it in his pack. Up
came the wild huntsman and missed it. "Where are you, Waldmann?" he
cried. "In Heineguggeli's sack," was the answer.'
9.
'The passing bell,' says Harland, 'according to Grose, was anciently
rung for two purposes, one to bespeak the prayers of all good
Christians for a soul just departing, the other to drive away the evil
spirits who stood at the bed's foot ready to seize their prey, or at
least to molest and terrify the soul on its passage.'
Mr. Sikes says that in Wales, before the Reformation, 'there was kept
in all Welsh churches, a handbell which was taken by the Sexton to the
house where a funeral was to be held, and rung at the head of the
procession,' and that 'the custom survived long after the Reformation
in many places, as at Caerleon, the little Monmouthshire village,
which was a bustling Roman city when London was a hamlet. The bell,
called the _bangu_, was still preserved in the parish of Llanfair
Duffryn Clwyd half a dozen years ago.'
The bell might now with greater propriety be called the _passed_ bell,
as it is tolled only after a death, the ringing concluding with a
number of distinct knells to announce the years and sex of the
deceased, which the authority alluded to above considers 'a vestige of
an ancient Roman Catholic injunction.' Until a comparatively recent
period it was customary at Walton-le-Dale, Lancashire, to inter
Protestants in the afternoon, a bell being tolled at intervals prior
to the funeral; Catholics, however, were buried in the evening, a full
peal being rung upon the bells immediately before the procession
started.
Mr. Thornber, writing in 1844, says that at the beginning of this
century, at Poulton, the more respectable portion of the inhabitants
were buried by candle-light, and that it was considered a sacred duty
to expose a lighted candle in the windows of every house as the corpse
was carried through the streets. He speaks of the custom as a mark of
respect to the dead, but possibly there was something more than this
in it. In Ireland even to-day it is usual to leave lighted candles in
the room where a corpse is laid out.
This belief in the power of bells over not only demons and evil
spirits of every kind, but also over the elves and 'good people,'
appears to have been held in all countries ever inhabited by fairies
and hill folk. The Danish trolls are said to have been driven out of
the country by the hanging of bells in the churches, the noise
reminding them forcibly of the time when Thor used to fling his hammer
after them. It is recorded in a bit of local doggrel from the pen of a
dead and forgotten rhymester, that the fairies remained at
Saddleworth, on the confines of Lancashire and Yorkshire, until
'The steeple rose,
And bells began to play;'
when the Queen wandered away to the wild district
'Where Todmore's kingdom lay;'
and the less important plebeians of fairy land 'dispersed, went.' Mr.
Henderson says that 'at Horbury, near Wakefield, and at Dewsbury, on
Christmas Eve, is rung the "devil's knell," a hundred strokes, then a
pause, then three strokes, three strokes, and three strokes again.'
In Iceland it is believed that at daybreak or upon the ringing of a
bell the trolls flee.
10.
Fairy funerals, according to tradition, have been seen in other
counties beside Lancashire, for an old Welsh writer alludes to such
sights as having been witnessed in his day. Mr. Wirt Sikes, in his
_British Goblins_, a recent and most valuable contribution to the folk
lore and mythology of South Wales, says that the bell of Blaenporth,
Cardiganshire, was noted for tolling thrice at midnight, unrung by
human hands, to foretell death, and that when the 'Tolaeth before the
burying,' the sound of an unseen funeral-procession passing by, is
heard, the voices sing the 'Old Hundredth,' and the tramping of feet
and the sobbing and groaning of mourners can be heard. In Normandy,
says P. Le Fillastre, _Annuaire de la Manche_, 1832, the large white
coffins, _les bieres_, which the belated voyager sees along the roads,
or placed on the churchyard fences, are unaccompanied by either
bearers or mourners, and the cemetery bell is silent.
Readers of Professor Hunt's volumes of Cornish Drolls and Romances
will remember the beautiful legend of the fisherman who, gazing by
night through the window of a lonely church, saw a procession passing
along the aisle, and witnessed the interment, near the sacramental
table, of the fairy queen. The only point of resemblance, however,
between the Southern and Northern traditions is to be found in the
solemn tolling of the church-bell. The Cornish story is unique in one
respect, inasmuch as, although we have plenty of legends in which the
fairies evince a desire to peer into their future state, and even some
in which their deaths are alluded to, it is extremely rare to find one
in which the burial of a fairy is narrated; and this fact would seem
to point to a defect in the 'Finn theory,' so plausibly advocated by
Mr. Campbell; for, surely, if once upon a time 'the fairies were a
real people, like the Lapps,' tradition would not be so silent, as it
almost universally is, with reference to the outward and visible signs
of their mortality.[C]
[C] Only since these notes were in type have I seen the excellent
paper from the pen of Mr. Grant Allen (_Cornhill Magazine_, March
1881), on the Genesis of the Myth of the Fairies. See also the same
charming writer's _Vignettes from Nature_, p. 206, and papers by B.
Melle and F. A. Allen, in _Science Gossip_ for 1866, 'The Track of the
Pigmies.'
11.
My friend, Mr. W. E. A. Axon, in his interesting _Black Knight of
Ashton_, tells a story of a 'Race with the Devil,' the hero of which
was one of a party of _pace-eggers_, who, waking up after a doze by a
farm-house fire, beside which the party had been permitted to sleep on
a wild night, and, feeling cold, had put on his Beelzebub dress, to
the terror of another member of the company, who awoke afterwards, and
seeing, as he supposed, the Devil seated airing himself by the fire,
fled into the darkness and the storm, his equally terrified companions
following him, and the no-less-frightened Beelzebub bringing up the
rear.
The Mid and South Lancashire stories, as will at once be seen, do not
resemble each other in any way, however; and I refer to Mr. Axon's
legend for the sake of directing my readers' attention to a valuable
note appended to it, in which Mr. Axon points out that there is a
similar old Hindoo story of such a chase, which was translated from
the Sanscrit into Chinese not later than the year 800.
It seems hardly probable that the Lancashire pace-egging story, so
exquisitely narrated by my friend, could have had an Aryan origin, yet
the resemblance is a striking and remarkable one.
12.
Many are the traditions of submerged bells told along the Lancashire
coast. 'Here,' says the Rev. W. Thornber in the scarce _History of
Blackpool_ (1844), 'or out at sea opposite this spot, once stood the
cemetery of Kilgrimol, mentioned in the above-quoted chapter of the
Priory of Lytham. Of this fact, tradition is not silent, and the
rustic who dwells in the neighbourhood relates tales of fearful
sights, and how many a benighted wanderer has been terrified with the
sounds of bells pealing dismal chimes.' In Wales, too, the
superstition is a common one. It is by no means improbable that there
may be more in these faint whispers than would at first appear, and
that underneath these dim traditions of churches swallowed by the sea
there may rest a faint stratum of the old Scandinavian superstition
that sweet singing and beautiful music could be heard by any who stood
to listen on an Elf hill; for, although the idea of submerged cities
may be found floating in the lore of all Celtic peoples, and in some
places the submersion is a matter even of history,[D] in others, as at
Kilgrimol, it is doubtful whether the sounds come from the sea or the
earth. It is, therefore, more than likely that the traditions of
submersion have received the addition of pealing bells from natural
causes. There is an Indian superstition which in another way
illustrates this theory. Manitobah Lake, in the Red River region,
derives its name from a small island, upon which is heard, whenever
the gales blow from the north, a sound resembling the pealing of
distant church-bells, and which is caused by the waves beating on the
shore at the foot of the cliffs and the rubbing of the fallen
fragments against each other. This island the Ojibeways suppose to be
the home of Manitobah, 'the speaking god,' and upon it they dare not
land.
[D] _Vide_ Lyell's _Principles of Geology_, Chapter on _Encroachments
of the Sea_, for many instances of submerged villages and churches
along the English coast.
There is in Normandy a singular tradition of a submerged bell, dating
back to the time of the English occupation, along with others of
buried and hidden treasure. It is said that, as the English soldiers
were abandoning the country, they destroyed the abbey of Corneville,
and were taking away with them the principal bell, when the barge
capsized. As they were trying to recover the prize, the French came
upon them, and they were obliged to hurry away, leaving the bell
behind. Since that time, whenever the bells of the churches in the
district ring out their joyous peals upon solemn festival days, the
submerged bell also can be heard joining in the carillon. (_Essai sur
l'arrondissement de Pont-Audemer_.)
A story somewhat similar to this is told of a bell from St. David's,
Pembrokeshire, carried off by Cromwellian troops whose vessel
afterwards was wrecked in Ramsay Sound, from the moving waters of
which the pealing can be heard when a storm is rising.
13.
For the sake of those who are not 'native and to the manner born,'
Roger's story is not given in his vernacular, a mixture of the
Mid-Lancashire and the Furness dialects, trying even to those who are
acquainted with the expressive Doric of other parts of the County
Palatine.
14.
Mr. Henderson, in his _Notes on the Folk Lore of the Northern Counties
of England and the Borders_, states that Mr. Wilkie maintains that the
_Digitalis purpurea_ was in high favour with the witches, who used to
decorate their fingers with its largest bells; hence called Witches'
Thimbles. Mr. Hartley Coleridge has more pleasing associations with
this gay wild-flower. He writes of 'the fays