“To those athirst the whole world seems
A spring of water in their dreams.”
_From the Arabic._
Being snowed up in a library, well stocked with modern scientific
folk-lore, I began a serious study of the subject. I started with
enthusiasm. I saw myself propounding a new theory for every variant
text, and pictured myself triumphantly riding through the otherworld
on the Ossianic cycle. After a few days of it, however, I found that,
wonderful as the science was, it was not made for me. I ran into a
thick German fog, I got mixed up with _sagzug_ and _märchen_, I failed
to appreciate the true differences between those holy men, Zimmer and
Rohde, and I wandered aimlessly among parallels and analogues of varying
age and _provenance_. When I emerged from the German fog I found myself
staggering about a bleak Irish moor in company with a fellow named
Cormac—or was it Finn? We were studying the _Dinnshenchas_, or playing
with an _Agallamh_ or looking for a _Leprechaun_. It was worse than
political economy, or logic, or the lost tribes. The fiscal problem is
merriment compared to folk-lore. I finished my holiday with Trollope and
have put folk-lore on my index _expurgatorius_.
One thing, however, haunts me still. I seem to have escaped from the
learned confusions of this dismal science with a belief that the world
is certainly not progressing. They took a lot of trouble at school to
persuade me that the world kept going round. Since I have dipped into
folk-lore I find this to be only part of the truth. The fact seems to
be that the world does nothing else but go round and round and round,
reiterating its old ideas in a very tiresome way indeed. The things we
do and gossip and preach about to-day are much the same as the things
they worried over in the ages of caves and mammoths and flint implements.
I feel sorry that I cannot explore folk-lore further, for there are
evidently great possibilities in it. But folk-lore is like collecting
stamps, or keeping gold-fish or guinea-pigs. It is a “fancy,” and if you
don’t fancy it you cannot be of the “fancy.” The slang of the science
is too difficult for most of us, and if you cannot master the technical
terms of a game, how can you hope to play it? Even football would be dull
if you had no elementary conception of “off-side,” and it is easier to
get “off-side” at folk-lore than it is at football. Then these scientists
are so solemn. Euclid has his pictures and occasionally admits that
things are absurd; but the smiles of folk-lore are in the otherworld, and
even their ghosts do not appear to the latter-day student.
I should never have troubled further about folk-lore had not I met one of
its greatest professors. To him I unburdened myself and told my trouble.
“Folk-lore books,” he explained, “are not made to read. They are written
to amuse the writer. You write about folk-lore—then you will begin to
enjoy it.” I remembered that Lord Foppington held similar views when he
said: “To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one’s self with the
forced product of another man’s brain. Now, I think a man of quality and
breeding may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own.” An idea
held in common by a peer and a professor must be precious indeed.
I modestly murmured that I knew nothing about folk-lore. To which the
Professor encouragingly remarked that I should “approach the subject
with an open mind.” “There is one royal road to success,” he said, as we
parted, “have a theory of your own, and whatever happens, stick to it.”
Now curiously enough, I had a theory about folk-lore. It was the
simple common idea that comes to many children even in their earliest
school-days. The schoolmasters were all wrong. The professors of
folk-lore were teaching it upside down. Instead of beginning with ancient
legends and working back towards to-day, they should begin with to-day
and march forward into the past. I wired to the Professor about it—reply
prepaid. His answer was encouraging. “Theory probably Celtic origin;
stick.”
As my business is to preside over a County Court, I went down to my work
full of my theory and determined at all costs to stick to it. I know
that to the pathologist a County Court is merely a gathering-place for
microbes, and a centre point of infection; that the reformer sees in it
only a cumbrous institution for deciding unnecessary disputes, whilst the
facile reporter comes there to wash from its social dirt a few ounces of
golden humour for his latest headline. These are but surface views. I
went there like the poet, “whose seed-field is Time,” to find folk-lore,
and I was overwhelmed.
No sooner did I enter the Court, as I had done many and many a hundred
times, than the High Bailiff, rising in his place, called out, as
he, too, had done many a hundred times, “Oh yes! Oh yes! Oh yes! All
persons having business in the Manchester County Court draw near and
give attention.” At once I knew that the place I was in belonged to the
old days of fairies and knights, and ladies and giants, and heroes and
dragons. The “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” struck my certain ear and told me I was
in the presence of folk-lore. The creeping voice of the old world came
stealing across the ages, calling upon me “Oyez!” “Hear!” and if you can
“Understand!” It seemed to bring its message with a sly chuckle as if to
say, “There you are, my modern, up-to-date, twentieth century judicial
person, beginning your day’s work with the same old cry that has called
men together to listen to official wisdom for centuries of time.”
My friend the High Bailiff has not, I am sure, the least notion that he
is, from a folk-lore point of view, a man of parallels and analogues,
or that the “fancy” would undoubtedly classify him along with that most
beautiful of human fritillaries, the Herald. For indeed, in everything
but glory of costume, he is one of those delightful figures of the middle
ages who carried challenges and messages of peace and war, and set out
the lists in jousts and tournaments, and witnessed combats and wagers of
battle—which my friend sits and watches to-day—and recorded the names
of those who did valiantly, and remembered the dead when the fight was
over—which to-day he leaves to the reporters. Here in this dingy court
in a Manchester back street students of folk lore may see a real Herald
calling out “Oyez! Oyez!” announcing that the lists are open, and that
anyone may come prancing into Court and throw down his glove—with the
post-heroic gloss of a treasury hearing fee upon it—and that if the
challenge be taken up, the fight may proceed according to the custom of
County Courts.
I would inaugurate a movement to apparel the High Bailiff in scarlet
and gold lace, and I would have him ride into Court on a white palfrey,
sounding a trumpet, but that I fear it would lead to jealousy among
Registrars. Besides, some envious German Professor will, I know, point
out that as a crier my High Bailiff is more akin to the _Praeco_ of a
Roman auction, and that the village town crier is his poor relation. The
answer to this is that his auctioneering tendencies really belong to his
bailiff cycle, as the “fancy” would say. And as a bailiff we could, did
time permit, trace him in dry-as-dust glossaries and abridgments, through
a line of sheriffs of counties, and stewards of manors, and in various
forms of governors and superintendents, until we lose sight of him as a
kind of tutor to the sons of emperors in the twilight of the gods.
Let the High Bailiff call on the first case, and say with Richard
Plantagenet, Duke of York:
This is the day appointed for the combat,
And ready are the appellant and defendant,
The armourer and his man to enter the lists;
So please your Highness to behold the fight.
It seems a real pity that we no longer follow the rubric of the Second
Part of Henry VI., and that we cannot see Horner enter with his
neighbours “bearing his staff with a sand-bag fastened to it,” on the
other side, “Peter with a drum and a sand-bag.” Horner and Peter to-day
would make a much better fight of it, thumping each other with sand-bags,
than they do “barging” at each other with tongues, and they would be
better friends afterwards. With a small charge for admission, too, and
two houses a night, the County Courts might be self-supporting.
But we have not got very far away from the wager of battle after all.
The hired champion is still with us from the house of the old Knights
Templars, but he breaks his wit against his adversary instead of a lance.
In another hundred years or so our methods of settling disputes may seem
as laughable and melodramatic to our more reasonable great grandchildren
as our grandfathers’ romantic methods seem to us. They may think that
fees paid to eminent counsel, dressed in antique shapes, to exhibit their
powers before packed galleries, according to the ancient and musty rules
of a game that is wholly out of date, is an absurd way of endeavouring to
reconcile human differences. The whole thing must before long, one would
think, tumble into the dustbin of history and become folk-lore. But the
legendary charm of the absurdity will always remain. Sir Edward Clarke
or Mr. Rufus Isaacs, appearing for an injured ballet-girl in a breach of
promise case against a faithless and wicked peer, is only a new setting
of the story of Perseus and Andromeda, with the golden addition of a
special fee. Perhaps there is even a parallel for the special fee in the
old myth, for may it not be said that in a sense Perseus was moved to
leave his usual circuit, and appear against the dragon by the tempting
special fee of Andromeda herself? Could such a glorious figure be marked
on the brief of to-day, what eloquence we should listen to.
The longer one stays in a County Court, the more does the atmosphere seem
charged with folk-lore. Sagas seem to float in the air with the soot
of our smoky chimneys, and wraiths of old customs swim in the draughty
currents of cold that whistle under our doors. No sooner does a witness
step into the box than one perceives that he too is an eternal type, and
our methods of dealing with him as everlasting as the forms of the waves.
The Greeks with all their noble ideals were a practical people, and the
exactitude of their terminology is beyond praise; with a true instinct
they described their witness as μάρτυς, a martyr. For, in the Golden Age,
and equally I take it, in the Bronze, Stone, and Flint Chip period, the
only way to stimulate your witness to truth was by blood or fire. These
rough, kind-hearted, jovial, out-of-door fellows had not considered the
superior and more subtle torture of cross-examination. The rack and the
stake were good enough for them. Yet I feel sorry for the Greeks. How an
Athenian mob would have enjoyed the intellectual entertainment of Mr.
Hawkins, Q.C., administering one of those searching cross-examinations
so lovingly described in Lord Brampton’s “Book of Martyrs.” Many others
I have heard greatly skilled in this truly gentle art, but no one who
played the game with such sporting strictness or approached his task
with such loving joy. To see a witness in his hands made one feel almost
jealous of the victim. To say this is only to say that to be a great
advocate you must also be a great sportsman. How many moderns could
handle a witness after the manner of Master Izaak Walton dealing with
his frog? “I say, put your hook, I mean the arming-wire, through his
mouth and out at his gills, and then with a fine needle and silk sew the
upper part of his leg, with only one stitch, to the arming-wire of your
hook; or tie the frog’s leg above the upper joint to the armed wire; and,
in so doing, use him as though you loved him, that is, harm him as little
as you may possibly that he may live the longer.” Alas! Lord Brampton’s
arming-wire is laid on the shelf, and the pike in his pool mourns for
Master Izaak—but what sportsmen they were. Really, when I think of the
sorrows of the human frog in the witness-box, I begin to think the hour
is coming to start a Witness Preservation Society with a paid secretary
and a London office. It would be a charity—and there is a lot of money in
charity nowadays.
Some day I will write a book the size of a Wensleydale cheese on the
folk-lore of evidence. It should be written in German, but unfortunately
I am such a bigoted Imperialist that I have patriotically avoided the
study of the tongue. It should perhaps be published in several cheeses,
and the biggest cheese should be all about the Oath. It was the flood
of folk-lore on this subject that overwhelmed me when I first began to
consider the matter.
In our County Court we administered two oaths.[1] The Scotch oath, with
uplifted hand, and the English oath, with its undesirable ceremony of
kissing the Book. The Scotch form is incomparably the older, and though
some maintain that the hand of the witness is lifted to show he has no
weapon about him, there seems no doubt that the sounder view is that
both Judge and witness are really each lifting his hand in appeal to the
Deity. In this way did the Greeks lift their hands at the altars of their
gods when they made sacrifice. In similar fashion was the oath to Wodin
administered in the Orkneys by two persons joining their hands through
the hole in the ring-stone of Stennis. So also Aaron “lifted up his hand
toward the people.” And it is no stretch of imagination to suppose the
lifting of the hands to the sun to have been one of the most natural and
solemn attitudes of early man. In the Scotch form of oath we seem to have
a ceremony that has been with us from the earliest dawn of humanity. I
have seen this oath administered in a Scotch Court, and it certainly
still retains many of the solemn incidents of a religious ceremony, and
compares very favourably from a serious dramatic point of view with the
English oath as administered here. The fact that the Judge administers
the oath himself, standing with hand uplifted, is impressive, at all
events to those to whom it is not made stale by custom. To me it seems a
very appropriate ceremony in an old-world system of law such as prevails
in Scotland, where there are numerous judges and not too much work to
do. In a busy English urban County Court, it would render the life of a
Judge uninsurable.
Our English oath is a much younger branch of the family. I have made my
own theory of its incidents, and remembering my professor’s advice, I
propose to stick to it. It is a quite modern idea that the oath should be
taken on the New Testament. Sir Geoffrey Boleyn, writing to John Paston
in 1460, says that the late Sir John Falstafe in his place at Suffolk,
“by his othe made on his primer then granted and promitted me to have
his manner of Gunton.” Even as late as 1681, Coke’s “Institutes” print a
form of oath with the Roman Catholic adjuration, “So help you God and all
Saints.” An Irish woman in Salford County Court quite recently objected
to kiss the Book, and desired to kiss a crucifix. But the “kissing” idea
is very modern. In 1681 it seems clear that kissing the Book was not a
necessary official act. All that was necessary was to place the hand upon
the Bible. “It is called a corporall oath,” writes Coke, “because he
toucheth with his hand some part of the Holy Scripture.”
The efficacy of the “touch” runs through all the old legends, and we have
an amusing survival of it to-day when a punctilious Crier insists upon
a nervous lady struggling out of her glove before he will hand her the
Book, and again, in the peremptory order constantly given by a clerk when
handing the Book to a witness, “Right hand, if you please.” For these
demands there is as far as I know no legal sanction, and I take them to
be echoes of the social system of these islands that prevailed some time
prior to the building of Stonehenge.
Touching a sacred object seems a world-wide method of oath-taking. The
Somali—who are not yesterday’s children—have a special sacred stone, and
observe a very beautiful ceremony. One party says, “God is before us, and
this stone is from Amr Bur,” naming a fabulous and sacred mountain. The
other party receiving the stone says, “I shall not lie in this agreement,
and therefore take this stone from you.” Let us hope that what follows is
more satisfactory than are my everyday experiences.
The exact origin of kissing the Book in English Courts, though modern, is
obscure. It is not, I should say, a matter of legal obligation, but seems
to be merely a custom dating from the middle or end of the eighteenth
century. If a witness claims to follow the law according to Coke, and
to take his “corporall oath” by touching the Book, who shall refuse him
his right? The “kissing” act seems akin indeed to what the “fancy” call,
somewhat unpleasantly, a saliva custom, which in modern western life
exists in very few forms, though many of the lower classes still “spit”
on a coin for luck. The subject is a very large one, but the fundamental
idea of all customs relating to saliva seems to have been a desire for
union with divinity, and if the Book were always kissed in our Courts
with that aspiration, the custom might well be retained.
Unfortunately, the practical value of an oath depends in almost exact
ratio upon the depth of superstition of the person to whom it is
administered. The moral man will speak truth for practical moral reasons.
The immoral man will lie for practical immoral reasons. The latter in the
old days was hindered by the oath from lying, because he firmly believed
in the practical evil effects of breaking the oath. The perjurer of old
was certainly “looking for trouble.” This is not a phrase of the “fancy,”
but it exactly describes the oath-breaker’s position. Some of the few
minor _sequelæ_ of perjury were such domestic troubles as a curse which
ran on to the seventh generation, or the perjurer’s death from lingering
disease in twelve months, or that he would be turned into stone, or that
the earth might swallow him up and that after death he would wander round
as a vampire. These simple beliefs, which were no doubt part of the
cave-dwellers’ early religious education, must have done a great deal to
render the evidence of early man more trustworthy and accurate than that
of his degenerate younger brother.
Though in an occasional burst of atavism an uneducated man may kiss
his thumb instead of the Book, the bulk of humanity take any oath that
is offered without any deep feeling of religious sanction, nor any
particular fear of supernatural results. It is not altogether a matter
of regret that this should be so. Our ceremony of oath-taking is really
a Pagan one. Our very verb “to swear” takes us back to the pre-Christian
days when man’s strength and his sword were the masters, and peace and
goodwill had come to conquer the earth. To swear was a vow to Heaven
upon a sword. When we offer the Book to a witness to swear upon, we
really tender him, not a Christian thought, but the old Pagan oath which,
splendid as it was, is no longer of force. It was a fine thing in its
day when a knight vowed upon his sword “to serve the King right well by
day and night, on field, on wave, at ting, at board—in peace, in war, in
life or death; so help him Thor and Odin, likewise _his own good sword_.”
It is no use replacing the sword by the Book if you retain the spirit of
the sword in the old Pagan ceremony. The word “to swear” is very closely
related to the word “sword,” and the very essence of swearing, deep down
in the root form of the thing and the word itself, is to take one’s
sword in one’s right hand, and fight for one’s own side with an energy
that will make the Pagan gods shout with joy in the Valhalla. Medical
witnesses and land surveyors are real Vikings in this respect, especially
as it seems to me those of Celtic origin.
But of a truth it is not only the oath and the witnesses that want
amendment. For when I suggest that it would be well in Court if we obeyed
the command, “Swear not at all,” and that the outward use of the Book
in the County Court is undesirable, it is because I feel that some such
thing as a Court on the lines of the teaching of the Book ought not to
be wholly impossible after 1,900 years of endeavour. You must drive out
of the Court all the folk-lore with its Pagan notions of fighting and
hired champions and oaths, and witnesses and heralds, and above all you
must get rid of the anachronism of a Judge, and appoint in his place a
peace-maker or official reconciler. The idea is not wholly Quixotic. Lord
Brougham, a very practical reformer, had hopes of constructing Courts of
Reconciliation in this country seventy years ago. We shall not close the
courts of litigation and replace them by courts of reconciliation in a
day. But I am optimist enough to hope that I may go down to my work one
morning to find that we have been taken over by a new department called
the Office of Peace, and that under the Royal Arms is our new official
motto, “Blessed are the Peacemakers.”