ages was attempted to be justified by a reference to the tragic fate of the boy of Lincoln.

An account of the great festival of the translation of the bones of S. Thomas, at Canterbury, is given in these Annals, and the writer agrees with all the others, who mention it that such a vast assemblage of persons was never seen in England. He also testifies to the wonderfully good arrangements made for the management and entertainment of the enormous multitude by Archbishop Stephen Langton. A much fuller account of this interesting ceremony will be found in the Annals of Croyland, but the fullest history of it is contained in the treatise written by Archbishop Stephen, to commemorate his great work, and which is published in the Patrologia of the Abbé Migne.

We now take leave of the Waverley Annals, with thanks to Mr. Luard, for having, by his reprint, put us in possession of a very useful Medieval Chronicle, with every facility for its use. The Index, which is promised at the conclusion of the Annales Monastici, of which both the Margan and the Waverley Annals are a part, will be a most useful source of reference for the student of these deeply interesting times. The thirteenth century was a critical period in the history of the English Church. Before the exempt bodies, the Cistercians and the Friars, had got firm footing in the land, the Papal power had not that strong and overpowering grasp which it afterwards obtained. If John had been a prince of less infamous character, if Henry III. had not been the weak and wayward creature that he was, it is probable that the establishment of our civil liberties, which those times witnessed, might have been accompanied by the establishment of ecclesiastical liberty also, and the Church of England free from the degrading slavery to Rome, might have earlier developed her true national character. That she failed to do so was due partly to the weakness of her princes, but especially to the watchfulness of the garrisons of Rome, formed by the establishment and growth of the exempt Orders.

33

ART II.-On the Folk Lore of the Northern Counties of England, and the Borders. By WILLIAM HENDERSON; with an Appendix on Household Stories. By SABINE BARING GOULD. Longmans, 1866.

2. Curious Myths of the Middle Ages. By SABINE BARING GOULD, M.A. Rivingtons, 1866.

3. Lancashire Folk Lore. Compiled and Edited by JOHN HARLAND, F.S.A.; and T. T. WILKINSON, F.R.A.S. Warne and Co., 1867.

4. Popular Romances of the West of England, or the Drolls, Traditions, and Superstitions of Old Cornwall. Collected and Edited by ROBERT HUNT. 2 vols. Hotten, 1865.

5. A Manual of Mythology. Longmans.

By the Rev. GEORGE W. Cox.

FOLK LORE is a modern word, telling in its very construction of the period of its formation. We feel as sure that it belongs to the stratum of the Teutonic Archaism as we do that 'Popular Superstition' is of the Latin Deposit. Even the former, in comparison with that of its lengthy synonym, is a proof of the different estimation it has attained. The monosyllables give dignity, the polysyllables cast a slur. Folk, as connected with the great conquering Volken, are ancient and honourable; but popular and vulgar, albeit from the same root, have both deteriorated in significance in their transit through Latin. Lore infers something to be learnt and sought out; superstition is the excess of belief, and implies that it ought to be discarded and forgotten.

In effect the beliefs and customs that fell under the stigma of superstition, were driven to such remote corners under that opprobrious title, that now that they have become lore, and scholars and philologists perceive their value, contempt for them has become so current that their repositories among the peasantry are ashamed of them, and it requires no small amount of address to enable an educated person to extract an account of them, more especially since, strange and interesting as they may be to the antiquary, many are far more honoured in the breach than in the observance. Parson, doctor, and schoo!master, must blame and condemn them in practice, even though the next generation will lose much that is racy and amusing.

On the whole we believe that the old nurse's fable is more in vogue than it has been at any other age of the world. Strong-minded men seem as a rule to have always despised mere portents and auguries, and only to have accepted the fables that accounted for natural phenomena because no other solution had been discovered. And the religion of truth always waged war against them. A true Israelite under the old dispensation was taught to be as free from all superstition as a Christian of the present day; and from Moses on to the later books of the Old Testament, there is a continual denunciation of the various magic practices that were caught from the heathens. The early Christian teachers in like manner forbade all varieties of divination, and modes of securing good luck, on the same principle, i.e., that the Second Commandment is infringed by trust in whatever is not of God; and in the interesting work at the head of our paper, Mr. Henderson has brought together many quotations showing the constant testimony of the Fathers and earlier ecclesiastics against such practices. He collects many such denunciations throughout the Middle Ages, and adds that apparently the Reformation, by diminishing popular reliance on Saints and Angels, absolutely caused the balance to swing back towards the old remnants of heathenism; so that instead of the fairies and elves being, as merry Bishop Corbett says, all of the old profession,' they would rather have lifted their heads when relieved from the censure of the Church. This is possible, but it may also be that our greater evidence of popular credulity may be caused by the more prominent relief into which a lower grade of persons were raised by the greater fullness of history, and by their own increasing importance.

However, there has been, and very rightly, a universal endeavour for at least two centuries, to argue away, laugh down and eradicate all such superstitions, until they have almost perished from the surface, and only remain niched in a few credulous and ignorant minds in remote places, now and then coming into full light, chiefly in some case of obtaining money on false pretences, or of savage revenge on some supposed witch. And when practical and mischievous faith in these superstitions has passed away, it has become the part of scholars to collect them and compare them as valuable and instructive remnants of ancient beliefs. Such researches in able hands have led to very important conclusions, and it is highly desirable that every indication of popular belief should at once be noticed down, just as a specimen in natural history in a new place is recorded not so much for its own sake as for its connexion with its congeners.

Folk Lore is a very vague term. It includes all that traditional mass of tales, sayings, beliefs, customs, observances, and auguries that are, or recently were, afloat among the people, accepted and acted upon by the lower orders, and more or less even by the upper classes. In these there is a certain amount of simple truth. Some are remnants of Church customs now disused, and some are relics of old Teuton heathenism. Often, we believe that superstition is the vulgarising of Reverence. Awe, devoid of actual fear, is incomprehensible to the rude and coarse, and when the vulgar see certain things, places, or persons treated with distant respect, they immediately conclude that some dire material effect is apprehended from a contrary course. Thus the poor women keep their children quiet in church by appalling threats of what the parson will do to them; and the legend of Queen Elizabeth's maid of honour who died of the prick of a needle on Sunday, has no doubt done much to produce the Englishwoman's horror of touching that implement; though the tales of the Evangelical Lutheran, Madame Nathusius, represent the pattern German girl as regarding fancy work as part of her Sunday recreation.

The real range of Folk Lore is world-wide; Kaffir, Negro, Maori, continually amaze us with the resemblance of their traditions to our own; but within this mighty circuit there are divisions; and those superstitions which belong to the IndeEuropean nations are the most easily compared, as well as the most interesting to ourselves; while again we shall find that the most accessible traditions, and those most easy to compare and classify, are those of the countries where the population consists of Teutons or Kelts, in various proportions, with civilization derived from Rome.

Much has been done towards such collections, ever since the brothers Grimm set the example in Germany. Mr. Edgar Taylor introduced their Mährchen' in England in an elegant selected translation, which, however, coming in the full swing of Edgeworthism, was, we fear, generally regarded as almost too unintellectual for a nursery book. Yet its notes gives it a value even above that of the beautiful recent edition de luxe, containing all the Mährchen. Sir Walter Scott meanwhile was, from taste and instinct, collecting all that Border tradition could afford him, viewing it, however, chiefly as poetic material. Croker's Irish tales were a most valuable contribution in themselves, and were told so charmingly as to awaken the popular taste and curiosity. Mr. Keightley began to collect and har monize the old tales and fairy legends of different countries; and though no collector has equalled the pair who deserve to be mythologically celebrated as the Giants Grimm, yet

the dwarfs standing on their shoulders begin to see further than even the giants themselves, and collectors and interpreters alike have multiplied within the last few years. Among the interpreters we would mention Professor Müller, Mr. Cox, Mr. S. B. Gould, and Mr. Kelly; among the collectors Mr. Dasent for Norway and Iceland, Mr. Campbell for the Highlands, Mr. Hunt for Cornwall, Mr. Hadland and Mr. Wilkinson for Lancashire, Mr. Henderson for the counties of Durham and Northumberland. as well as for the Border districts. Here he has been fortunate enough to become possessed of a MS. collection, made by a young man named Wilson, at the request of Sir Walter Scott, but which had failed to reach his hands. Add to these the Rev. J. C. Atkinson's contributions to the Monthly Packet, of the Folk Lore still fresh among the Danish sprung population of Cleveland-a work which we hope to see complete and published in a full and separate form. We believe that almost any curiosity of Folk Lore, which can be gathered direct from the peasantry, ought to be at once sent with sufficient evidence to some collector of these matters, since there is much yet to be established respecting the geogra phical distribution (if it may so be called) of certain myths and customs, and much light is thrown on differences of national character by the forms that the same story or belief will assume. No time is to be lost, for even in Cornwall Mr. Hunt tells us that stories he heard and happily recorded thirty-five years ago, have now become extinct.

It must be confessed, however, that researches after English Folk Lore are apt to be disappointing. Our people in the true-blooded Anglian and Saxon counties, are too busy, too practical, too shy of being laughed at, too sophisticated to dwell much on any tradition that does not connect itself with immediate results. They are not narrators of stories, and care little for battle-fields.

Mr. Henderson, indeed, relates how a Sunday scholar at Durham preferred a lesson from the Book of Joshua to one from Samuel, because of the fighting in it, and then told his teacher that there had been a great battle fought close to Durham once

"And where was it fought ?" asked the teacher; "At Neville's Cross," answered the lad promptly. "I go there very often of an evening, to see the place, and if you walk nine times round the Cross, and then stoop down and lay your head to the turf, you'll hear the noise of the battle and the clash of the armour." These were the young fellow's exact words.'Henderson, p. 266.

But Durham was peopled partly by Kelts, and partly by Northmen, and against this young poet may be set the old