The Science of Fairy Tales Part 4

It must not be overlooked that there may have been from the first more than one version of the legend, and that a version rejected by, or perhaps unknown to, Roger of Wendover and the writers who followed him may have always included the order to the inhabitants to keep within doors, of which Peeping Tom would seem to be the necessary accompaniment. Unfortunately, we have no evidence on this point. The earliest record of such a version appears in one of the ma.n.u.script volumes already alluded to. It has not been hitherto printed; and it is so much at variance, alike with the legend preserved in the thirteenth century, and the poem of the nineteenth century, that I quote it entire:--"The Franchisment and Freedome of Coventry was purchased in manner Following. G.o.diva the wife of Leofric Earle of Chester and Duke of March requesting of her Lord freedome for this That Towne, obtained the same upon condition that she should ride naked through the same; who for the Love she bare to the Inhabitants thereof, and the perpetuall remembrance of her Great Affection thereunto, performed the same as Followeth. In the forenoone all householders were Commanded to keep in their Families shutting their doores and windows close whilst the Dutchess performed this good deed, which done she rode naked through the midst of the Towne, without any other Coverture save only her hair. But about the midst of the Citty her horse neighed, whereat one desirous to see the strange Case lett downe a Window, and looked out, for which fact or for that the Horse did neigh, as the cause thereof, Though all the Towne were Franchised, yet horses were not toll-free to this day."[48]

The ma.n.u.script in which this pa.s.sage occurs is copied from an older ma.n.u.script which appears to have been compiled in the sixteenth century. Unfortunately, however, the latter is imperfect, a leaf having been torn out at this very point. We cannot, therefore, say with certainty that the account of the famous ride was ever comprised in it.

But the expressions made use of imply that the windows were closed with shutters rather than gla.s.s, and that they were opened by letting down the shutters, which were either loose or affixed by a hinge to the bottom sills. It is a question exactly at what period gla.s.s came into general use for windows in the burgesses' houses at Coventry. Down almost to the middle of the fifteenth century all gla.s.s was imported; and consequently it was not so common in the midlands as near the coast, especially the south-eastern coast. We shall probably be on the safe side if we a.s.sume that in the early years of the sixteenth century, at all events, the ordinary dwelling-house at Coventry was no longer dest.i.tute of this luxury. It would seem, therefore, that the story, in the form here given, cannot be later, and may be much earlier, than the latter years of the fifteenth century.

Failing definite evidence to carry us back further, it becomes of importance to inquire whether there are any traditions in other places from which we may reason. In the "History of Gloucesters.h.i.+re," printed by Samuel Rudder of Cirencester in 1779, we read that the paris.h.i.+oners of St. Briavels, hard by the Forest of Dean, "have a custom of distributing yearly upon Whitsunday, after divine service, pieces of bread and cheese to the congregation at church, to defray the expenses of which every householder in the parish pays a penny to the churchwardens; and this is said to be for the privilege of cutting and taking the wood in Hudnolls. The tradition is that the privilege was obtained of some Earl of Hereford, then lord of the Forest of Dean, at the instance of his lady, upon the same hard terms that Lady G.o.diva obtained the privileges for the citizens of Coventry." It appears that Rudder, while in the main accurately relating both custom and tradition, has made the mistake of supposing that the payment was made to the churchwardens, whereas it was in all probability made to the constable of the castle of St. Briavels as warden of the Forest of Dean. The custom is now in a late stage of decadence, and local inquiries have failed to elicit any further details throwing light on the point under consideration.[49]

I am not aware of any other European tradition that will bear comparison with that of G.o.diva, but Liebrecht relates that he remembers in his youth, about the year 1820, in a German newspaper, a story according to which a countess frees her husband's subjects from a heavy punishment imposed by him. She undertakes to walk a certain course clad only in her s.h.i.+ft, and she performs it, but clad in a s.h.i.+ft of iron.[50] The condition is here eluded rather than fulfilled; and the point of the story is consequently varied. It would be interesting to have the tale unearthed from the old newspaper, and to know where its scene was laid, and whether it was a genuine piece of folklore.

Eastern tales, however, furnish us repeatedly with incidents in which a lady parades the streets of a city, and during her progress all folk are bidden to close their shops and withdraw into their houses on pain of death. The example of the Princess Badroulbadour will occur to every reader of the "Arabian Nights." This, however, is by no means a solitary example. In the story of Kamar Al-Zaman and the Jeweller's Wife, one of the stories of the "Nights" rejected on moral grounds by Lane, but translated by Burton, a dervish relates that he chanced one Friday to enter the city of Ba.s.sorah, and found the streets deserted. The shops were open; but neither man nor woman, girl nor boy, dog nor cat was to be seen. By and by he heard a sound of drums, and hiding himself in a coffee-house, he looked out through a crevice and saw forty pairs of slave girls, with uncovered heads and faces displayed, come walking through the market, and in their midst a lady riding unveiled and adorned with gold and gems. In front of her was a damsel bearing in baldric a great sword with haft of emerald and ta.s.sels of jewel-encrusted gold. Pausing close to the dervish, the lady said to her maidens: "I hear a noise of somewhat within yonder shop; so do ye search it, lest haply there be one hidden there, with intent to enjoy a look at us while we have our faces unveiled." Accordingly they searched the shop opposite the coffee-house, and brought forth a man. At the lady's command the damsel with the sword smote off his head, and leaving the corpse lying on the ground, the procession swept on. It turned out that the lady was the wife of a jeweller to whom the King of Ba.s.sorah was desirous of granting a boon, and at her request the boon obtained was a proclamation commanding that all the townsfolk should every Friday enter the mosques two hours before the hour of prayer, so that none might abide in the town, great or small, unless they were in the mosques or in the houses with the doors locked upon them; but all the shops were to be left open. Then the lady had permission to ride with her slave-women through the heart of the town, and none were to look on her from window or lattice; and every one whom she found abroad she was at liberty to kill. A similar incident is related in the life of Kurroglu, the robber-poet of Persia, where a beautiful princess pa.s.ses in state through the bazaars every Friday on her way to the mosque, while all the men are banished.[51] Here, again, some one was of course found playing the spy.

A version of the incident, which can be traced further back in literary form than either of the foregoing, occurs in the "Ards.h.i.+-Bords.h.i.+." This book is a Mongolian recension of a Sanskrit collection of stories concerning Vikramaditya, a monarch who, if he ever lived, seems to have flourished about the beginning of the Christian era. He was celebrated, like Solomon, for his wisdom and his might; and his name became the centre of a vast accretion of legends. Some of these legends were translated into Mongolian late in the Middle Ages, and formed a small collection called after Ards.h.i.+-Bords.h.i.+, the nominal hero. In the story to which I wish to direct attention, a certain king has a daughter bearing the name of Suns.h.i.+ne, of whom he was so jealous that if any one looked upon her his eyes were put out, and the man who entered her apartments had his legs broken. Naturally, the young lady got tired of being thus immured, and complained to her father that, as she had no opportunity of seeing man or beast, the time hung heavily on her hands; and she begged him to let her go out on the fifteenth of the month and look about her. The king agreed to this; but, the sly old rascal!

nothing was further from his intention than to gratify his daughter's longing for masculine converse. Wherefore he issued a decree that all objects for sale were to be exposed openly to the view, all cattle to be left indoors, the men and women were to withdraw into their houses and close their doors and windows, and if any one came forth he should be severely punished. On the appointed day, Suns.h.i.+ne, surrounded by her ladies, and seated in a brand-new chariot, drove through the town, and viewed the merchandise and goods exposed for sale. The king had a minister, named Moon, who could not restrain his curiosity; and he peeped at her from a balcony. The princess, as he did so, caught sight of him and made signs to him, which were interpreted by the penetration of his wife to be an invitation to meet her clandestinely. The wife hardly displayed what most ladies would deem "a proper spirit" in advising compliance; and the consequence of taking that advice would have been serious trouble both to himself and to the princess, had it not been for the ready wit of the two women, who got over the difficulty by contriving an ingenious equivocation not unknown in other stories, by which the princess cleared herself and her lover on oath.[52]

It is true that in these tales the lady who rides forth is not naked; but to ride openly and unveiled would be thought almost as immodest in countries where strict seclusion is imposed upon women. All these tales include the Peeping Tom incident; and it appears, indeed, so obvious a corollary to the central thought of Lady G.o.diva's adventure that it is hardly likely to have required centuries for its evolution. From some traditions, however, it is absent. A story belonging to the Cinderella cycle, found at Smyrna, relates that when a certain king desired to marry his own daughter, the maiden, by the advice of her Fate, demanded as the price of compliance three magnificent dresses. Having obtained these, she asked permission to go unseen (like Badroulbadour) to the bath. The king, to gratify her, forbade his subjects on pain of death to open their shops or to show themselves in the streets while she pa.s.sed by. She thus got an opportunity of escaping from the city, of which she did not fail to make use,--greatly, no doubt, to her unnatural father's disgust. An Indian tradition also tells us that the inhabitants of Chamba were under the necessity of digging a ca.n.a.l for irrigation, but when it was dug, owing to the enchantments of an evil spirit, not a drop of water could be got to flow along its course. A magician at last found out that the spell could be dissolved if the beautiful and virtuous young princess of Chamba would consent to traverse a given distance of the plain entirely naked, in full view of the populace, and to lose her head when the journey was accomplished. After much hesitation, her compa.s.sion triumphed over her shame; and she undertook the task. But lo! as she advanced, a thick line of young trees arose to right and left, completely hiding her from cynical eyes. And the shady ca.n.a.l is shown to-day by the good people of Chamba as one of the most authentic monuments of their history.[53]

So far the stories. Concerning which it must be observed that they are evidence that the myth of Lady G.o.diva is widely diffused in the East, and that the spy is usually, though not always, part of the tale. The Smyrnoean version must probably be thrown out of the reckoning. It is, as I have already mentioned, a variant of the Cinderella cycle. The problem of the plot is how to get the heroine unseen out of her father's clutches. This is commonly effected by the simple mechanism of a disguise and a night escape. Other methods, I need not now detail, are, however, sometimes adopted; and the excuse of going to the bath, with the order to the people to close their shops and keep within doors, would seem to reveal nothing more than the unconscious influence of Aladdin or some other of the Eastern stories. Throwing this out, then, as accidental, an overwhelming proportion of the a.n.a.logues cited contains the spy. It would be dangerous to reason on the supposition that the proportions of all the Asiatic variants extant correspond with those of the variants cited; but we are at liberty to a.s.sume that a large number, if not the majority, comprise the incident of Peeping Tom. None of them was known in Europe until Galland published his translation of the "Arabian Nights" in the year 1704--upwards of two centuries later than the latest period at which the story as given in the Coventry ma.n.u.script can have come into existence.

But the stories, though they may go a little way to help us in regard to the incident of Peeping Tom, throw no light on the origin of the legend, or of the procession. Let us therefore turn to one or two curious religious ceremonies, which may have some bearing upon it. A potent spell to bring rain was reported as actually practised during the Gorakhpur famine of 1873-4. It consisted of a gang of women stripping themselves perfectly naked, and going out by night to drag the plough across a field. The men were kept carefully out of the way, as it was believed that peeping by them would not only vitiate the spell, but bring trouble on the village. It would not be a long step from this belief to a story in which peeping was alleged to have taken place with disastrous effects, either to the village, or (by favour of the deities intended to be propitiated) to the culprit himself. At the festival of the local G.o.ddess in the village of Serur, in the Southern Mahratta country, the third and fourth days are devoted to private offerings.

Many women, we are told, on these days walk naked to the temple in fulfilment of vows, "but they were covered with leaves and boughs of trees, and surrounded by their female relations and friends."[54]

The performance of religious rites by women alone, when men are required under heavy penalties to absent themselves, is, indeed, not very uncommon in savage life. Nor is it confined to savage life. When Rome was at the height of her civilization and her triumphs, the festival of the Bona Dea was rendered notorious by the divorce of Caesar's wife and by legal proceedings against an aristocratic scoundrel, who, for the purposes of an intrigue with her, had violated the sacred ceremonies.

The Bona Dea, or Good G.o.ddess, was a woodland deity, the daughter and wife of Faunus. Her wors.h.i.+p had descended from a remote antiquity; and her annual festival was held in the month of December, and was attended only by women. The matrons of the n.o.blest families of Rome met by night in the house of the highest official of the state to perform the traditional ceremonies of the G.o.ddess, and to pray for the well-being of the Roman people. Only women, and those of the most unsullied character, were permitted to attend; and the breach of this rule by Clodius, disguised in woman's garb, const.i.tuted a heinous offence against the state, from the penalties of which he only escaped, if we may believe Cicero, by bribing the judges.[55]

At the village of Southam, not far from Coventry, another procession in honour of G.o.diva formerly took place. Very little is known about it now, save one singular fact, namely, that there were two G.o.divas in the cavalcade, and one of them was black. Southam was part of the property possessed by Earl Leofric; and it has been suggested that this is enough to account for the commemoration of G.o.dgifu. It would no doubt be an excellent reason for affixing her renowned name to a periodical ceremony already performed there. But it would hardly be a reason for commemorating her extortion of privileges in which the inhabitants of Southam did not share; and it would leave the black lady unexplained.

She may, indeed, have been a mere travesty, though the hypothesis would be anything but free from difficulty. Here, again, if we have recourse to the comparison of ceremonies, we may obtain some light. Among the tribes of the Gold Coast of Africa the wives of men who have gone to war make a daily procession through the town. They are stark naked, painted all over with white, and decorated with beads and charms. Any man who is found in the town is attacked and driven away. And on the occasion of a battle the women imitate the actions the men are thought to be performing, with guns, sticks, and knives. The Gold Coast is a long way off; but not only do black women there paint themselves white in their sacred rites, white women in Britain have painted themselves, if not black, at least a dark blue. Pliny records that both matrons and unmarried girls among the Britons in the first century of the Christian era were in the habit of staining themselves all over with the juice of the woad; and he adds that, thus rivalling the swarthy hue of the aethiopians, they go on these occasions in a state of nature. We are sometimes taught that when the English invaded Britain, the natives whom they found here were all driven out or ma.s.sacred. There are, however, many reasons for doubting that this wholesale destruction was as complete as has been imagined. The name of Coventry betrays in its termination a Celtic element; and this could hardly have entered into it had there not been in the neighbourhood a considerable British-speaking population. What is more likely than that at Southam this population continued and preserved its customs, and that one of such customs was that very religious rite of which Pliny speaks? Unhappily he tells us nothing about the rite itself, nor the deity in whose honour it was performed. But it would not involve a great stretch of fancy to suppose that in the black lady of Southam we have a survival of the performance.

It is not too much to say that this explanation would have the merit of being intelligible and adequate.[56]

In all countries ceremonies of a special character are usually dramatic.

They represent, or are believed to represent, actions of the divinities in whose honour they are performed. The rites of the Bona Dea, we know, were of this kind; and they consequently degenerated into orgies of a shameful character. The Coventry procession is admittedly a representation of G.o.dgifu's ride. It is not now, nor has it been so long as we have any records of it--that is to say for two hundred years--connected with any professed act of wors.h.i.+p; but this is not incompatible with its being the long-descended relic of some such observance as those I have described. The introduction of Christianity did not annihilate the older cults. The new religion incorporated some of them; and although the rest were no longer regarded as sacred, the feeling of obligation remained attached to them for centuries. They were secularized, and ultimately degraded for the most part into burlesque.

Such as were connected with munic.i.p.al life, or, as we shall see in a future chapter, with family life, retained a measure of solemnity long after it had pa.s.sed away from rites which had been abandoned to an unorganized mob. This is well ill.u.s.trated by the contrast between the ceremonial at Coventry (whatever its origin) and that at St. Briavels.

The stronger hand of a munic.i.p.ality would have a restraining power wanting to that of a village community, or a parish--especially if the latter had been governed by a lord, who in later times had been shorn of his authority, or had ceased to reside among, or take an interest in the affairs of, his tenantry. Something like this I take to have been the history of St. Briavels. There does not appear from Rudder's account to have been, in his time at least, any pageant commemorative of the achievement of the lady to whom the paris.h.i.+oners reckoned themselves to owe their privileges; nor have I been able to trace one by local inquiries. But the tradition is at St. Briavels unmistakably connected with a religious and social rite. The distribution of food on a day of high and holy festival in the church to the congregation, and paid for by a levy upon every householder in the parish, can point to nothing else than a feast of the whole community as a solemn act of wors.h.i.+p. Its degeneracy in more recent times has been thus described to me by the Rev. W. Taprell Allen:--"For many years it was customary to bring to the church on Whitsunday afternoon baskets of the stalest bread and hardest cheese, cut up into small pieces the size of dice. Immediately after the service the bread and cheese were scrambled for in the church, and it was a custom to use them as pellets, the parson coming in for his share as he left the pulpit. About 1857, or perhaps a year or two later, the unseemly custom was transferred from the church to the churchyard, the bread and cheese being thrown down from the church tower. Later on it was transferred to the road outside the church gates. It now lasts but a few minutes. A few years ago all the roughs of the Forest used to come over, and there was much drinking and fighting; but now it is very different. The custom has in fact been dying out." From these later stages of decay the G.o.diva pageant was saved by becoming a munic.i.p.al festival. And while at St. Briavels we can watch the progress of degeneration from a point at which the religious character of the ceremony had not quite vanished, down to the most unblus.h.i.+ng burlesque, and to its ultimate expulsion from consecrated precincts,--at Coventry we see but one phase, one moment, at which the rite, if it ever had any t.i.tle to that name, seems to have been photographed and rendered permanent.

It is obvious, however, that a feast is not a dramatic representation of a ride; and the point requiring elucidation is the intimate relation of the feast at St. Briavels with a story apparently so irrelevant as that of the countess' ride. To explain this, we must suppose that the feast was only part--doubtless the concluding part--of a ceremony, and that the former portion was a procession, of which the central figure was identical with that familiar to us at Coventry. But such a procession, terminating in a sacred feast, would have had no meaning if the naked lady represented a creature merely of flesh and blood. It is only explicable on the hypothesis that she was the G.o.ddess of a heathen cult, such as Hertha (or Nerthus), whose periodical progress among her subject tribes is described in a well-known pa.s.sage by Tacitus,[57] and yet survives, as we have seen, in the folklore of Rugen. Now the historian tells us that Hertha was Mother Earth, the G.o.ddess of the soil, whose yearly celebration would appropriately take place in the spring or early summer. To her the produce of the land would be ascribed; and in her name and by her permission would all agricultural operations be performed. Such a G.o.ddess it must be who is honoured by the ceremonies already noticed in India. Such a G.o.ddess, at any rate, was the Bona Dea; and to such a G.o.ddess we may readily believe would be ascribed the privilege of cutting wood. It is quite consistent with this that the payment by every household at St. Briavels should be made to the warden of the forest, and that it should be spent by him on the G.o.ddess'

festival. We are left to surmise what were the tolls and burdens at Coventry, so vaguely referred to by Roger of Wendover. Pigs and horses, we learn from two different sources, were not included in the exemptions obtained by the countess; and the reason for this in the latter case is accounted for by the incident of Peeping Tom.

One other point is worthy of mention: both at St. Briavels and at Coventry the commemoration takes place nearly at the same time of year.

The Great Fair at Coventry opens on the day after Corpus Christi Day--that is to say, the Friday after Trinity Sunday. Corpus Christi Day itself was the day on which the celebrated Coventry Miracle Plays were performed; and the Fair opened the next morning. At the same time of year too--namely, on Ascension Day--a custom, for which there is no explanation in any record, was observed at St. Michael's Church, York, when ale and bread and cheese were yearly given away in the church to the poor of the parish.[58] Although Ascension Day is separated by three weeks from Corpus Christi, the movable character of the feasts would bridge this gulf without any difficulty; and heathen observances of the same nature, and referring to the same season, when they had to be reconciled to the Christian calendar, might easily find places in some instances on one day and in others on another day. G.o.dgifu and her husband were honoured as founders of the Benedictine monastery at Coventry, which rose upon the ruins of an earlier house of Benedictine nuns founded by Osburg, a lady of the royal house, nearly two hundred years before. This nunnery had been destroyed in the Danish wars about the year 1016. Consequently, if any legend, or ceremony, was known or practised at Coventry in connection with some traditional patroness, the name of G.o.dgifu was ready to hand to be identified with it. Through the monastery Coventry first rose to wealth and repute; and the townsfolk on this score owed a debt of grat.i.tude to the foundress, though there is no record whether any special day was set apart in her honour.

On the whole, then, there is ground for supposing that the legend and procession of Lady G.o.diva are survivals of a pagan belief and wors.h.i.+p located at Coventry; that the legend was concerned with a being awful and mysterious as Dame Berchta, or Hertha herself; and that the incident of Peeping Tom was from the first, or at all events from an early date, part of the story. The evidence upon which these conclusions rest may be shortly recapitulated thus:--

1. The absence of historical foundation for the tradition.

2. The close resemblance between the tradition and other stories and superst.i.tions which unquestionably deal with heathen G.o.ddesses, such as Berchta and Hertha.

3. The equally close a.n.a.logy between the procession and that described in Eastern stories, which, so far as we know, could not have reached England at the latest period when the procession could possibly have been inst.i.tuted; and between the procession and certain heathen rites practised not only in the East, but as near home as Rome and Germany,--nay, in Britain itself.

4. The occurrence of a similar procession at Southam, in the same county, having the special feature of a black lady, best explained as a survival of certain rites practised by the ancient Britons.

5. The connection between the a.n.a.logous legend at St. Briavel's and the remains of a sacred communal feast that can hardly be anything else than the degraded remnant of a pagan observance.

The want of historical evidence cannot, of course, be overlooked; but we must remember that in investigating traditions and traditional observances we are dealing with a phase of civilization of which history only yields rare and indirect glimpses. It is the absence of direct evidence that, not only in the science of Folklore, but also in the physical sciences, causes resort to the evidence afforded by comparison of other structures and processes. On the validity of this evidence, and the reasoning based upon it, nearly all our scientific learning depends.

In spite, therefore, of the defects in the historical evidence, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary, it can scarcely be denied that the a.n.a.logies in both custom and legend here brought together amount to a fairly strong presumption in favour of the conclusions I have ventured to draw from them.

If I may formulate my conjecture as to the course of development actually pursued, it would be something like this. The ceremony at Coventry is a survival of an annual rite in honour of a heathen G.o.ddess, from which men were excluded. This rite, like all such, would have been a part of the tribal cult, and intimately a.s.sociated with the tribal life and organization. Side by side with it a myth would have been evolved, accounting for the performance as a dramatic representation of an event in the G.o.ddess' career. This myth would have been similar in outline to those recited above, and would have comprised an explanation of the exclusion of men. When Christianity spread through the district the inhabitants would still cling to their old custom and their old myth, as we know was done elsewhere, because it was bound up with their social life. But, if not violently put down by the rulers of the land, both custom and myth would, little by little, lose their sacred character as the new religion increased in influence, and would become transformed into munic.i.p.al ceremonies. This process would be slow, centuries being required for its completion; but it would be aided by the gradual development of the tribe first into a settled village community, and thence into a mediaeval towns.h.i.+p. With the loss of sanct.i.ty the reason for prohibiting the attendance of men would vanish; but the tradition of it would be preserved in the incident of the story which narrated Peeping Tom's treachery.[59]

FOOTNOTES:

[33] Mrs. Bray, vol. i. p. 174.

[34] "Revue Celtique," vol. i. p. 231; Keightley, p. 312, citing "The Local Historian's Table-Book," by M. A. Richardson. Cromek, p. 242; "Y Cymmrodor," vol. iv. p. 209; "Revue des Trad. Pop." vol. iii. p. 426; "Revue Celtique," vol. i. p. 232.

[35] Sebillot, "Contes," vol. ii. p. 34; "Revue des Trad. Pop." vol.

iii. p. 428; Sebillot, "Litt. Orale," p. 21; Kennedy, p. 106; Keightley, p. 311; "Y Cymmrodor," vol. vi. p. 166; Wirt Sikes, p. 87. This story purports to be quoted from Howells, p. 349--an impossible reference, seeing that the volume in question only contains 194 pages. The peculiarities of Mr. Sikes' authorities, however, need very little comment.

[36] "Y Cymmrodor," vol. vi. p. 194; Hunt, p. 120.

[37] Gerv. Tilb. _Dcc._ iii. c. 85.

[38] Sebillot, "Contes," vol. ii. p. 42; "Litt. Orale," p. 23; "Trad. et Super." p. 109. But in these cases the operation was performed painlessly enough, for the victims were unaware of their loss until they came to look in the gla.s.s. In one of Prof. Rhys' stories the eye is p.r.i.c.ked with a green rush; "Y Cymmrodor," vol. vi. p. 178: Hunt, p. 83.

See also Sebillot, "Contes," vol. i. p. 119.

[39] Keightley, p. 310; "Revue des Trad. Pop." vol. iii. p. 426; Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 129, quoting Thiele. In another Danish tale given on the same page, the woman's blindness is attributed to her having divulged what she had seen in Fairyland.

[40] Sebillot, "Litt. Orale," p. 24.

[41] "Choice Notes," p. 170; Thorpe, vol. iii. p. 8. The latter form of the story seems more usual. See Gredt, pp. 28, 29, where we are plainly told that the hapless mortals are fetched away by the devil.

[42] Sternberg, p. 132 (see also Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 12); Von Alpenburg, p. 63. See a similar story in Grimm, "Teut. Myth." p. 276, from Borner, "Folk-tales of the Orlagau." In the latter case, however, the punishment seems to have been inflicted for jeering.

[43] Jahn, p. 177, quoting Temme, "Volkssagen"; Ovid, "Metam." l. iii.

fab. 3; Tacitus, "Germ." c. 40.

[44] Roger of Wendover, "Flowers of History," sub anno 1057. I quote from Dr. Giles' translation.

[45] See his Presidential Address to the Warwicks.h.i.+re Naturalists' and Archaeologists' Field Club, 1886.

[46] MS. marked D. This entry is an interpolation in a list of mayors and sheriffs in a different handwriting. There are several such interpolations in the volume. Coventry possesses a number of MS. volumes of annals, one of which (see below) seems to date from the latter part of the sixteenth century, and the rest from the latter part of the seventeenth. In the MS. marked F. (considered by Mr. W. G. Fretton, F.S.A., to be in the handwriting of John Tipper, of Bablake, Coventry, a schoolmaster and local antiquary at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries), and also in the MS. in the British Museum (Additional MSS. 11,364), the entry runs simply:--"1678 Michaell Earle (Mercer) Mayor; Francis Clark, George Allatt, Sherriffs.

This year y^e severall Companies had new streamers, and attended y^e Mayor to proclaim y^e faire, and each company cloathed one boy or two to augment y^e show." The latter MS. elsewhere speaks of the story of G.o.diva's ride as "comonly known, and yearly comemorated by the Mayor, Aldermen, and y^e severall companies."

[47] This statue used to be decked out on the occasion of the procession in the long peruke and neckcloth of the reign of Charles II. See T.

Ward, "Collections for the Continuation of Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwicks.h.i.+re" (2 vols., fol. MS., Brit. Mus., Additional MSS., Nos.

29,264, 29,265), vol. ii. fol. 143.

[48] MS. marked E, Coventry, seventeenth century. A careful examination of the language of Roger of Wendover, Matthew Paris, John of Brompton, and Matthew of Westminster, shows that Roger of Wendover's account is the source of the other three, Matthew Paris copying most closely, and John of Brompton most freely. John of Brompton and Matthew of Westminster omit the escort. Their statement as to G.o.diva's being unseen refers to the hair which covered her; and the latter informs us, with a touch of rhetoric, that Leofric regarded it as a miracle.

[49] Rudder, p. 307. The Rev. W. Taprell Allen, M.A., Vicar of St.

Briavels, has been kind enough to supply me with the correction from local inquiries and intimate acquaintance with the traditions and affairs of the parish extending over many years. See also "Gent. Mag.