Part 8 (1/2)
But it is for its birds that Lundy is perhaps most notable. To those who first approach its mighty cliffs it might appear to be the haunt of all the birds in creation. There are gulls of many varieties, falcons, kestrels, ravens, crows, cormorants, kittiwakes, puffins; there is the razor-billed auk, and that now extinct bird, the Great Auk, was seen on the island no later than the last century.
But, indeed, it was no surprise to me to hear of this extinct species lingering on Lundy; the strangeness and wildness of the place might lead one to expect it to be the haunt of the Dodo, or that monstrous and fabulous bird of the ”Arabian Nights,” the Giant Roc.
The hoopoe, the pretty little Southern bird which haunts the gardens of Greece, sings its ”tio, tio, tio, tio, tix” of Aristophanes' comedy on this wind-swept Northern isle; the rose-coloured starling, that rare and beautiful bird of a warmer clime, has been seen here in the spring; the eagle and the golden eagle hover above its crags; the sparrow-hawk and the great gyrfalcon prey upon the small birds and little rodents; even the wild and shy osprey was known to build its eyrie upon Lundy to within the last half-century.
Many of these birds are visitors only, and do not breed here; for in the spring and the autumn, when the great tides of migration set north and south, Lundy lies in the track of their going, and here the birds alight, in their hundreds of thousands, to rest the wings tired with the going and coming from Africa or Asia across the miles of water.
But whether in winter or summer, spring or autumn, any bold walker who ventures round the cliffs and coves of Lundy will find himself surrounded with such a crowd of screaming sea-fowl, diving, swooping, poising, or darting, in such myriads as if the foot of man had never yet scared them from their breeding-places, as the sea-fowl swooped and screamed from their inviolate heights when the first Nors.e.m.e.n ran their beaked s.h.i.+p on to the desert beaches of Iceland.
CHAPTER IX
THE LAST STRONGHOLDS OF TRADITION
Schools, newspapers, and railways have gone far in the past hundred years to destroy the wealth of oral tradition which once satisfied the imagination and taxed the memories of the country-dwelling population of England. And do not let us too greatly deplore this; let us recognize that it is better for the general welfare of the world that a man who dwells three hundred miles from London should have some interest, however slight, in international politics, and some knowledge, however fragmentary, of natural forces, rather than a slipshod belief in ghosts, witches, and the omnipotence of ”squire.”
It is not from such minds that empire is made or deserved, and if with the increase of cheap schooling, cheap printing, and cheap travelling much that is beautiful in language or in legend is swept aside and forgotten, we who have, by the fortune of training, been allowed to see the beauty of the old things must recognize that what the generation gains is more for its happiness than what it discards, as a new bra.s.s Birmingham bedstead is cleaner, healthier, and more desirable for a small crowded cottage than a worm-eaten old wooden four-poster.
This reminder I make to myself more than to any ”gentle reader”; for I have a pa.s.sionate attachment to antiquity and a curiosity in legend which leads me into remote paths of speculation and fancy. Some of the most interesting survivals of ancient tradition are those customs, far more common all over England than is supposed, which contain some very ancient religious rite, long ago forgotten by the people, who practise as a superst.i.tion, or sometimes as a pastime, what was once an act of wors.h.i.+p. The Christian Church, indeed, embodies many of these survivals of paganism, not in its dogma or liturgy, but in its customs.
Such, for instance, is the giving of eggs at Easter, the eating of hot cross buns on Good Friday, the games of All Hallowe'en, the harvest festival.
Such customs as ”touching with a dead hand” as a cure for sickness, covering the mirrors in a house where one has just died, watching at the church door on Midsummer Night to see the souls of all the wors.h.i.+ppers pa.s.s in, and those who will not live out the year remain behind and do not pa.s.s out--these are part of the common stock of beliefs, not confined to Devons.h.i.+re or Scotland, nor directly traceable to Celt or Saxon or Latin, but surviving from the remote past of the human race, when the slowly emerging mind was struggling with its apprehensions of life and death. But there are other customs, surviving in the wilder and less accessible parts of our country, in Scotland, Northumberland, Devon, and Cornwall, which seem to throw a flash of light on the history of vanished peoples, by their resemblance--though worn and rubbed by time, like a defaced coin--to certain rites, well known to us in history, as practised by the Romans, or the Druid peoples, or the wors.h.i.+ppers of Baal.
Of such kind is a ceremony, until a few years ago very common in Devons.h.i.+re, where the first armful of corn that is cut is bound into a little sheaf, called ”the nek,” and set aside from the rest of the field. At the end of the first day's reaping the oldest man present takes the little sheaf and holds it aloft, crying, ”We ha' un!” (We have it!) The cry is repeated three times, and the rest of the reapers, standing round the old man with their reaping-hooks in their hands, bow down at each cry. The spokesman then cries out three times, ”Thee Nek!” or, as it is stated by some witnesses of the scene, ”Arnack, Arnack, Arnack!” and the little sheaf is carried off the field and hung up in the church. I do not know the meaning of the cries, but the whole ceremony is undoubtedly a dedication of the corn to the Corn-Spirit, and the little sheaf which is carried home and hung up is a rough image of the Corn-Maiden, like those plaited straw figures of Demeter and Persephone the Greek husbandmen used to make, and which the peasants of Sicily make still. Whether the observance of this rite in Devons.h.i.+re is of Roman date, or whether it goes farther back, to a remoter tradition of precla.s.sical times, it is difficult to say.
So it is, also, of the Devons.h.i.+re custom of making an offering of wine and honey to bees on the day of their owner's death, and of reversing their hives until the corpse has been carried out of the house. The Greeks poured honey, but not wine, in their rites for the dead, and in all the ceremonies which had to do with the wors.h.i.+p of the earth deities--the ancient autochthonic G.o.ds, older than the Olympians. But wine was strictly an offering to the G.o.ds of the heavens, not to the G.o.ds of the underworld, or of death.
There is another custom, still very common in North Devon and Somerset, for the young men of the countryside to climb the nearest hill-top to see the sunrise over the ridge of the Quantocks or the distant Mendips on Easter morning. They account for their action by saying it is ”for luck”; but this custom, if connected popularly with Christian wors.h.i.+p, has at its roots an older, sterner, and perhaps b.l.o.o.d.y origin. For, searching back into the mists of antiquity, we find that those early and mysterious peoples whose priests we call the ”Druids,” to whom the mistletoe was sacred (and with which we decorate our houses at Christmas, the festival of ”peace and good-will”), offered human sacrifices to their dark G.o.ds on high mountains and at the hour of sunrise.
Whether the Britons whom Caesar describes as sacrificing human beings in vast wicker cages were the Druidical peoples who built Stonehenge and the great stone circles of Dartmoor and c.u.mberland, or whether with them the mode of wors.h.i.+p was already traditional, preserved by a priestly oligarchy from a yet remoter age, and connected by I know not what strange links with the fierce Eastern wors.h.i.+p of Baal or Melkarth, it is impossible to say with certainty at present, though the names by which the c.u.mberland men still call the peaks and valleys round the small Druid circle near Keswick contain the elements of those foreign Phoenician words.
But at least we may a.s.sume that the accurate astronomical arrangements of these Druid stones connected human sacrifice with the movements of the sun, and the tradition which sends the young men of the countryside up Dunkery Beacon on Easter morn is certainly older than the first Roman galley that beached in our bays.
Dunkery Beacon is the highest peak in the West of England; it rises above Exmoor black and bold above bog and heather, commanding a view from the Malvern Hills of Worcesters.h.i.+re on the north to the high lands of Plymouth on the south-west, two hundred miles distant the one from the other. The great sweep of the Bristol Channel s.h.i.+nes below it on the west, and beyond that lie the blue hills of Monmouths.h.i.+re and Pembrokes.h.i.+re; eastward the counties of Somerset, Devon, and Dorset lie under the eyes, and on a clear day it has been computed that no fewer than fifteen counties can be seen from this one eminence.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Dunkery Beacon, from Horner Woods]
So notable a height might well have been chosen by those Druid peoples as a fitting stage for the celebration of their wors.h.i.+p, and the tradition which holds it ”lucky” to climb the Beacon on a spring morning is just such a memory and faint superst.i.tion as lingers from an old and forgotten faith. The country-folk round Keswick used to drive their cattle up to the Druid circle on the hill-top near on the first of May, light a fire within the circle, and drive their cattle through the smoke ”for luck,” unconscious that they were remembering the wors.h.i.+p of the G.o.d Moloch, to whom beasts and human beings were sacrificed at his Asiatic shrines by pa.s.sing them through the fire.
On Dunkery Beacon, so far as I can ascertain, there are no remains of a Druid circle, but only two stone platforms arranged for beacon fires.
As a beacon it has been used for many hundred years. In the time of Alfred the Great it flamed a warning of the coming of the Danes; it was doubtless lighted at the coming of William the Conqueror into the West; when the Armada went beating up the Channel; time and again when the rumour ran that Napoleon had started for these sh.o.r.es; the country-folk lighted it several times as a warning that the Doones were out on one of their raids, till one night they climbed the beacon and threw the watchman on the fire, after which it was left black and silent for all the evil that the Doones did, until in due course retribution overtook them and their stronghold was seized. So that I conjecture that the circle of stones (if there were one) was pulled down to build the beacon fires.
But the ”Hunting of the Earl of Rone” which takes place at Combe Martin on Ascension Day is probably the most interesting of all ancient survivals in North Devon. It is a curious ceremony, partaking something of the nature of a Guy Fawkes mummery, something, I consider, of a much older and traditional character.
The ”Earl of Rone,” actually, was the son of the Earl of Tyrone, the ”Red Hand of Erin,” who, in the reign of James I, fled from Ireland and landed at Combe Martin, wandered about the countryside with a band of companions, and was finally pursued and captured in Lady Wood, outside the village. In the Ascensiontide sports the Earl wears a grotesque costume: a mask, and a smock padded with straw, and round his neck a chain of biscuits. He has with him a hobby-horse and buffoon covered with fantastic trappings, and carrying a small article called a ”mapper” (which is conjectured to be a misreading for ”snapper”), and representing the teeth and jaws of a horse. The Earl has also a donkey, decorated with flowers and with a necklace of biscuit, and the hunters wear a sort of fantastic grenadier costume. For a week before Ascension Day this strange cortege goes in procession round the neighbourhood. The ceremony on Ascension Day is as follows: The Earl of Rone hides in Lady Wood, and is there pursued by the soldiers, fired upon, and captured. He is then placed on the donkey, with his face towards the tail, and led into the village, accompanied by the fool with his hobby-horse. They make several halts, at each of which the Earl is again fired upon and falls wounded from his donkey, mourned by the fool, but amid the general rejoicing of the spectators. Finally he is replaced by the fool, and the affair becomes a mere matter of buffoonery without special significance. Contributions are levied from the public, and enforced by the ”mapper,” by which they are seized and held until they have paid. The fool also has a besom, which he dips in the gutter, and with which he sprinkles the recalcitrant.
But among much that is mere horseplay, and common to all popular celebrations which have no religious significance to keep in check a natural holiday exuberance, we can discover two distinct traditions.