Part 2 (1/2)
This is an example of the forcible revival of an ancient tradition to suit a later fact, and is evidence of the enormous impression which the event to which it refers had upon the locality. Kett's rebellion was one thing to the nation at large and quite another thing to this district of Norfolk, and the great events of the tenth century preserved in legend were equated with the minor events of the sixteenth century, thus enabling us to understand better the depth of the local feeling which produced these events.
[Ill.u.s.tration: PLAN OF THE SITE OF THE ”HEAVEN WALLS” AT LITLINGTON, ROYSTON, CAMBRIDGEs.h.i.+RE]
Both local and personal traditions are of interest in the unravelling of the meaning of historical events, and the forces at the back of them, and I will add a note of one or two examples of those humbler traditions which confirm or enhance the value of the historical record. They are of the greatest importance if correctly understood.
They include such examples, for instance, as Mr. Kemble notes when he says, ”I have more than once walked, ridden, or rowed, as land and stream required, round the bounds of Anglo-Saxon estates, and have learned with astonishment that the names recorded in my charter were those still used by the woodcutter or the shepherd of the neighbourhood.”[47] This is remarkable testimony to the persistence of tradition. It is the commencing point of a whole series of examples which go to show that embedded in the memories of the people, and supported by no other force but tradition, there are innumerable traces of historic fact.[48]
A stage forward, in the same cla.s.s of tradition, are those examples of special names which indicate an important or impressive event, the real nature of which is only revealed by modern discovery. Thus perhaps the ”White Horse Stone” at Aylesford, in Kent, the legend of which is that one who rode a beast of this description was killed on or about this spot,[49] may take us back to the great battle at Crayford, where Horsa was killed. Another kind of local tradition is perhaps more instructive. Immediately contiguous to the north side of the Roman road at Litlington, near Royston, were some strips of unenclosed, but cultivated, land, which in ancient deeds from time immemorial had been called ”Heaven's Walls.” Traditional awe attached to this spot, and the village children were afraid to traverse it after dark, when it was said to be frequented by supernatural beings.
Here is subject for inquiry. Both words in the name are significant.
Why the allusion to Heaven; why is a field called walls? The problem was solved in 1821, for in that year some labourers were digging for gravel on this spot, and they struck upon an old wall composed of flint and Roman brick. This accidental discovery was followed up by Dr. Webb, and the wall was found to enclose a rectangular s.p.a.ce measuring about thirty-eight yards by twenty-seven, and containing numerous deposits of sepulchral urns containing ashes of the dead. It was clear from the results of the excavations that here was one of those large plots of ground environed by walls to which the name of _ustrinum_ was given by the Romans,[50] a fact which was preserved in the name long after the site had lost every trace of its origin.
[Ill.u.s.tration: LITLINGTON FIELD]
I will refer to one more local example. In Dorsets.h.i.+re and Wilts.h.i.+re fairs are held upon sites which are often marked by the remains of ancient works, or distinguished by some dim tradition of vanished importance.[51] One has only to refer to the history of the market as ”a contribution to the early history of human intercourse” as Mr.
Grierson puts it,[52] and to the extremely important and archaic const.i.tution of the market, a glimpse of which has been afforded by Sir Henry Maine, alone among scholars who have investigated earliest English inst.i.tutions, to know how valuable such a note as this must be if it can be confirmed by extended research. Local investigation of these places and their traditions would, no doubt, lead to many points in the tribal settlement of the district, an important fact of history nowhere found in history.
No one, I think, taking into consideration this view of the relations.h.i.+p of local and personal traditions to history will deny that history is likely to gain much by the proper interpretation of such traditions. Every yard of British territory has its historic interest, and there are innumerable peaks above the general level which should be worth much to national history. Every epoch of British history has its great personage, who in popular opinion stands out from among his fellows. When once it is understood that traditions attaching to places and persons yield facts of a kind worth searching for, there will arise the desire to obtain all that is now obtainable from this source, and to add thereto the deductions to be drawn from their geographical distribution.
II
If the accretion of myth around the lives of great historic personages, and the persistence of tradition in historic localities, may be accepted as one phase of the necessary relations.h.i.+p of tradition to history, we may proceed to inquire how far the unattached traditions, the folk-tales pure and simple, contain or are based upon historic details. These details will not tell us of any one historic personage, or relate to any one historic locality, but will relate to the peoples before personages and localities figured in their history, and will explain facts in culture-history rather than in political history. We shall be approaching the period before written history had begun, and for which, so far as written history is concerned, we are dependent upon foreign or outside authority. I think, perhaps, Dr.
Karl Pearson has put the case for this view in the best form. ”As we read fairy stories to our children,” he says,
”we may study history for ourselves. No longer oppressed with the unreal and the _baroque_, we may see primitive human customs and the life of primitive man and woman cropping out at almost every sentence of the nursery tale. Written history tells us little of these things, they must be learnt, so to speak, from the mouths of babes. But there they are in the _Marchen_, as invaluable fossils for those who will stoop to pick them up and study them. Back in the far past we can build up the life of our ancestry--the little kingdom, the queen or her daughter as king maker, the simple life of the royal household, and the humble candidate for the kings.h.i.+p, the priestess with her control of the weather and her power over youth and maid. In the dimmest distance we can see traces of the earlier kindred group marriage, and in the near foreground the beginnings of that fight with patriarchal inst.i.tutions which led the priestess to be branded by the new Christian civilization as the evil-working witch of the Middle Ages.”[53]
I should not have ventured to quote this long pa.s.sage if my own studies, before Dr. Pearson's book was published in 1897, had not led me to much the same conclusions.[54] But Dr. Pearson a.s.sists me in a special way. His methods are scientific. He is not a folklorist because he loves folklore, but because he sees in it the materials for elucidating the early life of man. He is not, so to speak, prejudiced in its favour. He brings to his aid the practical mind of the statistician and the psychologist, and his conclusions may not, therefore, be put on one side as easily as those of myself and other students of folklore.
It is due to the folklorist, however, to say that this aspect of the folk-tale had already been discovered by one of the greatest of the earlier collectors of traditional lore, the late Mr. J. F. Campbell.
Thus, writing, in 1860, of his grand collection of ”Highland Tales,”
Mr. Campbell very truly says: ”The tales represent the actual everyday life of those who tell them, with great fidelity. They have done the same, in all likelihood, time out of mind, and that which is not true of the present is, in all probability, true of the past; and therefore something may be learned of forgotten ways of life.”[55] Readers of Mr. Campbell's books well know how he has traced out from these traditions from the nursery, identical customs with Highland everyday life, and relics also of a long-forgotten past state of things; how he points to the records of the stone age and the iron age in these representatives of the scientific memoirs of the past; how very significantly he answers his own supposition, that if these tales ”are dim recollections of savage times and savage people, then other magic gear, the property of giants, fairies, and bogles, should resemble things which are precious now amongst savage or half-civilized tribes, or which really have been prized amongst the old inhabitants of these islands or of other parts of the world.”[56]
This is an extremely important conclusion on the relations.h.i.+p of history and tradition, and it will be well to ill.u.s.trate it by turning to some obvious details of primitive life, which are to be seen with more or less clearness enshrined in the folk-tales which have been preserved in our own country.
In Kennedy's _Fireside Stories of Ireland_, it is related in one of the tales that there was no window to the mud-wall cabin, and the door was turned to the north;[57] and then, again, we have this picture given to us in another story: on a common that had in the middle of it a rock or great pile of stones overgrown with furze bushes, there was a dwelling-house, and a cow-house, and a goat's-house, and a pigsty all scooped out of the rock; and the cows were going into the byre, and the goats into their house, but the pigs were grunting and bawling before the door.[58] This takes us to the surroundings of the cave-dwelling people.
Then in other places we come across relics of ancient agricultural life preserved in these stories. In the Irish story of ”Hairy Rouchy”
the heroine is fastened by her wicked sisters in a pound,[59] an incident not mentioned in the parallel Highland tale related by Campbell.[60] Many Irish stories contain details of primitive life that the Scottish variants do not contain. The field that was partly cultivated with corn and partly pasture for the cow,[61] the gra.s.sy ridge upon which the princess sat, and the furrows wherein her two brothers were lying,[62] are instances.
A great question arises here. If the Scotch story does not mention the primitive incident mentioned in the Irish story, does it mean that the Irish story has retained for a longer time the details of its primitive original? Or does it mean that it has absorbed more of surrounding Irish life into it than the Scotch story has of surrounding Scottish life?
These details must have a place in the elucidation of Irish folk-tales, because they have a very distinct place indeed in primitive inst.i.tutions; and it hence becomes a question to folklorists as to how they have entered into, or escaped from, the narrative of traditional story. It appears to me that the appearance or non-appearance of these phases of early life are typical of what has been going on with the plot and structure of folk-tales as long as they have remained the traditional treasures of the people. A story identical in all the main outlines of plot will be varied in matters of detail, according to the people who are using it in their daily routine of story-telling. But this variation is always from the primitive to the cultured, from the simple to the complex. The mud-cabin or cave-dwelling in Irish story would have developed into the palace in stories of a richer country like England; the old woman, young girl, master and servant, would become perhaps the queen, princess, king and va.s.sal; just as in Spanish and Portuguese stories the giant of other European tales is represented by ”the Moor.” If this process of change is a factor in the life of the folk-tale, it follows that those folk-tales which contain the greatest number of primitive details are the most ancient, and come to us more directly from the prehistoric times which they represent.
We may gather warrant for such a conclusion if we pa.s.s from small details to a distinct inst.i.tution. The inst.i.tution which stands out most clearly in early history is the tribe, and I will therefore turn to an element of ancient tribal life, and an element which has to do with the practical organisation of that life, namely, the tribal a.s.sembly. We find that the folk-tale records under its fairy or non-historic guise many important recollections of the a.s.sembly of the tribe. One very natural feature of this a.s.sembly in early times was its custom of meeting in the open air--a custom which in later times still obtained, for reasons which were the outcome of the prejudices existing in favour of keeping up old customs. These reasons are recorded in the formula of Anglo-Saxon times, that meetings should not be held in any building, lest magic might have power over the members of the a.s.sembly.[63]
Before turning to the tales of our own country, I will first see whether savage and barbaric tales have recorded anything on the subject, for their picture of the tribal a.s.sembly, when revealed in the folk-tale, belongs to the period which might have witnessed the making of the story, and which certainly witnessed the tribal organisation of the people as a living inst.i.tution. Dr. Callaway, in his _Nursery Tales and Traditions of the Zulus_, relates a story of ”the Girl-King.” ”Where there are many young women,” says the story, ”they a.s.semble on the river where they live, and appoint a chief over the young women, that no young woman may a.s.sume to act for herself.
Well, then they a.s.semble and ask each other, 'Which among the damsels is fit to be chief and reign well?' They make many inquiries; one after another is nominated and rejected, until at length they agree together to appoint one, saying, 'Yes, so and so shall reign.'”[64]
However far this may be actually separated from the political a.s.sembly of the Zulus, there is no doubt we have here a folk-tale adaptation of events which were happening around the relators of the tale. This is all I am anxious to state, indeed. What in the folk-tale was related of the girl-king, was a reflex only of what happened when the political chieftain himself was concerned.
This, perhaps, is still better ill.u.s.trated if we turn to India. In the story of ”How the Three Clever Men outwitted the Demons,” told by Miss Frere in her _Old Deccan Days_, it is related how ”a demon was compelled to bring treasure to the pundit's house, and on being asked why he had been so long away, answered, 'All my fellow-demons detained me, and would hardly let me go, they were so angry at my bringing you so much treasury; and though I told them how great and powerful you are, they would not believe me, but will, as soon as I return, judge me in solemn council for serving you.' 'Where is your council held?'