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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Strange Survivals," S. Baring-Gould presents a captivating exploration of unusual and extraordinary phenomena that defy conventional understanding. This work combines elements of travel writing, folklore, and anthropology, delving into the bizarre occurrences and remarkable cases of survival that have persisted through time. Baring-Gould's literary style is richly descriptive, blending personal anecdotes with thorough research, allowing readers to traverse the murky waters of myth and reality while engaging with the narrative's underlying themes of human resilience and the uncanny. Such contextual framing within 19th-century Victorian literature invites a critical examination of scientific rationality vis-√†-vis popular superstitions and folklore that shaped societal narratives of the time. An accomplished scholar and writer, S. Baring-Gould was deeply interested in folklore, archaism, and the supernatural, significantly influencing his literary oeuvre. His extensive background as a clergyman and his insatiable curiosity about the eccentricities of human existence contributed to the synthesis of a uniquely rich and scholarly work. Baring-Gould's explorations were informed by his travels and extensive reading, further underscored by his belief in the importance of recording the unexplainable. "Strange Survivals" is a compelling read for those intrigued by the intersection of folklore, travel, and the uncanny. Readers will find themselves engrossed in Baring-Gould's narrative, which not only seeks to entertain but also to provoke thoughtful discourse on the nature of survival and belief. This book is a treasure for enthusiasts of the bizarre, offering insights that resonate far beyond the pages. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Strange Survivals
Table of Contents
Introduction
What seems modern often carries the shadow of far older beliefs and habits. Strange Survivals by S. Baring-Gould is a work of nonfiction that explores how fragments of ancient customs persist within later societies. First appearing in the late Victorian era, it belongs to the tradition of folklore studies and cultural history, examining continuities that outlast the ages that produced them. Rather than recounting a single story, the book assembles observations and arguments that guide readers through the hidden lineage of everyday practices. Its subject is the long memory of culture and the subtle ways tradition endures beneath new surfaces.
The premise is straightforward and compelling: beneath the customs familiar to Baring-Gould’s contemporaries lie earlier forms, refitted to new times and meanings. He treats daily life as a palimpsest, where older inscriptions show through the newer script. The experience the book offers is reflective and exploratory, combining a measured scholarly tone with an accessible, essayistic voice. The mood is curious rather than sensational, inviting readers to trace quiet continuities rather than pursue dramatic revelations. It is a study of texture and resonance, encouraging attention to the small, telling details that reveal how the past weaves itself into the present.
Approaching his subject as a clergyman and folklorist, Baring-Gould draws together historical references and observed customs to propose lines of descent in belief and practice. The method is comparative: he aligns later usages with earlier analogues and asks how function, symbolism, or social need might have preserved them. Organized in chapters, the book treats its topics as case studies, each essay sifting through evidence with Victorian erudition and a preference for reasoned inference. The result is not a catalogue of oddities but a series of arguments, each testing whether a resemblance is mere coincidence or a genuine survival altered by time.
At its core, Strange Survivals examines how traditions persist by adapting to new contexts. It follows the transformations that occur when meanings shift while forms endure, and when communities repurpose inherited practices to meet present needs. The book explores the porous boundary between customary behavior and formal belief, showing how social norms, ritual gestures, and recurrent motifs can migrate across eras. It also highlights the tension between rational reform and the comfort of familiar habit, asking how authority, memory, and utility shape what remains. Throughout, the emphasis falls on persistence through change rather than on the supposed novelty of the modern.
For contemporary readers, the book’s relevance lies in its reminder that culture is cumulative. In a moment often preoccupied with innovation, Baring-Gould’s focus on continuity offers a counterpoint: yesterday’s forms may underwrite today’s identities, holidays, and shared assumptions. The questions it raises—about how practices acquire new meanings, how societies negotiate inheritance, and how communities remember—resonate across disciplines from history to anthropology. It encourages readers to look more closely at everyday habits and public rituals, not to dismiss them as relics, but to consider how they encode collective experience. In doing so, it helps decode the quiet logic of tradition.
The reading experience is steady and thoughtful, shaped by Victorian prose that balances learning with clarity. Rather than racing toward conclusions, the chapters unfold at a deliberate pace, each building an argument from examples and comparison. The structure invites either sustained reading or selective engagement, allowing readers to dwell on particular lines of inquiry. Baring-Gould’s perspective is historically situated, and part of the book’s interest today is the window it opens onto the intellectual habits of its time. Yet its central approach—following patterns across periods and asking how they persist—remains intelligible and stimulating for a modern audience.
As an introduction to Baring-Gould’s broader interest in folklore and cultural history, Strange Survivals offers a lucid framework for thinking about how the past inhabits the present. It is less a final word than an invitation to observe, compare, and question, equipping readers with a way of seeing rather than a set of fixed conclusions. By foregrounding adaptation and continuity, it encourages a patient, historically minded curiosity about ordinary things. Those who take it up may find that familiar practices acquire unexpected depth. In tracing cultural endurance, the book ultimately affirms the layered, resilient character of human imagination and social life.
Synopsis (Selection)
Strange Survivals presents S. Baring-Gould’s survey of ancient customs, beliefs, and symbols that persist in modern life after their original meanings have faded. He defines survivals as practices carried on by habit, convenience, or sentiment, tracing their descent from pagan, medieval, or early modern contexts into contemporary usage. The book proceeds thematically, linking scattered habits to older religious rites, social needs, and legal forms. Using examples from Britain and continental Europe, the author outlines how forms endure while functions shift, arguing that small gestures, local ceremonies, and decorative motifs can be read as historical residues that illuminate long continuities in culture and thought.
Early chapters examine domestic life, where survivals are most inconspicuous. Baring-Gould describes threshold observances, the placement of the hearth, and protective tokens kept in houses. He notes rituals around bread, salt, and fire, and the persistence of luck-bringing devices such as the horseshoe. Household taboos, cradle customs, and courtesy rules are shown as vestiges of once weighty prohibitions and rites. The author emphasizes how practical routines can outlast belief, with forms retained for convenience or comfort. By tracing these habits to earlier conceptions of purity, danger, or blessing, he demonstrates how ordinary interiors preserve traces of vanished cosmologies.
The study then turns to the festive calendar, where old ritual patterns remain visible in public celebration. Baring-Gould links midwinter observances like the Yule log and wassailing to older propitiatory acts, and he views spring revels, maypoles, and morris dances as survivals of fertility rites. He discusses hobby-horse processions and mumming, harvest-home customs, and the exchange of gifts or ceremonial foods. Each instance illustrates how communal renewal, appeasement of unseen powers, and agricultural hopes were once embedded in annual rhythms. Over time, these practices were recast as amusement, pageantry, or local identity, while retaining characteristic forms and phrases.
Attention then shifts to civic usages and obsolete legal forms that linger in softened guise. The author reviews traces of ordeal, trial by combat, and sanctuary, noting how their ceremonial aspects left marks on later procedure or popular memory. He describes guild festivals, mayoral pageants, and the rough music of charivari, showing how communal discipline once employed symbolic noise and procession. Parish customs, proclamations, and the beating of bounds illustrate how boundaries and authority were maintained through ritual. Baring-Gould argues that these survivals record earlier methods of enforcing order and honor, later reinterpreted as tradition, entertainment, or civic pride.
In beliefs and folk medicine, Baring-Gould collects charms, prophylactics, and practices aimed at warding off misfortune. He treats the evil eye, apotropaic gestures, and the use of bells or iron as persistent techniques of protection. Holy wells, rag trees, and votive offerings are presented as Christianized continuations of older cults of springs and groves. Folk cures, amulets, and calendared remedies reveal how sacred time and place structured healing. The author highlights a gradual shift from explicit sacrifice or invocation to symbolic tokens and customs, observing that once-feared powers survive in softened, often purely customary acts that still command respect.
Narrative traditions and children’s lore provide another field of survivals. Baring-Gould notes how counting-out rhymes, game formulas, and refrain lines preserve archaic words and structures, sometimes detached from their earlier meanings. He relates the persistence of masked play, animal disguises, and ritualized contests to remnants of seasonal drama. Nursery tales and legends are cataloged for motifs traceable to classical or Germanic sources, reworked through centuries of retelling. The emphasis remains on form and continuity rather than literary criticism, outlining how repetition and play conserve fragments of ritual language and social instruction long after belief has been transformed or forgotten.
Material symbols, dress, and architectural details also bear marks of the past. The author surveys heraldic badges, livery colors, and insignia, explaining how emblems outlive the institutions that produced them. In churches and public buildings, he points to orientations, porch uses, boundary markers, and carved survivals like crosses or grotesques that began with protective or didactic purposes. Wayside crosses, processional routes, and memorial stones likewise encode older sacral geography. Crafts and tools preserve naming conventions and ceremonial first uses. Throughout, Baring-Gould treats these objects as historical documents, demonstrating how visual cues and repeated gestures conserve memory across institutional change.
Methodologically, Baring-Gould relies on parish records, travelers’ notes, legal sources, and comparative examples to anchor his claims. He juxtaposes British customs with continental parallels to show broad patterns and local divergences. While suggesting probable origins, he remains attentive to accretions, substitutions, and pious reinterpretations, cautioning against assuming single causes for complex traditions. The analysis underscores how religious conversion, state centralization, and economic shifts repurpose inherited forms. By emphasizing context and documented practice, the book positions survivals as evidence for historical processes, not curiosities, and urges careful reading of everyday life as a layered text of earlier social and religious arrangements.
The concluding chapters synthesize these examples into a general statement about cultural continuity. Strange Survivals argues that modern societies carry a palimpsest of older patterns, with familiar ceremonies, sayings, and emblems derived from functions once vital to safety, cohesion, and subsistence. The book’s central message is that understanding such residues clarifies the evolution of institutions and belief, illustrating how change proceeds by adaptation as much as by rupture. Baring-Gould closes by encouraging the recording of vanishing customs, not to romanticize the past, but to preserve evidence for historical inquiry. Survivals, he concludes, are intelligible witnesses to the long memory of communities.
Historical Context
Strange Survivals (1892) emerges from late-Victorian Britain, when rapid industrialization and scientific historicism met a countryside still patterned by ancient rites. Its author, Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924), wrote as an Anglican clergyman and antiquary rooted in the West Country—rector of Lew Trenchard, Devon, from 1881—while ranging comparatively across Britain and continental Europe. The “setting” is thus both the moorlands and parishes of Devon and Cornwall (Dartmoor, Lew Trenchard, Bideford, Helston) and the broader ethnographic map of Europe, where analogous customs persisted. The period’s tensions—urbanization, compulsory schooling, clerical reform, and state regulation of festivals—form the backdrop against which he documented Maypoles, bonfires, well-worship, mumming, and charms as living residues of older religious and social orders.
The English Reformation and subsequent Puritan ascendancy (c. 1530s–1660) were decisive in reshaping popular ritual. The 1534 Act of Supremacy and the 1559 Act of Uniformity enforced Protestant forms; the 1549 Prayer Book Rebellion in Devon and Cornwall protested change and was crushed with heavy casualties. In the 1640s, Parliamentary ordinances—famously in 1644—suppressed Christmas and other “superstitious” feast-days; iconoclasm dismantled images and seasonal customs. After the 1660 Restoration some parish rites revived, but often in altered form. The book repeatedly reads these upheavals behind “survivals” such as May games, harvest rites, and processions, showing how practices were privatized, renamed, or shifted in time to evade ecclesiastical and civic sanction.
Early modern witchcraft legislation framed enduring beliefs that the book records in folk remedies and apotropaic acts. The 1563 Witchcraft Act and the harsher 1604 Act criminalized maleficium; prosecutions peaked in the 1640s. In Devon, the Bideford witches—Temperance Lloyd, Mary Trembles, and Susannah Edwards—were hanged at Heavitree, Exeter, in 1682. The 1736 Act repealed earlier statutes, treating claims of magical power as fraud rather than capital crime. Yet belief persisted into the nineteenth century in witch-bottles, charms, and “cunning-folk.” Baring-Gould notes such practices in West Country cottages, interpreting them as survivals of pre-Reformation and pre-Christian ritual technologies for protection and healing, carried on beneath new theological veneers.
The Calendar (New Style) Act 1750, implemented in 1752, shifted Britain from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, omitting 11 days (2–14 September 1752) and moving New Year’s Day to 1 January. Popular discontent and reports of protests followed the disruption of local timekeeping. Crucially for customary life, many rural communities retained “Old” festival dates—Old Christmas, Old May Day (often 12 May), and Old Midsummer—maintaining agricultural and ritual rhythms. Strange Survivals repeatedly links date anomalies in wassailing, maypoles, and solstitial fires to the calendar reform, showing how communities defended functional season-markers against administrative standardization and how the double calendar preserved earlier cosmologies under altered names and schedules.
The rise of anthropology and folklore studies provided Baring-Gould with a conceptual toolkit. Edward B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) formalized the idea of “survivals,” traits persisting after original functions fade. The Folklore Society, founded in London in 1878, and its journal (from 1890) promoted comparative methods; J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) popularized ritual theory. In Devon, the Devonshire Association (founded 1862) fostered local scholarship; Baring-Gould contributed papers and, in the 1890s, served prominently. Strange Survivals consciously adopts Tylor’s term and procedure, aligning West Country customs with European analogues to argue for continuities from pagan and medieval practice into Victorian parish life, while testing these claims against clerical records and parish memories.
Industrialization and state reform threatened the conditions that sustained local rites. Railways reached the West Country in the 1840s (e.g., Bristol–Exeter 1844; Exeter–Plymouth 1849), accelerating mobility and market integration. England and Wales became majority-urban by the 1851 census; by 1891, well over two-thirds lived in urban districts. The Elementary Education Act 1870 expanded schooling, reshaping seasonal labor and beliefs; the Bank Holidays Act 1871 and the Fairs Act 1871 rationalized leisure and enabled suppression of fairs deemed disorderly. In Cornwall and Devon, mining decline (mid-late nineteenth century) and rural out-migration altered community structures. Baring-Gould’s documentation of apple-tree wassailing, wake customs, and need-fires reflects a salvage impulse amid these administrative and economic pressures.
Nineteenth-century archaeology and the discovery of “deep time” reframed antiquity and fed interpretations of custom. Post-1859 debates (Darwin; Boucher de Perthes; Lyell) normalized prehistory. In 1894 the Devonshire Association created the Dartmoor Exploration Committee; R. N. Worth served as a leading figure, and Baring-Gould took part in excavations at sites such as Grimspound (Dartmoor), reporting on hut-circles and reaves. Fieldwork tied visible monuments to conjectured ritual life—hearths, enclosures, trackways—encouraging readings of bonfire rites, well offerings, and seasonal processions as lineal echoes of prehistoric agrarian and solar cults. Strange Survivals channels this archaeological sensibility, using named places and excavated features to anchor folklore in a stratified landscape of long-duration practice.
The book doubles as social and political critique by exposing how centralized authority—civil, ecclesiastical, and commercial—reordered communal time and space. It highlights class asymmetries in the labeling of working-class rites as “superstition,” while elite reform recast or abolished them through statute, policing, and clerical discipline. By tracing survivals after the Reformation, the 1752 calendar change, and Victorian regulation of fairs and leisure, Baring-Gould reveals how local agency adapted, renamed, and defended customary solidarities. His clerical vantage acknowledges pastoral concerns yet indicts cultural contempt for vernacular knowledge, implicitly challenging the homogenizing projects of modern schooling, market rhythms, and moral regulation that marginalized parish traditions and the rural poor who kept them.
Strange Survivals
I.On Foundations.
When the writer was a parson in Yorkshire, he had in his parish a blacksmith blessed, or afflicted—which shall we say?—with seven daughters and not a son. Now the parish was a newly constituted one, and it had a temporary licensed service room; but during the week before the newly erected church was to be consecrated, the blacksmith’s wife presented her husband with a boy—his first boy. Then the blacksmith came to the parson, and the following conversation ensued:—
Blacksmith: “Please, sir, I’ve gotten a little lad at last, and I want to have him baptised on Sunday.”
Parson: “Why, Joseph, put it off till Thursday, when the new church will be consecrated; then your little man will be the first child christened in the new font in the new church.”
Blacksmith (shuffling with his feet, hitching his shoulders, looking down): “Please, sir, folks say that t’ fust child as is baptised i’ a new church is bound to dee (die). T’ old un (the devil) claims it. Now, sir, I’ve seven little lasses, and but one lad. If this were a lass again ’twouldn’t ’a’ mattered; but as it’s a lad—well, sir, I won’t risk it.”
A curious instance this of a very widespread and very ancient superstition, the origin of which we shall arrive at presently.
In the first place, let us see the several forms it takes.
All over the north of Europe the greatest aversion is felt to be the first to enter a new building, or to go over a newly erected bridge. If to do this is not everywhere and in all cases thought to entail death, it is considered supremely unlucky. Several German legends are connected with this superstition. The reader, if he has been to Aix-la-Chapelle, has doubtless had the rift in the great door pointed out to him, and has been told how it came there. The devil and the architect made a compact that the first should draw the plans, and the second gain the Kudos; and the devil’s wage was to be that he should receive the first who crossed the threshold of the church when completed. When the building was finished, the architect’s conscience smote him, and he confessed the compact to the bishop. “We’ll do him,” said the prelate; that is to say, he said something to this effect in terms more appropriate to the century in which he lived, and to his high ecclesiastical office.
When the procession formed to enter the minster for the consecration, the devil lurked in ambush behind a pillar, and fixed his wicked eye on a fine fat and succulent little chorister as his destined prey. But alas for his hopes! this fat little boy had been given his instructions, and, as he neared the great door, loosed the chain of a wolf and sent it through. The evil one uttered a howl of rage, snatched up the wolf and rushed away, giving the door a kick, as he passed it, that split the solid oak.
The castle of Gleichberg, near Rönskild, was erected by the devil in one night. The Baron of Gleichberg was threatened by his foes, and he promised to give the devil his daughter if he erected the castle before cockcrow. The nurse overheard the compact, and, just as the castle was finished, set fire to a stack of corn. The cock, seeing the light, thought morning had come, and crowed before the last stone was added to the walls. The devil in a rage carried off the old baron—and served him right—instead of the maiden. We shall see presently how this story works into our subject.
At Frankfort may be seen, on the Sachsenhäuser Bridge, an iron rod with a gilt cock on the top. This is the reason: An architect undertook to build the bridge within a fixed time, but three days before that on which he had contracted to complete it, the bridge was only half finished. In his distress he invoked the devil, who undertook the job if he might receive the first who crossed the bridge. The work was done by the appointed day, and then the architect drove a cock over the bridge. The devil, who had reckoned on getting a human being, was furious; he tore the poor cock in two, and flung it with such violence at the bridge that he knocked two holes in it, which to the present day cannot be closed, for if stones are put in by day they are torn out by night. In memorial of the event, the image of the cock was set up on the bridge.
Sometimes the owner of a house or barn calls in the devil, and forfeits his life or his soul by so doing, which falls to the devil when the building is complete.
And now, without further quotation of examples, what do they mean? They mean this—that in remote times a sacrifice of some sort was offered at the completion of a building;[3q] but not only at the completion—the foundation of a house, a castle, a bridge, a town, even of a church, was laid in blood. In heathen times a sacrifice was offered to the god under whose protection the building was placed; in Christian times, wherever much of old Paganism lingered on, the sacrifice continued, but was given another signification. It was said that no edifice would stand firmly unless the foundations were laid in blood. Some animal was placed under the corner-stone—a dog, a sow, a wolf, a black cock, a goat, sometimes the body of a malefactor who had been executed for his crimes.
Here is a ghastly story, given by Thiele in his “Danish Folk-tales.” Many years ago, when the ramparts were being raised round Copenhagen, the wall always sank, so that it was not possible to get it to stand firm. They, therefore, took a little innocent girl, placed her in a chair by a table, and gave her playthings and sweetmeats. While she thus sat enjoying herself, twelve masons built an arch over her, which, when completed, they covered with earth to the sound of drums and trumpets. By this process the walls were made solid.
When, a few years ago, the Bridge Gate of the Bremen city walls was demolished, the skeleton of a child was actually found embedded in the foundations.
Heinrich Heine says on this subject: “In the Middle Ages the opinion prevailed that when any building was to be erected something living must be killed, in the blood of which the foundation had to be laid, by which process the building would be secured from falling; and in ballads and traditions the remembrance is still preserved how children and animals were slaughtered for the purpose of strengthening large buildings with their blood.”
The story of the walls of Copenhagen comes to us only as a tradition, but the horrible truth must be told that in all probability it is no invention of the fancy, but a fact.
Throughout Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and North Germany, tradition associates some animal with every church, and it goes by the name of Kirk-Grim. These Kirk-Grims are the goblin apparitions of the beasts that were buried under the foundation-stones of the churches. It is the same in Devonshire—the writer will not say at the present day, but certainly forty or fifty years ago. Indeed, when he was a boy he drew up a list of the Kirk-Grims that haunted all the neighbouring parishes. To the church of the parish in which he lived, belonged two white sows yoked together with a silver chain; to another, a black dog; to a third, a ghostly calf; to a fourth, a white lamb.
Afzelius, in his collection of Swedish folk-tales, says: “Heathen superstition did not fail to show itself in the construction of Christian churches. In laying the foundations, the people retained something of their former religion, and sacrificed to their old deities, whom they could not forget, some animal, which they buried alive, either under the foundation or without the wall. The spectre of this animal is said to wander about the churchyard at night, and is called the Kirk-Grim. A tradition has also been preserved that under the altar of the first Christian churches, a lamb was usually buried, which imparted security and duration to the edifice. This is an emblem of the true Church Lamb—the Saviour, who is the Corner-Stone of His Church. When anyone enters a church at a time when there is no service, he may chance to see a little lamb spring across the quire and vanish. This is the church-lamb. When it appears to a person in the churchyard, particularly to the grave-digger, it is said to forbode the death of a child.”
Thiele, in his “Danish Folk-tales,” says much the same of the churches in Denmark. He assures us that every church there has its Kirk-Grim, which dwells either in the tower, or in some other place of concealment.
What lies at the base of all stories of haunted houses is the same idea. All old mansions had their foundations laid in blood. This fact is, indeed, forgotten, but it is not forgotten that a ghostly guard watches the house, who is accounted for in various ways, and very often a crime is attributed to one of the former inhabitants to account for the walking of the ghost. By no means infrequently the crime, which, in the popular mind, accounts for the ghost, can be demonstrated historically not to have taken place. Again, in a great number of cases, the spectre attached to a building is not that of a human being at all, but of some animal, and then tradition is completely at a loss to explain this phenomenon.
The proverb says that there is a skeleton in every man’s house, and the proverb is a statement of what at one time was a fact. Every house had its skeleton, and every house was intended to have its skeleton; and what was more, every house was designed to have not only its skeleton, but its ghost.
We are going back to heathen times, when we say that at the foundation-stone laying of every house, castle, or bridge, provision was made to give to each its presiding, haunting, protecting spirit. The idea, indeed, of providing every building with its spectre, as its spiritual guard, was not the primary idea, it grew later, out of the original one, the characteristically Pagan idea, of a sacrifice associated with the beginning of every work of importance.
When the primeval savage lived in a hut of poles over which he stretched skins, he thought little of his house, which could be carried from place to place with ease, but directly he began to build of stone, or raise earthworks as fortifications, he considered himself engaged on a serious undertaking. He was disturbing the face of Mother Earth, he was securing to himself in permanency a portion of that surface which had been given by her to all her children in common. Partly with the notion of offering a propitiatory sacrifice to the earth, and partly also with the idea of securing to himself for ever a portion of soil by some sacramental act, the old Pagan laid the foundations of his house and fortress in blood.
Every great work was initiated with sacrifice.[2q] If a man started on a journey, he first made an offering. A warlike expedition was not undertaken till an oblation had been made, and the recollection of this lingered on in an altered form of superstition, viz., that that side would win the day which was the first to shed blood, a belief alluded to in the “Lady of the Lake.” A ship could not be launched without a sacrifice, and the baptism of a vessel nowadays with a bottle of wine is a relic of the breaking of the neck of a human victim and the suffusion of the prow with blood, just as the burial of a bottle with coins at the present day under a foundation stone is the faded reminiscence of the immuring of a human victim.
Building, in early ages, was not so lightly taken in hand as at present, and the principles of architectural construction were ill understood. If the walls showed tokens of settlement, the reason supposed was that the earth had not been sufficiently propitiated, and that she refused to bear the superimposed burden.
Plutarch says that when Romulus was about to found the Eternal City, by the advice of Etruscan Augurs, he opened a deep pit, and cast into it the “first fruits of everything that is reckoned good by use, or necessary by nature,” and before it was closed by a great stone, Faustulus and Quinctilius were killed and laid under it. This place was the Comitium, and from it as a centre, Romulus described the circuit of the walls.[1] The legend of Romulus slaying Remus because he leaned over the low walls is probably a confused recollection of the sacrifice of the brothers who were laid under the bounding wall. According to Pomponius Mela, the brothers Philæni were buried alive at the Carthaginian frontier. A dispute having arisen between the Carthaginians and Cyrenæans about their boundaries, it was agreed that deputies should start at a fixed time from each of the cities, and that the place of their meeting should thenceforth form the limit of demarcation. The Philæni departed from Carthage, and advanced much farther than the Cyrenæans. The latter accused them of having set out before the time agreed upon, but at length consented to accept the spot which they had reached as a boundary line, if the Philæni would submit to be buried alive there. To this the brothers consented. Here the story is astray of the truth. Really, the Philæni were buried at the confines of the Punic territory, to be the ghostly guardians of the frontier. There can be little doubt that elsewhere burials took place at boundaries, and it is possible that the whipping of boys on gang-days or Rogations may have been a mediæval and Christian mitigation of an old sacrifice. Certainly there are many legends of spectres that haunt and watch frontiers, and these legends point to some such practice. But let us return to foundations.
In the ballad of the “Cout of Keeldar,” in the minstrelsy of the Border, it is said,
In a note, Sir Walter Scott alludes to the tradition that the foundation stones of Pictish raths were bathed in human gore.
A curious incident occurs in the legend of St. Columba, founder of Iona, which shows how deep a hold the old custom had taken. The original idea of a sacrifice to propitiate the earth was gone, but the idea that appropriation of a site was not possible without one took its place. The Saint is said to have buried one of his monks, Oran by name, alive, under the foundations of his new abbey, because, as fast as he built, the spirits of the soil demolished by night what he raised by day. In the life of the Saint by O’Donnell (Trias Thaumat.) the horrible truth is disguised. The story is told thus:—On arriving at Hy (Iona), St. Columba said, that whoever willed to die first would ratify the right of the community to the island by taking corporal possession of it. Then, for the good of the community, Oran consented to die. That is all told, the dismal sequel, the immuring of the living monk, is passed over. More recent legend, unable to understand the burial alive of a monk, explains it in another way. Columba interred him because he denied the resurrection.
It is certain that the usage remained in practice long after Europe had become nominally Christian; how late it continued we shall be able to show presently.
Grimm, in his “German Mythology,” says: “It was often considered necessary to build living animals, even human beings, into the foundations on which any edifice was reared, as an oblation to the earth to induce her to bear the superincumbent weight it was proposed to lay on her. By this horrible practice it was supposed that the stability of the structure was assured, as well as other advantages gained.” Good weather is still thought, in parts of Germany, to be secured by building a live cock into a wall, and cattle are prevented from straying by burying a living blind dog under the threshold of a stable. The animal is, of course, a substitute for a human victim, just as the bottle and coins are the modern substitute for the live beast.
In France, among the peasantry, a new farmhouse is not entered on till a cock has been killed, and its blood sprinkled in the rooms. In Poitou, the explanation given is that if the living are to dwell in the house, the dead must have first passed through it. And in Germany, after the interment of a living being under a foundation was abandoned, it was customary till comparatively recently to place an empty coffin under the foundations of a house.
This custom was by no means confined to Pagan Europe. We find traces of it elsewhere. It is alluded to by Joshua in his curse on Jericho which he had destroyed, “Cursed be the man before the Lord, that riseth up, and buildeth this city Jericho: he shall lay the foundation thereof in his firstborn, and in his youngest son shall he set up the gates of it.” (Josh. vi. 26.)
The idea of a sacrifice faded out with the spread of Christianity,[1q] and when tenure of soil and of buildings became fixed and usual, the notion of securing it by blood disappeared; but in its place rose the notion of securing a spiritual protector to a building, sacred or profane, and until quite late, the belief remained that weak foundations could be strengthened and be made to stand by burying a living being, generally human, under them. The thought of a sacrifice to the Earth goddess was quite lost, but not the conviction that by a sacrifice the cracking walls could be secured.
The vast bulk of the clergy in the early Middle Ages were imbued with the superstitions of the race and age to which they belonged. They were of the people. They were not reared in seminaries, and so cut off from the influences of ignorant and superstitious surroundings. They were a little ahead of their fellows in culture, but only a little. The mediæval priest allowed the old Pagan customs to continue unrebuked, he half believed in them himself. One curious and profane incident of the close of the fifteenth century may be quoted to show to how late a date heathenism lingered mixed up with Christian ideas. An Italian contemporary historian says, that when Sessa was besieged by the King of Naples, and ran short of water, the inhabitants put a consecrated host in the mouth of an ass, and buried the ass alive in the porch of the church. Scarcely was this horrible ceremony completed, before the windows of heaven were opened, and the rain poured down.[2]
In 1885, Holsworthy parish church was restored, and in the course of restoration the south-west angle wall of the church was taken down. In it, embedded in the mortar and stone, was found a skeleton. The wall of this portion of the church was faulty, and had settled. According to the account given by the masons who found the ghastly remains, there was no trace of a tomb, but every appearance of the person having been buried alive, and hurriedly. A mass of mortar was over the mouth, and the stones were huddled about the corpse as though hastily heaped about it, then the wall was leisurely proceeded with.
The parish church of Kirkcudbright was partially taken down in 1838, when, in removing the lintel of the west doorhead, a skull of a man was found built into the wall above the doorway. This parish church was only erected in 1730, so that this seems to show a dim reminiscence, at a comparatively recent date, of the obligation to place some relic of a man in the wall to insure its stability.
In the walls of the ancient castle of Henneberg, the seat of a line of powerful counts, is a relieving arch, and the story goes that a mason engaged on the castle was induced by the offer of a sum of money to yield his child to be built into it. The child was given a cake, and the father stood on a ladder superintending the building. When the last stone was put in, the child screamed in the wall, and the man, overwhelmed with self-reproach, lost his hold, fell from the ladder, and broke his neck. A similar story is told of the castle of Liebenstein. A mother sold her child for the purpose. As the wall rose about the little creature, it cried out, “Mother, I still see you!” then, later, “Mother, I can hardly see you!” and lastly, “Mother, I see you no more!” In the castle of Reichenfels, also, a child was immured, and the superstitious conviction of the neighbourhood is, that were the stones that enclose it removed, the castle would fall.
In the Eifel district, rising out of a gorge is a ridge on which stand the ruins of two extensive castles, Ober and Nieder Manderscheid. According to popular tradition, a young damsel was built into the wall of Nieder Manderscheid, yet with an opening left, through which she was fed as long as she was able to eat. In 1844 the wall at this point was broken through, and a cavity was discovered in the depth of the wall, in which a human skeleton actually was discovered.
The Baron of Winneburg, in the Eifel, ordered a master mason to erect a strong tower whilst he was absent. On his return he found that the tower had not been built, and he threatened to dismiss the mason. That night someone came to the man and said to him: “I will help you to complete the tower in a few days, if you will build your little daughter into the foundations.” The master consented, and at midnight the child was laid in the wall, and the stones built over her. That is why the tower of Winneburg is so strong that it cannot be overthrown.
When the church of Blex, in Oldenburg, was building, the foundations gave way, being laid in sand. Accordingly, the authorities of the village crossed the Weser, and bought a child from a poor mother at Bremerleke, and built it alive into the foundations. Two children were thus immured in the basement of the wall of Sandel, one in that of Ganderkesee. At Butjadeirgen, a portion of the dyke gave way, therefore a boy named Hugo was sunk alive in the foundations of the dam. In 1615 Count Anthony Günther of Oldenburg, on visiting a dyke in process of construction, found the workmen about to bury an infant under it. The count interfered, saved the child, reprimanded the dam-builders, and imprisoned the mother who had sold her babe for the purpose. Singularly enough, this same count is declared by tradition to have buried a living child in the foundations of his castle at Oldenburg.
When Detinetz was built on the Danube, the Slavonic settlers sent out into the neighbourhood to capture the first child encountered. A boy was taken, and walled into the foundations of their town. Thence the city takes its name, dijete is the Slavonic for boy.
In the life of Merlin, as given by Nennius and by Geoffrey of Monmouth, we are told that Vortigern tried to build a castle, but that the walls gave way as fast as he erected them. He consulted the wise men, and they told him that his foundations could only be made to stand if smeared with the blood of a fatherless boy. Thus we get the same superstition among Celts, Slaves, Teutons, and Northmen.
Count Floris III. of Holland, who married Ada, daughter of Henry, the son of David, King of Scotland, visited the island of Walcheren in 1157, to receive the homage of the islanders. On his return to Holland he despatched a number of experienced workmen to repair the sea-walls which were in a dilapidated condition. In one place where the dam crossed a quicksand, they were unable to make it stand till they had sunk a live dog in the quicksand. The dyke is called Hontsdamm to this day. Usually a live horse was buried in such places, and this horse haunts the sea-walls; if an incautious person mounts it, the spectre beast plunges into the sea and dissolves into foam.
The dog or horse is the substitute for a child. A few centuries earlier the dyke builders would have reared it over an infant buried alive. The trace of the substitution remains in some folk-tales. An architect promises the devil the soul of the first person who crosses the threshold of the house, or church, or goes over the bridge he has built with the devil’s aid. The evil one expects a human victim, and is put off with a wolf, or a dog, or a cock. At Aix-la-Chapelle, as we have seen, a wolf took the place of a human victim: at Frankfort a cock.
In Yorkshire, the Kirk-Grim is usually a huge black dog with eyes like saucers, and is called a padfoot. It generally frequents the church lanes; and he who sees it knows that he must die within the year. And now—to somewhat relieve this ghastly subject—I may tell an odd incident connected with it, to which the writer contributed something.
On a stormy night in November, he was out holding over his head a big umbrella, that had a handle of white bone. A sudden gust—and the umbrella was whisked out of his hand, and carried away into infinite darkness and mist of rain.
That same night a friend of his was walking down a very lonely church lane, between hedges and fields, without a house near. In the loneliest, most haunted portion of this lane, his feet, his pulsation and his breath were suddenly arrested by the sight of a great black creature, occupying the middle of the way, shaking itself impatiently, moving forward, then bounding on one side, then running to the other. No saucer eyes, it is true, were visible, but it had a white nose that, to the horrified traveller, seemed lit with a supernatural phosphoric radiance. Being a man of intelligence, he would not admit to himself that he was confronted by the padfoot; he argued with himself that what he saw was a huge Newfoundland dog. So he addressed it in broad Yorkshire: “Sith’ere, lass, don’t be troublesome. There’s a bonny dog, let me pass. I’ve no stick. I wi’nt hurt thee. Come, lass, come, let me by.”
At that moment a blast rushed along the lane. The black dog, monster, padfoot, made a leap upon the terrified man, who screamed with fear. He felt claws in him, and he grasped—an umbrella. Mine!
That this idea of human victims being required to ensure the stability of a structure is by no means extinct, and that it constitutes a difficulty that has to be met and overcome in the East, will be seen from the following interesting extract from a recent number of the London and China Telegraph. The writer says:—“Ever and anon the idea gets abroad that a certain number of human bodies are wanted, in connection with laying the foundation of some building that is in progress; and a senseless panic ensues, and everyone fears to venture out after nightfall. The fact that not only is no proof forthcoming of anyone having been kidnapped, but that, on the contrary, the circle of friends and acquaintances is complete, quite fails to allay it. But is there ever any reasoning with superstition? The idea has somehow got started; it is a familiar one, and it finds ready credence. Nor is the belief confined either to race, creed, or locality. We find it cropping up in India and Korea, in China and Malaysia, and we have a strong impression of having read somewhere of its appearance in Persia. Like the notions of celibacy and retreat in religion, it is common property—the outcome, apparently, of a certain course of thought rather than of any peculiar surroundings. The description of the island of Solovetsk in Mr. Hepworth Dixon’s ‘Free Russia’ might serve, mutatis mutandis, for a description of Pootoo; and so a report of one of these building scares in China would serve equally well for the Straits. When the last mail left, an idea had got abroad among the Coolie population that a number of heads were required in laying the foundations of some Government works at Singapore; and so there was a general fear of venturing out after nightfall, lest the adventurer should be pounced on and decapitated. One might have thought the ways of the Singapore Government were better understood! That such ideas should get abroad about the requirements of Government even in China or Annam is curious enough; but the British Government of the Straits above all others! Yet there it is; the natives had got it into their heads that the Government stood in need of 960 human heads to ensure the safe completion of certain public works, and that 480 of the number were still wanting. Old residents in Shanghai will remember the outbreak of a very similar panic at Shanghai, in connection with the building of the cathedral. The idea got abroad that the Municipal Council wanted a certain number of human bodies to bury beneath the foundation of that edifice, and a general dread of venturing out after nightfall—especially of going past the cathedral compound—prevailed for weeks, with all kinds of variations and details. A similar notion was said to be at the bottom of the riots which broke out last autumn at Söul. Foreigners—the missionaries for choice—were accused of wanting children for some mysterious purpose, and the mob seized and decapitated in the public streets nine Korean officials who were said to have been parties to kidnapping victims to supply the want. This, however, seems more akin to the curious desire for infantile victims which was charged against missionaries in the famous Honan proclamation which preceded the Tientsin massacre, and which was one of the items in the indictment against the Roman Catholics on the occasion of that outbreak. Sometimes children’s brains are wanted for medicine, sometimes their eyes are wanted to compound material for photography. But these, although cognate, are not precisely similar superstitions to the one which now has bestirred the population of Singapore. A case came to us, however, last autumn, from Calcutta, which is so exactly on all fours with this latest manifestation, that it would almost seem as if the idea had travelled like an epidemic and broken out afresh in a congenial atmosphere. Four villagers of the Dinagepore district were convicted, last September, of causing the death of two Cabulis and injuring a third, for the precise reason that they had been kidnapping children to be sacrificed in connection with the building of a railway bridge over the Mahanuddi. A rumour had got abroad that such proceedings were in contemplation, and when these Cabulis came to trade with the villagers they were denounced as kidnappers and mobbed. Two were killed outright, their bodies being flung into the river; while the third, after being severely handled, escaped by hiding himself. We are not aware whether the origin of this curious fancy has ever been investigated and explained, for it may be taken for granted that, like other superstitions, it has its origin in some forgotten custom or faded belief of which a burlesque tradition only remains. This is not the place to go into a disquisition on the origin of human sacrifice; but it is not difficult to believe that, to people who believe in its efficacy, the idea of offering up human beings to propitiate the deity, when laying the foundations of a public edifice, would be natural enough. Whether the notion which crops up now and again, all over Asia, really represents the tradition of a practice—whether certain monarchs ever did bury human bodies, as we bury newspapers and coins, beneath the foundations of their palaces and temples, is a question we must leave others to answer. It is conceivable that they may have done so, as an extravagant form of sacrifice; and it is also conceivable that the abounding capacity of man for distorting superstitious imagery, may have come to transmute the idea of sacrificing human beings as a measure of propitiation, into that of employing human bodies as actual elements in the foundation itself. It is possible that the inhabitants of Dinagepore conserve the more ideal and spiritual view, which the practical Chinese mind has materialised, as in the recent instance at Singapore. Anyhow, the idea is sufficiently wide-spread and curious to deserve a word of examination as well as of passing record.”
