Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth Part 49

She says, 'My dear, I'll wed thee wi' a ring, With a ring, my dear, I'll wed wi' thee.'

'Thoo may go wed thee weddens wi' whom thoo will; For I'm sure thoo'll never wed none wi' me.

11.

'But I'll put a gold chain around his neck, An' a gey good gold chain it'll be, That if ever he comes to the Norway lands, Thoo may hae a gey good guess on hi'.

12.

'An' thoo will get a gunner good, An' a gey good gunner it will be, An' he'll gae oot on a May mornin'

An' shoot the son an' the grey selchie.'

13.

Oh! she has got a gunner good, An' a gey good gunner it was he, An' he gaed oot on a May mornin', An' he shot the son and the grey selchie.

When the gunner returned from his expedition and showed the Norway woman the gold chain, which he had found round the neck of the young seal, the poor woman, realising that her son had perished, gives expression to her sorrow in the last stanza:--

14.

'Alas! alas! this woeful fate!

This weary fate that's been laid for me!'

An' ance or twice she sobbed and sighed, An' her tender heart did brak in three.

+Note.+ --Doubtless _grey_ selchie is more correct than _great_, as in the other version. Some verses were forgotten after stanza 13.

THE LYKE-WAKE DIRGE (p. 88)

'Art thow i-wont at lychwake Any playes for to make?'

John Myrc's _Instructions for Parish Priests_ (circa 1450).

Aubrey's version of _The Lyke-Wake Dirge_ is printed, more or less correctly, in the following places:--

i. Brand. _Observations on Popular Antiquities_, ed. Ellis (1813), ii.

180-81. (Not in first edition of Brand.)

ii. W. J. Thoms. _Anecdotes and Traditions_, Camden Society, 1839, pp.

88-90, and notes pp. 90-91, which are reprinted by Britten (see below).

iii. W. K. Kelly. _Curiosities of Indo-European Tradition and Folklore_, 1863, pp. 116-17.

iv. Edward Peac.o.c.k. In notes, pp. 90-92, to John Myrc's _Instructions for Parish Priests_, E.E.T.S., 1868. (Re-edited by F. J. Furnivall for the E.E.T.S., 1902, where the notes are on pp. 92-94.)

v. James Britten. _Aubrey's Remains of Gentilisme and Judaisme:_ the whole MS. edited for the Folklore Society, 1881, pp. 30-32.

Aubrey's remarks and sidenotes are as follow (Lansdowne MS. 231, fol.

114 _recto_):--

'From Mr. Mawtese, in whose father's youth, sc. about 60 yeares since now (1686), at country vulgar Funerals, was sung this song.

'At the Funeralls in Yorkes.h.i.+re, to this day, they continue the custome of watching & sitting up all night till the body is inhersed. In the interim some kneel down and pray (by the corps) some play at cards some drink & take Tobacco: they have also Mimicall playes & sports, e.g. they choose a simple young fellow to be a Judge, then the suppliants (having first blacked their hands by rubbing it under the bottom of the Pott) beseech his Lo:p [_i.e._ Lords.h.i.+p] and s.m.u.tt all his face. ['They play likewise at Hott-c.o.c.kles.' --_Sidenote._] Juvenal, Satyr II.

"Esse aliquos manes, et subterranea regna, "Et contum, & Stygio ranas in gurgite nigras, "Atq. una transire vadum tot millia cymba.

'This beliefe in Yorks.h.i.+re was amongst the vulgar (& phaps is in part still) that after the persons death, the Soule went over Whinny moore ['Whin is a furze.' --_Sidenote_.] and till about 1616 (1624) at the Funerall a woman came [like a Praefica] and sung this following Song.'

Then follow several verses scratched out, and then the Dirge, to which, however, is prefixed the remark,

'This not ye first verse.'

As regards the doubtful reading 'sleete' for 'fleet,' there is curiously contradictory evidence. Pennant, in his _Tour in Scotland_, MDCCLXIX.

(Chester, 1771, pp. 91-92), remarks:--

'On the death of a Highlander, the corps being stretched on a board, and covered with a coa.r.s.e linen wrapper, the friends lay on the breast of the deceased a wooden platter, containing a small quant.i.ty of salt and earth, separate and unmixed; the earth, an emblem of the corruptible body; the salt, an emblem of the immortal spirit. All fire is extinguished where a corps is kept; and it is reckoned so ominous, for a dog or cat to pa.s.s over it, that the poor animal is killed without mercy.

'The _Late-wake_ is a ceremony used at funerals: the evening after the death of any person, the relations and friends of the deceased meet at the house, attended by bagpipe or fiddle; the nearest of kin, be it wife, son, or daughter, opens a melancholy ball, dancing and greeting; _i.e._ crying violently at the same time; and this continues till daylight; but with such gambols and frolicks, among the younger part of the company, that the loss which occasioned them is often more than supplied by the consequences of that night. If the corps remains unburied for two nights the same rites are renewed.'

The Rev. J. C. Atkinson, on the other hand, states the contrary regarding the fire,--see his _Glossary of the Cleveland Dialect_ (1868), p. 595. He supposes 'fleet' to be equivalent to the Cleveland 'flet,'

live embers. 'The usage, hardly extinct even yet in the district, was on no account to suffer the fire in the house to go out during the entire time the corpse lay in it, and throughout the same time a candle was (or is yet) invariably kept burning in the same room with the corpse.'

Bishop Kennett, in Lansdowne MS. 1033, fol. 132, confirms Aubrey's gloss of 'fleet' = water, in quoting the first verse of the dirge. He adds, 'hence the _Fleet_, _Fleet-ditch_, in _Lond._ Sax. fleod, amnis, fluvius.'

The 'Brig o' Dread' (which is perhaps a corruption of 'the Bridge of the Dead'), 'Whinny-moor,' and the h.e.l.l-shoon, have parallels in many folklores. Thus, for the Brig, the Mohammedans have their _Al-Sirat_, finer than a hair, sharper than a razor, stretched over the midst of h.e.l.l. The early Scandinavian mythology told of a bridge over the river Gioll on the road to h.e.l.l.

In Snorri's _Edda_, when Hermodhr went to seek the soul of Baldr, he was told by the keeper of the bridge, a maiden named Modhgudhr, that the bridge rang beneath no feet save his. Similarly Vergil tells us that Charon's boat (which is also a parallel to the Brig) was almost sunk by the weight of aeneas.

Whinny-moor is also found in Norse and German mythology. It has to be traversed by all departed souls on their way to the realms of Hel or Hela, the G.o.ddess of Death. These realms were not only a place of punishment: all who died went there, even the G.o.ds themselves taking nine days and nights on the journey. The souls of Eskimo travel to Torngarsuk, where perpetual summer reigns; but the way thither is five days' slide down a precipice covered with the blood of those who have gone before.

The pa.s.sage of Whinny-moor or its equivalent is facilitated by h.e.l.l-shoon. These are obtained by the soul in various ways: the charitable gift of a pair of shoes during life a.s.sures the right to use them in crossing Whinny-moor; or a pair must be burned with the corpse, or during the wake. In one of his Dialogues, Lucian makes the wife of Eukrates return for the slipper which they had forgotten to burn.

Another parallel, though more remote, to the h.e.l.l-shoon, is afforded by the account of one William Staunton, who, like so many others, was privileged to see a vision of Purgatory and of the Earthly Paradise, on the first Friday after the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross in the year 1409. Accounts of such experiences, it may be remarked here, were popular from the tenth century onwards amongst the Anglo-Saxons and English, especially after the middle of the twelfth century, when the story of the famous 'St. Patrick's Purgatory' was first published.

William Staunton relates (Royal MS. 17 B. xliii. in the British Museum) that in one part of Purgatory, as he went along the side of a 'water, the which was blak and fowle to sight,' he saw on the further side a tower, with a fair woman standing thereon, and a ladder against the tower: but 'hit was so litille, as me thowght that it wold onnethe [scarcely] bere ony thing; and the first rong of the ladder was so that onnethe might my fynger reche therto, and that rong was sharper than ony rasor.' Hearing a 'grisly noyse' coming towards him, William 'markid'

himself with a prayer, and the noise vanished, and he saw a rope let down over the ladder from the top of the tower. And when the woman had drawn him safely to the top, she told him that the cord was one that he had once given to a chapman who had been robbed.

The whole subject of St. Patrick's Purgatory is extremely interesting; but it is outside our present scope, and can best be studied in connection with the mythology of the _Lyke-wake Dirge_ in Thomas Wright's _St. Patrick's Purgatory_ (1844). The popularity of the story is attested by accounts extant in some thirty-five Latin and English MSS. in the British Museum, in the Bodleian, at Cambridge, and at Edinburgh. Calderon wrote a drama round the myth, _El Purgatorio de San Patricio_; Robert Southey a ballad; and an early poem of George Wither's, lost in MS., treated of the same subject. Recently the tale has received attention in G. P. Krapp's _Legend of St. Patrick's Purgatory_, Baltimore, 1900.

A correspondent in _Notes and Queries_, 9th Ser., xii. 475 (December 12, 1903), remarks that the 'liche-wake' is still spoken of in the Peak district of Derbys.h.i.+re.