APPENDIX II. ELDER TREE

463

of it about with them from the charms of witches. It has been suggested that it was on this account that our forefathers planted it so freely by the side of their cottages.1

66

In a curious, thick, square book of 816 pages, printed in 1823, entitled Five Thousand Receipts in all the Useful and Domestic Arts, are three elaborate receipts for making elderberry wine, and also (p. 229) the way to make an imitation of Cyprus wine from elder berries." The particulars conclude: "This wine is so much like the fine, rich wine brought from the island of Cyprus, in colour, taste, and flavour, that it has deceived the best judges." Then follows a long receipt of how to make "imitation of port wine" from a mixture of elder berries, "good cider," brandy, cochineal! From the same volume (p. 229) I gather that elder flowers can be used to make English Frontiniac": "Stop it close, and bottle in six months. When well kept this wine will pass very well for Frontiniac." Cyprus and Frontiniac are nowadays as unknown as Old Falernian.

In earlier times elder wood was buried with dead bodies, we are told, and the driver of the funeral hearse has in later years had his whip made of a stick cut from that tree. In Tyrol an elder bush is often trimmed up in the shape of a cross and planted on the newly closed grave. If it should come into blossom after that it is a satisfactory augury of the happy condition of the departed."

In Bohemia three spoonfuls of the water which has been used to bathe an invalid are poured under an elder tree to benefit the patient; and a Danish cure for toothache consists in placing an elder twig in the mouth, and then sticking it in a wall saying, "Depart, thou evil spirit.' "8

The durability of the wood of the elder is expressed in the Wiltshire proverb :

"An eldern stake and a blackthorn ether [hedge]

Will make a hedge to last for ever."

Another old proverb says:

"When the elder is white, brew and bake a peck,
When the elder is black, brew and bake a sack";

which I take to mean that in the spring, when the odorous cymes of white flowers come into bloom, the weather is so open that lengthy thought for the morrow is not so necessary as when those flowers are followed by the small masses of round black berries.

1 Friend's Flowers and Flower Lore (1884), 2nd ed., p. 543.
2 Ibid., p.
586.

3 T. F. Thiselton Dyer's Folk-lore of Plants (1889), p. 288.

The old Cornish name for the elder is scauan, which crops up in many place-names in Cornwall and is also apparent in such family names as Scawen and Boscawen. The name even now survives in Cornwall as skew-tree.

Dr. Prior once suggested that elder, eller, are connected with an early English word meaning Kindler," a name which he says "we may suppose that it acquired from its hollow branches being used like the bamboo in the tropics, to blow up a fire."

Though then we may have no especial regard for the elder tree, we cannot help being interested in the curious mixed mass of superstition which surrounds it. With our modern scientific education clamouring at the door of reason we are too apt to jump to conclusions, too apt to ignore the faiths and beliefs of the past, and what they meant to those who lived with them. Superstition being an excess, is ever better than a void-something is better than nothing; it cannot co-exist with a disrespectful, disregarding state of mind. It is too a hope when there is nothing better :

"Et des esprits impures l'alégresse est extrême,

Quand un espoir s'abjure et se dit anathème."

APPENDIX III

THE NORTH WALL OF CHURCHES AND THE NORTH SIDE OF

IT

CHURCHYARDS

T has occasionally, though very rarely, happened, as at St. Just (page 163), that when rebuilding old, dilapidated churches, skeletons, and sometimes coffins, have been discovered embedded in the north wall of the edifice. I have never heard of a body being found in the south or any other wall but the north. There may, of course, be burials in the south wall, and if so the explanations of them would be totally different from those of burials in the north wall.

To bury a body in the wall of a church is so unusual that such an interment naturally provokes comment and excites attention. It is not the accustomed place to bury in, and further, such interments must always tend to weaken the wall of the fabric. Even burials close up to the church wall have always been deprecated, whether inside or outside of the church, for that reason. When therefore we find a body placed in the wall we are led to ask the reason for so strange a departure from custom and long-established usage. We may consequently be sure, when a body or skeleton is found in a church wall, that not for nothing was it there deposited. Some potent reason or reasons for departing from long-established custom must be forthcoming to explain the abnormal circumstance, if we can only light upon them. We must further remember that burial customs are among the most persistent to be handed down unimpaired and unaltered, so that burial in a church wall-so startlingly out of the common-at once provokes our thinking faculties and makes us search for the explanation of so untoward

an occurrence.

Such strange interments in the north wall of churches are sometimes said by tradition to be those of priests, usually of the rector or vicar of the parish, who were bad livers, or judged to be bad livers by their contemporaries. But we should charitably remember that a person held to be a bad liver in one age might very well be considered a good liver in another. The

alchemists of the Middle Ages were often held to have relations with the devil. Nowadays the student who devotes himself to chemical or other scientific research is looked up to as a man unselfishly working for the ultimate benefit of the race. Many a man of the present day who has made marvellous discoveries in science would, in the Middle Ages, have been called a wizard, and capitally treated as such.

At Brent, or Burnt, Pelham, Herts, there is a curious example of this north-wall burial. In the parish church of that place is a monument in the north wall of the nave. It is supposed to commemorate one Piers Shonks, lord of a manor in the parish, who lived in the time of William the Conqueror. He was, according to tradition, a noted snake-killer, and having killed a dragon which was under the immediate protection of Satan, he so exasperated the spiritual serpent that he declared he would have the body of Shonks whether he were buried within or without the church. The wily Shonks, to avoid such a dire calamity overtaking his corporeal remains, ordered his body to be placed in the wall of the church. His attendants, and this is the noticeable fact, placed the corpse in the north wall. On the wall at the back of the tomb (which is of Petworth marble and is carved in an emblematic representation of the Resurrection, with a grotesque figure at the foot of the slab signifying the triumph of Christianity over sin) is the following inscription :

"Tantum fama manet, Cadmi Sanctique Georgi

Posthuma, Tempus edax ossa, sepulchra vorat;
Hoc tamen in muro tutus, qui perdidit anguem,
Invito, positus Demonæ, Shonkus erat.
O PIERS SHONKS

WHO DIED ANNO 1086"

"Nothing of Cadmus nor St. George, those names
Of great renown, survives them but their fames :
Time was so sharp set as to make no bones
Of theirs, nor of their monumental stones.
But Shonks one serpent kills, t'other defies,
And in this wall as in a fortress lies."

In the north wall of the church of Tremeirchion, near the banks of the Elwy, North Wales, another interment took place under traditional circumstances somewhat resembling those at Brent Pelham. It is said that a necromancer priest, Daffydd Dhu (or the black of Hiradduc), died, vicar of the parish, about 1340. He had made a compact with the devil that if Satan

Also known as Pelham Sarners. In Domesday it is spelt Peleham. According to Norden, the name is derived "from the Pells and watersprings which rise there."-Chauncy's Historical Antiquities of Hertfordshire, MDCC, p. 139.

NORTH WALL OF CHURCHES, ETC. 467

permitted him to successfully practise the Black Arts with impunity during his lifetime he should possess his body, after his decease, whether he were buried inside a church or outside of a church. Here again with casuistic ingenuity the knowing ecclesiastic got the better of the Unholy One by ordering his body to be buried neither inside nor outside of the church, but in the wall, and his servants naturally chose the north wall wherein to place the mortal remains of their late master.

In both of these cases it will be observed there was a sinister, or at least a doubtful reputation, associated in their lifetimes with those whose bodies found resting-places in the north wall of the sacred edifice.

In the north wall of Rouen Cathedral is the tomb of an early archbishop, who, having accidentally killed a man by hitting him with a soup-ladle because the soup given to the poor by the servant was of an inferior quality, thought himself unworthy of a resting-place within the church, and disliking to be buried without, was interred in the wall. It was doubtless wrong of the cook to swindle the poor, but it was a greater wrong of the high dignitary of the Church to let anger get the better of calm judgment, a sin which led to homicide.

At Clavering, in Essex, right in the north wall of the church, close up to the chancel, is the recumbent figure of a knight in chain armour, evidently a Crusader. This is by tradition said to be the tomb of the founder of the church, but with what authority I know not. The vicar of the parish, Rev. S. M. Morton, informs me that he has been unable to discover any records verifying the tradition. Still, it is singular, at any rate, that the tomb of evidently a notable personage should be allocated to the north wall, and it would, judging from analogy, seem to point to the knight sculptured on the tomb having had a sinister reputation. The present building, at least the nave of Clavering Church, dates from about 1450; and Mr. Morton informs me that he has reason to think the building was erected with flints used in the construction of the old baronial castle adjoining the churchyard.

In the spring of 1872 a skeleton was found in the north wall of Purton (or Periton) Church, in Wiltshire. It was in an upright position in a cavity just large enough to contain it, and with it were found some chicken bones, some images, and an old sword. At the time the skeleton was reported to be that of a female by the local doctor, and popular opinion at once jumped to the conclusion on what evidence I have been unable to ascertain, though I have prosecuted many inquiries—that the skeleton was that of a nun who, having broken her vows, was walled up alive.