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CHAPTER VI

EUROPEAN CONDITIONS

HERE are obviously conditions attaching to European culture history which do not apply elsewhere, and as obviously the most important, perhaps the only important one, which it is necessary to consider in connection with the problems of folklore is that resulting from the introduction of a non-European religion and the adoption of this religion as part of the state machinery in the several countries. This religion is, of course, Christianity. It came into the home of a decaying, corrupt, and impossible state religion wherever the Roman Empire was established and into the homes of purer and sterner faiths, faiths that had belonged to the people through all the years of conquest and settlement, migration and resettle ment, wherever the empire of Rome had not become established.

Until the advent of Christianity into Britain the Celtic peoples possessed their own customs, their own religious beliefs, their own usages. Until the AngloSaxons came into contact with Christianity in their new settlements in England, they also possessed their own customs, usages, and beliefs. So far as Celt and Teuton were responsible for continuing or allowing to continue the still older faiths, the faiths of savagery as

we have accustomed ourselves to term them, they brought these faiths also into contact with Christianity, and Christianity dealt with the problem thus presented exactly as it dealt with the Celtic and Teutonic faiths, namely, by treating all alike as pagan, all equally to be set aside or used in any fashion that circumstances might demand. Let it be particularly noted that Christianity did not distinguish between the various shades of paganism. All that was not Christian was pagan.

Christianity was both antagonistic to and tolerant of pagan custom and belief. In principle and purpose it was antagonistic. In practice it was tolerant where it could tolerate safely. At the centre it aimed at purity of Christian doctrine, locally it permitted pagan practices to be continued under Christian auspices. In the earliest days it set itself against all forms of idolatry and non-Christian practices; in later days, after the fifth century, says Gibbon,1 it accepted both pagan practice and pagan ritual.

The relationship of Christianity to paganism is, therefore, a very complex subject, and it would not be possible in this place to work out one tithe of it. Nor is it needed. The two cardinal facts with which we are now concerned are the principle of antagonism and the practice of toleration. As to the former there need not be any discussion on the fact. Everywhere throughout Europe its effect is to be seen. It formed the most solid and systematic arresting force against the natural development of pagan belief and practice, and it is this fact of arrested development in pagan belief and 1 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Bury), iii. 214-15.

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practice which is of great importance. We can ascertain the point of stoppage, note the stage of arrested development, and trace out the subsequent history of a custom, belief, or rite so arrested. As a survival in a state of arrested development, a custom or belief is observable throughout its later history. All it does is to decay, and decay slowly, and each stage of decay may oftentimes be discovered. On the other hand, if no arrest of development had taken place there would have been no survival and no decay. The custom or belief which is not arrested by an opposing culture becomes a part of the religion or of the institutions of the nation, and the history of its development becomes, as a rule, lost in the general advance of religion and politics-custom develops into law, belief develops into religion, rite develops into ceremonial, and tradition ceases to be the force which keeps them alive. The two classes of custom and belief thus contrasted are of different value to the student. The one is important because it contains the germs and goes back to the origin of existing institutions. The other is important because, having been arrested by a strong opposing force, unable to destroy it altogether, it remains as evidence of custom and belief at the time of its arrestment. It will be seen at once how far this evidence may take us. It stretches back into the remotest past. It survives in the stage at which it was arrested, not of course in the form in which it then appeared, but in the decayed form which years of existence beneath the ever-opposing forces of the established civilisation must have brought about.

These opposing forces can be detected in working

order. What can be more indicative of a dual system of belief than the cry of an old Scottish peasant when he came to worship at the sacred well?_"O Lord, Thou knowest that well would it be for me this day an I had stoopit my knees and my heart before Thee in spirit and in truth as often as I have stoopit them afore this well. But we maun keep the customs of our fathers." It appears over and over again in the lives of early Christian saints who were only just parting from a living pagan faith. Thus St. Bega was the patroness of St. Bees in Cumberland, where she left a holy bracelet which was long an object of profound veneration; and in a prefatory statement by the compiler of a small collection of her miracles, written in the twelfth century, we learn among other things that whosoever forswore himself upon her bracelet swiftly incurred the heaviest punishment of perjury or a speedy death. It is to be observed that Beagas, the French Bague, is the Anglo-Saxon denomination for rings, and Dr. William Bell suggests that holy St. Bega was but a personification of one of the holy rings which, having gained great hold upon the minds of the heathen Cumbrians, it was not politic in their first Christian missionaries wholly to subvert.1 These rings are, of course, the doom rings of the Scandinavian temples which are so often referred to in the Sagas.2

Baptism, an essentially Christian ceremony, might off-hand be supposed to contain nothing but evidence for Christianity. It might at most be expected that the

1 Royal Irish Academy, viii. 258; Brit. Arch. Assoc. (Gloucester volume), 62.

"The Story of the Ere Dwellers," Morris, Saga Library, ii. 8.

details of the ceremony would contain relics of adapted pagan rites, and this we know is the case. But we can go beyond even this, and discover in the popular conception of the rite very clear indications of the early antagonism between Christianity and paganisman antagonism which is certainly some eighteen hundred years old in this country, and though so old is still contained in the evidence of folklore.

An analysis of baptismal folklore shows us that its most important section is contained under the group which deals with the effect of non-baptism. In England we have it prevailing in the border counties, in Cornwall, Devonshire, Durham, Lanca shire, Middlesex, Northumberland, and Yorkshire, and in North-East Scotland, that children joined the ranks of the fairies if they died unchristened, or that their souls wandered about in the air, restless and unhappy, until Judgment Day. Various penalties attended the condition of non-baptism, but perhaps the most signifi cant is the Northumberland custom of burying an unbaptised babe at the feet of an adult Christian corpse -surely a relic of the old sacrifice at a burial which is indicated so frequently in the graves of prehistoric times, particularly of the long-barrow period. In Ireland we have the effect of non-baptism in a still more grim form. In the sixteenth century the rude Irish used to leave the right arms of their male children unchristened, to the intent that they might give a more ungracious and deadly blow.1

These, and their allied and variant customs, are relics, not so much of the absorption by Christian 66 1 Camden, Britannia, s.v. Ireland."