as a sheep or a calf being sacrificed, as in the Isle of Man, but the objects of the sacrifices may be said to be the same.

10. Several pin and rag wells are said to exist in Lincolnshire, their waters being supposed to possess healing virtues, especially as regards eye ailments.

I Love-spells and prognostications are mentioned, some of them as belonging to Allhallows, as they do partly in the Isle of Man: she mentions the making of dumb cake, and the eating of the salt herring, followed by dreams of the future husband bringing the thirsting lass drink in a jug, the quality of which indicates the bearer's position in life. But other Lincolnshire practices of the kind seem to oscillate between Allhallows and St. Mark's Eve, while gravitating decidedly towards the latter date. Here it is preferable to give Miss Peacock's own words:-' Professor Rhys' mention of the footmark in the ashes reminds me of a love-spell current in the Wapentake of Manley in North Lincolnshire. Properly speaking, it should be put in practice on St. Mark's E'en, that eerie spring-tide festival when those who are skilled may watch the church porch and learn who will die in the ensuing twelvemonth; but there is little doubt that the charm is also used at Hallow E'en, and at other suitable seasons of the year. The spell consists in riddling ashes on the hearthstone, or beans on the floor of the barn, with proper ceremonies and at the proper time, with the result that the girl who works her incantation correctly finds the footprint of the man she is to marry clearly marked on the sifted mass the following morning. It is to be supposed that the spirit of the lover is responsible for the mark, as, according to another folk-belief, any girl who watches her supper on St. Mark's E'en will see the spirit of the man she will wed come into the room at midnight to

partake of the food provided. The room must be one with the door and windows in different walls, and both must be open. The spirit comes in by the door (and goes out by the window ?). Each girl who undertakes to keep watch must have a separate supper and a separate candle, and all talking is to end before the clock goes twelve, for there must not be any speaking before the spirits. From these superstitions, and from the generally received idea that the spirits of all the parishioners are to be observed entering the church on St. Mark's E'en, it may be inferred that the Manx footprint is made by the wraith of the person doomed to death.' Compare pp. 318-9 above.

What Miss Peacock alludes to as watching the church porch was formerly well known in Wales', and may be illustrated from a district so far east as the Golden Valley, in Herefordshire, by the following story told me in 1892 by Mrs. Powell of Dorstone, on the strength of what she had learnt from her mother-inlaw, the late Mrs. Powell, who was a native of that parish :

'On Allhallows Eve at midnight, those who are bold enough to look through the church windows will see the building lighted with an unearthly light, and the pulpit occupied by his Satanic majesty clothed in a monk's habit. Dreadful anathemas are the burden of his preaching, and the names of those who in the coming year are to render up their souls may be heard by those who have courage to listen. A notorious evil liver, Jack of France, once by chance passed the church at this awful moment: looking in he saw the lights and heard the voice, and his own name in the horrid list; and, according to some versions of the story, he went home

1See p. 321 above and the references there given; also Howells' Cambrian Superstitions, p. 58.

to die of fright. Others say that he repented and died in good repute, and so cheated the evil one of his prey.'

I have no list of places in Wales and its marches which have this sort of superstition associated with them, but it is my impression that they are mostly referred to Allhallows, as at Dorstone, and that where that is not the case they have been shifted to the beginning of the year as at present reckoned; for in Celtic lands, at least, they seem to have belonged to what was reckoned the beginning of the year. The old Celtic year undoubtedly began at Allhallows, and the day next in importance after the Calends of Winter (in Welsh Calangáeaf) was, among the Celts, the beginning of the summer half of the year, or the Calends of May (in Welsh Calánmai), which St. Mark's Eve approaches too nearly for us to regard it as accidental. With this modified agreement between the Lincolnshire date and the Celtic one contrast the irreconcilable English date of St. John's Eve; and see Tylor's Primitive Culture, i. 440, where one reads as follows of 'the well-known superstition,' 'that fasting watchers on St. John's Eve may see the apparitions of those doomed to die during the year come with the clergyman to the church door and knock; these apparitions are spirits who come forth from their bodies, for the minister has been noticed to be much troubled in his sleep while his phantom was thus engaged, and when one of a party of watchers fell into a sound sleep and could not be roused, the others saw his apparition knock at the church door.' With an unerring instinct for the intelligent colligation of facts, Miss Peacock finds the nearest approach to the yearly review of the moritures, if I may briefly so call them, in the wraith's footprint in the ashes. Perhaps a more systematic examination of Manx folklore may result in the discovery of a more exact parallel.

For want of knowing where else to put it, I may mention here in reference to the dead, a passage which has been copied for me by my friend Mr. Gwenogvryn Evans, from Manuscript 163 in the Peniarth Collection. I understand it to be of the earlier part of the sixteenth century, and p. 1o has the following passage :

Yn yr ynys honn [Manaw] y kair gweled liw dyd bobyl a vvessynt veirw/ Rrai gwedi tori penav /eraitt gwedi torri i haelode / Ac os dieithred a dissyfynt i gweled hwynt / Sengi ar draed gwyr or tir ac vetty hwynt a gaent weled yr hyn a welssynt hwyntav.

'In this island [Man] one beholds in the light of day people who have died, some with their heads cut off and others with their limbs cut off. And if strangers desire to see them, they have to stand on the feet of the natives of the land, and in that way they would see what the latter had seen.'

A similar instance of the virtue of standing on the feet of another person has been mentioned in reference to the farmer of Deunant, at p. 230 above; the foot, however, on which he had to stand in order to get a glimpse of the fairy world, was a fairy's own foot.

Lastly, the passage in the Peniarth Manuscript has something more to say of the Isle of Man, as follows:

Mawr oed arfer o swynion a chyvaredion gynt yn yr ynys honn/Kanys gwraged a vydynt yno yn gwnevthvr gwynt i longwyr gwedir gav mewn tri chwlm o edav aphan vai eissie gwynt arnynt dattod kwlm or edav anaynt.

'Great was the practice formerly of spells and sorceries in this island; for there used to be there women making wind for sailors, which wind they confined within three knots made on a thread. And when they had need of wind they would undo a knot of the thread.' This was written in the sixteenth century, and based probably on Higden's Polychronicon, book I, chap. xliv

(= I. 42–3), but the same practice of wind making goes on to this day, one of the principal practitioners being the woman to whom reference was made at p. 299. She is said to tie the breezes in so many knots which she makes on the purchasing sailor's pocket-handkerchief. This reminds one of the sibyl of Warinsey, or the Island of Guernsey, who is represented by an ancient Norse poet as fashioning false prophecies.' See Vigfusson and Powell's Corpus Poeticum Boreale, i. 136; also Mela's first-century account of the virgins of the island of Sena, which runs to the following effect:-'Sena, in the Britannic Sea, opposite the coast of the Osismi, is famous for its oracle of a Gaulish god, whose priestesses, living in the holiness of perpetual virginity, are said to be nine in number. They call them Gallizenæ, and they believe them to be endowed with extraordinary gifts to rouse the sea and the wind by their incantations, to turn themselves into whatsoever animal form they may choose, to cure diseases which among others are incurable, to know what is to come and to foretell it. They are, however, devoted to the service of voyagers only who have set out on no other errand than to consult them '.' It is probable that the sacrosanct2 inhabitants of the small islands on the coasts of Gaul and Britain had wellnigh a monopoly of the traffic in wind 3.

1

1 Pomponius Mela De Chorographia, edited by Parthey, iii, chap. 6 (p. 72); see also my Hibbert Lectures, pp. 195-6, where, however, the identification of the name Sena with that of Sein should be cancelled. Sein seems to be derived from the Breton Seidhun, otherwise modified into Sizun and Sun: see chap. vi below.

See my Hibbert Lectures, pp. 195-7; also my Arthurian Legend, pp. 367-8, where a passage in point is cited at length from Plutarch De Defectu Oraculorum, xviii (= the Didot edition of Plutarch's works, iii. 511); the substance of it will be found given likewise in chap. viii below.

For an allusion to the traffic in winds in Wales see Howells, p. 86, where he speaks as follows:-'In Pembrokeshire there was a person commonly known as the cunning man of Pentregethen, who sold winds to the sailors, after the manner of the Lapland witches, and who was reverenced in the neighbourhood in which he dwelt, much more than the divines.'