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    English Folklore
    English Folklore
    English Folklore
    Ebook97 pages1 hour

    English Folklore

    By Arthur Robinson Wright

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    About this ebook

    This early work Arthur Robinson Wright was originally published in the early 20th century and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. Arthur Robinson Wright was born in the United Kingdom in 1863. In 1885 he began his career as a civil servant, working in the Patent Office. Wright enjoyed a long and successful career here, being promoted to Assistant-Comptroller of Patents in 1922 and finally retiring from the service in 1927. Aside from his official work as a civil servant, Wright was a voracious reader of folklore, and also wrote widely on the subject. Wright also amassed a huge personal library of books and newspaper cuttings during his lifetime. His collection of over five thousand books was donated to the Folklore Society after his death.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGayley Press
    Release dateMay 30, 2024
    ISBN9781528799799
    English Folklore

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      Book preview

      English Folklore - Arthur Robinson Wright

      I

      INTRODUCTION

      IN 1725 Henry Bourne dedicated to those Incouragers of Learning and Rewarders of Merit, the Mayor and Corporation of the town and county of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where he was curate of All Saints’ Church, a little book with the title Antiquitates Vulgares, or The Antiquities of the Common People. Giving An Account of several of their Opinions and Ceremonies. With Proper Reflections upon each of them; shewing which may be retain’d and which ought to be laid aside. The mixture of affable condescension to the common people, and of humble apology to their betters for a display of interest in what vulgar folk did and thought, makes the book delightful reading nowadays. The preface says: I would not be thought a Reviver of old Rites and Ceremonies to the Burdening of the People, nor an Abolisher of innocent Customs, which are their Pleasures and Recreations: I aim at nothing, but a Regulation of those which are in Being among them, which they themselves are far from thinking burdensome, and abolishing such only as are sinful and wicked.

      Customs which Bourne regarded with disfavour still flourish lustily, while the religious observation of Saturday afternoon and other practices which he applauded have long ago faded into oblivion, but interest in the matters of which he wrote with deprecation has continuously grown. This first book on English folklore was expanded by others into the well-known volumes of what is generally named, after an editor of half a century later, Brand’s Popular Antiquities. In The Athenæum of August 22, 1846, W. J. Thoms, for long secretary of the Camden Society and editor of Notes and Queries, proposed, under a pseudonym, the collection of what we in England designate as Popular Antiquities, or Popular Literature . . . which would be most aptly described by a good Saxon compound Folk-Lore—the Lore of the People. The word then coined, and since deprived of its hyphen, has been adopted for the science in almost all civilised languages except the German, which uses the somewhat wider Volkskunde (admitting, however, the adjectival Folklorist or Volklorist).

      It was not at first understood that the curious items, unconsidered trifles, light as air, which fill the pages of Bourne and Brand and other early collections at home and abroad, were yet to the student

      "confirmations strong

      As proofs of holy writ,"

      could tell us about their background of the folk mind and unwritten folk history, and could throw light on the beginnings of almost all other sciences. As this has come to be perceived, folklore has gained steadily in influence and scope since the early days when Andrew Lang summarised, in his Adventures Among Books, the lesson of what we call folklore . . . which to many seems trivial, to many seems dull. It may become the most attractive and serious of the sciences. The topic of folklore and the development of customs and myths is not generally attractive, to be sure. Only a few people seem interested in that spectacle, so full of surprises—the development of all human institutions, from fairy tales to democracy. In beholding it we learn how we owe all things, humanly speaking, to the people and to genius. The natural people, the folk, has supplied us, in its unconscious way, with the stuff of all our poetry, law, ritual: and genius has selected from the mass, has turned customs into codes, nursery tales into romance, myth into science, ballad into epic, magic mummery into gorgeous ritual. . . . The student of this lore can look back and see the long trodden way bebind him, the winding tracks through marsh and forest and over burning sands. He sees the caves, the camps, the villages, the towns where the race has tarried, for shorter times or longer, strange places many of them, and strangely haunted, desolate dwellings and inhospitable. But the scarce visible tracks converge at last on the beaten ways, the ways to that city whither mankind is wandering.

      Folklore, then, has evolved from a record of old women’s chatter and rustic festivals into a science dealing with the whole of folk thought and practice. It might be defined as the science which studies the expression, in popular beliefs, institutions, practices, oral literature, and arts and pastimes, of the mental and spiritual life of the folk, the people in general, in every stage of barbarism and culture. It is at the base of all other sciences, and appears in all of them at their early stages, and often survives to a late one; thus, astronomy has evolved out of astrology, and chemistry out of alchemy. Scientific medicine is the child of medical folklore, and has retained in its pharmacopoeia until quite recent years such folk-medicines as mummy-powder and pulverised toad, and still uses at the head of its prescriptions a sign which is probably in reality the astrological sign for Jupiter, as a written charm or an invocation of the protecting god.

      Folklore seeks to decipher the unwritten history of the folk and the effect on it of heredity and surroundings, and to determine the origins of modern social institutions, customs, and beliefs. It distinguishes the phases of character and motives of conduct which influence national life, and it is hence a study of special importance and utility in the British Empire, the home of innumerable races the governing springs of whose conduct are vastly different from our own, and can only be ascertained by the sympathetic study of their folklore. It was the belief that sepoys were compelled to use for their cartridges grease from the cow sacred to Hindus that brought about the Indian Mutiny. The official, the missionary, the doctor, the judge, and the trader ought, therefore, all to be equipped with knowledge of the customs and beliefs of the people to whom they are sent. This applies also to those of us left at home. Folklore is the key to understanding and sympathy with the folk around us. Up to the time of the Renaissance the culture of all classes was much the same, and King Cophetua’s beggar maid had little to learn on her introduction to court circles except to wear richer clothes and eat strange meats. All classes enjoyed together the mumming play and the wandering minstrel’s songs and tales. Now education and outside habit have divided us into classes and masses, though the man about town who turns his chair round three times to change his luck at cards is still own brother under the skin to the coster who bows to the new moon or spits on his first money of the day for luck, and the fisherman who spits on his bait or in the mouth of the first fish caught; the Society woman who visits the Bond Street clairvoyant, or palmist, or crystal-gazer has the same longing to divine the future as her East End sister for whom the greasy cards are turned over in the back street, or the leaves in the teacup are read by an old woman. The educated man should seek to appreciate the immemorial reasons at the back of the mind and actions of the unlettered, and should humble himself by examining his own irrational deeds—crack-stepping as he walks the pavement, avoiding ladders and thirteen at table, and so on.

      Then, too, folklore is essential to the full enjoyment of our literature. The plays of Shakespeare are full of it, and only folklore can explain such passages as that in the soliloquy of King Henry VI. (Third Part, Act II., sc. v.):

      "O God! methinks it were a happy life

      To be no better than a homely swain;

      To sit upon a hill, as I do now,

      To carve out dials quaintly, point by point."

      This is made clear by Mr. Lovett’s discovery of the remarkable sundials still

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