free by apostolical authority, and were as much quit from all entrance of wicked men as the altars of churches, and that all those who violated our premises were excommunicated by the chief pontiff. Upon hearing this, the king ordered by his high authority that the officer, with his attendants, should take back the man according to the privileges of the order, and should restore him to the abbey, to the honour of the order. This was done to the joy of the whole land, which gloried in our privileges. Afterwards, the violators of our abbey, as being violators of holy Church, were excommunicated, and were cited to the gates of the abbey by the letters of the Legate. Here, having first made satisfaction to God and the abbey, they were publicly scourged by the rural dean of the place and the Vicar of Farnham, and having been absolved from their sentence, and penance being enjoined to them, they went away, having been thus made for the future somewhat more civil to our Order." 91

The chronicler might well triumph in the termination of the dispute, but an impartial judge of the matter will not fail to perceive the gross injustice, which first of all shielded a murderer on a mere pretence, and then gloried in inflicting punishment on men who were merely the official executors of a warrant. But the story is instructive, as it shows how completely the existence of such privileges as those claimed by the Cistercians rendered good government and impartial exercise of law impossible; and this claim, be it observed, was made not for the good of Holy Church. It was not like the claim of Thomas á Becket, or Bishop Grosseteste, that churchmen should be judged only by churchmen, and that it was necessary for the purposes of ecclesiastical discipline that the lay courts should not interfere. This was not the claim of the Cistercians. They did not concern themselves about the general interests of the church; they looked only to their own order. They would consider their privileges as much infringed by a pursuivant of the Archbishop as by a bailiff of the King. It was a purely selfish exemption for certain ends of their own convenience and advancement, for which they strove. Under these special privileges they claimed to be allowed to monopolize as much of the soil of England as they could obtain from the devotion of the benefactors of their order. And what did they give to Church or State in return for these vast benefits. They lived in the midst of the land a life of watchful and suspicious antagonism to those around them, professing themselves to be more holy than their neighbours, but often contradicting their professions by their practice; affecting to despise wealth, yet accumulating it to a vast amount; with all their interests, their zeal, and their organization at the service of a foreign prince-an un-English and unpatriotic sect, which brought no energies to bear on the side of virtue against vice, of order against disorder, but, absorbed in

1 Annales de Waverleiâ, p. 325, seq.

their own employments and their own schemes were simply a burden and a trouble to their Church and country.

Before leaving the Waverley Annals we desire to notice a few very interesting facts connected with the ecclesiastical history of the period, which are scattered up and down in their

pages.

Under the year 1181 we have a notice of the Carthusian brethren having occupied their first dwellings in England. These were a seet of religious who made even higher professions of asceticism than the Cistercians themselves, and we may add, held to them more faithfully, a circumstance which may serve to account for the fact of their not having spread and increased like the others. Of this order was Hugh of Burgundy, better known as S. Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln. In his life, as given in the Golden Legend, we are told, In that tyme Henry, Kynge ' of England, dyd doo bylde and founded an hous of Charter'hous in England, wherfore he sent into Burgoyn to the Charter'hous for to have one of them to have the gouvernaunce and 'rewle of it. And at the grete instaunce and prayer of the 'Kynge unnethe coude he gett this sayd Saint Hughe, but at the last, by the commaundment of his oueryst and request of 'the Kynge he was sente into the reame of Englond, and there made procurator of the same hous, and there lyved an holy and 'devoute lyf, lyke as he dyd before, that he stood so in the Kynge's grace that the Kynge named him to be Byssop of Lyncolne, which bysshoprycke the Kynge had holden longe in his honde, and was called thereto by the sayd chapytre, and the byssoprycke to hym presentyd.' S. Hugh was especially famous for his pious care in attending to lepers, and in burying the dead, and thus the chronicler tells us, 'Our Lord gaf and rendryd to hym by retrybucion condyngne honourable sepul"ture, for what tyme he departed out of this world, and the same day that his body was broughte to the churche of Lyncolne, it happed that the Kynge of Englonde, the Kynge of Scotland, and three archebyssoppes, baronnes, and grete 'multitude of peple were gadred at Lyncolne, and were present 'at his honourable sepulture.' The death of S. Hugh is mentioned in the Waverley Annals, but we learn from Roger of Wendover that not only were King John and King William of Scotland present at the funeral, but that they also acted as bearers of the corpse; yet it was at this very time that John exhibited such fury against the Cistercian abbots, and then in his caprice founded an abbey of the Order, as has been mentioned above. S. Hugh was the designer, and in part the

6

1

Annales de Waverleiâ, p. 242.

2 Roger de Wendover, III. 162.

́builder, of some of the most beautiful portions of Lincoln Cathedral, and this noble fane was soon afterwards polluted by a strange and horrible crime, the account of which is given in the Waverley Annals. In the year 1205, before the altar of S. Peter, in the Church at Lincoln, William de Bramford, subdean of the Cathedral, was murdered by a certain clerk, who had been vicar of that Church. We may conjecture that the unfortunate sub-dean had been instrumental in removing his assassin from his post, and that the act was one of revenge. The remainder of the story illustrates the savage manner of the period. The clerk was straightway in the midst of the same 'church torn limb from limb by the servants of the sub-dean ' and others, and then his remains were dragged out of the church, and hung up outside the city. All this was done on 'the Lord's Day of the Dominical letter B." Another interesting event, connected with the Church at Lincoln, is told in fuller detail in these Annals than in most others. Many notices are there of the cruelties practised upon the wretched Jews, but that story, by which a great many of those which followed it were pretended to be justified, is related as follows:

1255, the Jews, the enemies of the Christian name, having miserably afflicted with many and various torments a certain boy in Lincoln, named Hugh, at length, in insult and contempt of the name of Christ, fixed him to a cross, and killed him by a cruel death. Afterwards desiring to conceal so great a crime from the Christians, they took down the glorious body from the cross and threw it into the river to sink it, but the water not enduring so great an injury of its Creator, straightway threw it out on dry ground. Upon this, the enemies of Christ thinking vainly to hide it more safely and secretly under ground, buried the body; but on the morrow they found the body of the blessed martyr placed upon the ground as before. Astonished, as might be expected, at the strangeness of so great a thing, they were nearly driven to madness, not knowing what to do or whither to turn themselves. At last they threw it into a well containing water for drinking. Straightway so great a light shone upon the place from heaven, and so fragrant an odour filled the whole place, that all could perceive that something holy and wonderful was contained in that well. The Christians hastened to the spot, and seeing the venerable body float upon the water, with great devotion they drew it out. By the hands and feet pierced, by the head punctured in the form of a crown, and the other scars on the body, it was clear to all that the detested Jews were the authors of this crime. They carried the body, in procession, to the church, miracles being wrought by it on the way, and eighteen of the wicked Jews confessing their crime with their own lips, were dragged by horses through the streets of London, and afterwards hung.'

2

The sufferings of these eighteen unfortunates were however by no means the whole of the vengeance taken on the Jews for the supposed crime of the murder of little S. Hugh. Many a terrible onslaught on this unfortunate people during the middle

Annales de Waverleiâ, p. 267.

2 Ib. p. 346, seq.

ages was attempted to be justified by a reference to the tragic fate of the boy of Lincoln.

An account of the great festival of the translation of the bones of S. Thomas, at Canterbury, is given in these Annals, and the writer agrees with all the others, who mention it that such a vast assemblage of persons was never seen in England. He also testifies to the wonderfully good arrangements made for the management and entertainment of the enormous multitude by Archbishop Stephen Langton. A much fuller account of this interesting ceremony will be found in the Annals of Croyland, but the fullest history of it is contained in the treatise written by Archbishop Stephen, to commemorate his great work, and which is published in the Patrologia of the Abbé Migne.

We now take leave of the Waverley Annals, with thanks to Mr. Luard, for having, by his reprint, put us in possession of a very useful Medieval Chronicle, with every facility for its use. The Index, which is promised at the conclusion of the Annales Monastici, of which both the Margan and the Waverley Annals are a part, will be a most useful source of reference for the student of these deeply interesting times. The thirteenth century was a critical period in the history of the English Church. Before the exempt bodies, the Cistercians and the Friars, had got firm footing in the land, the Papal power had not that strong and overpowering grasp which it afterwards obtained. If John had been a prince of less infamous character, if Henry III. had not been the weak and wayward creature that he was, it is probable that the establishment of our civil liberties, which those times witnessed, might have been accompanied by the establishment of ecclesiastical liberty also, and the Church of England free from the degrading slavery to Rome, might have earlier developed her true national character. That she failed to do so was due partly to the weakness of her princes, but especially to the watchfulness of the garrisons of Rome, formed by the establishment and growth of the exempt Orders.

33

ART II. On the Folk Lore of the Northern Counties of England, and the Borders. By WILLIAM HENDERSON; with an Appendix on Household Stories. By SABINE BARING GOULD. Longmans, 1866.

2. Curious Myths of the Middle Ages. By SABINE BARING GOULD, M.A. Rivingtons, 1866.

3. Lancashire Folk Lore. Compiled and Edited by JOHN HARLAND, F.S.A.; and T. T. WILKINSON, F.R.A.S. Warne and Co., 1867.

4. Popular Romances of the West of England, or the Drolls, Traditions, and Superstitions of Old Cornwall. Collected and Edited by ROBERT HUNT. 2 vols. Hotten, 1865.

5. A Manual of Mythology. Longmans.

By the Rev. GEOrge W. Cox.

FOLK LORE is a modern word, telling in its very construction of the period of its formation. We feel as sure that it belongs to the stratum of the Teutonic Archaism as we do that 'Popular Superstition' is of the Latin Deposit. Even the former, in comparison with that of its lengthy synonym, is a proof of the different estimation it has attained. The monosyllables give dignity, the polysyllables cast a slur. Folk, as connected with the great conquering Volken, are ancient and honourable; but popular and vulgar, albeit from the same root, have both deteriorated in significance in their transit through Latin. Lore infers something to be learnt and sought out; superstition is the excess of belief, and implies that it ought to be discarded and forgotten.

In effect the beliefs and customs that fell under the stigma of superstition, were driven to such remote corners under that opprobrious title, that now that they have become lore, and scholars and philologists perceive their value, contempt for them has become so current that their repositories among the peasantry are ashamed of them, and it requires no small amount of address to enable an educated person to extract an account of them, more especially since, strange and interesting as they may be to the antiquary, many are far more honoured in the breach than in the observance. Parson, doctor, and schoolmaster, must blame and condemn them in practice, even though the next generation will lose much that is racy and amusing.