Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

he felt himself on the track of the elixir of life. Our imagination is set on fire. The days when the "world was young" dawn again upon us. Everything in us and around us is suffused by this glow and we see mysterious powers working for good. They who told the tale for the first time cast the picture back into days that had gone by long ago; we are throwing the rays of light before us into the days that are to come. For these tales express in a pithy and poetical form the ideals of mankind. The secret of the fairy-tales is that they are thoroughly human, no difference of faith or race, or station in life is recognised. They draw man to man, thereby weaving a spell over our mind. They find a ready echo in our heart; they appeal to every man, woman and child who is not yet affected by the conventionalities of life, who is still responsive to the perfume of the flower, to the warbling song of the bird, to the music of the murmuring stream, to the poetry of forest and glen, to the glory of the skies, and to the beauty of the world. They are a vivid reflex of those times when every day brought forth another wonder, and the fragrance of the poetry of life is wafted into our soul, refreshing, vivifying, and quickening. Our Society has drunk of that fountain of youth, and it is our privilege to have kept the access to the "eau de jouvency" free to all comers. The Fairy Godmother still showers her gifts upon us. It is for us to appreciate the gifts and to recognise the glint of the gold in the clay out of which we fashion the bricks for the future Palace of Folklore. May you be able to detect a minute fraction of it in the brick which I have endeavoured to add to the grand fabric, and forgive me if I now break the spell and bring you back, let me hope refreshed, to the world of stern realities. It was "only a Fairy Tale."

LOCAL TRADITIONS OF THE QUANTOCKS.

BY THE REV. C. W. WHISTLER, M.R.C.S., L.S.A.,

VICAR OF STOCKLAND, BRIDGWATER.

(Read at Meeting, 20th November, 1907.)

THE Quantock district of West Somerset, some of whose traditions are here to be recorded, lies between the Severn Sea and the wide fenlands of the Tone and Parrett, which, roughly speaking, run from north to south, and then from east to west, to form what was once an almost impassable frontier against an invader from south or east. The more open western side of this quadrilateral is dominated by the Quantocks themselves, rising to an extreme height of over 1200 feet about midway of their length, and studded with ancient camps at every point where a crossing could be attempted. In early days there have been practically only two roads into the district from the eastward-one across the Parrett and its marshes by ferry at what is now Bridgwater, where the way was kept in Roman times by earthworks on either side; the other by a ford, passable only at low water, at Combwich, some six miles to the seaward. Except to marshmen, there could have been no way into the district from the south, where Athelney lies hidden in the fens; and the hill tracks to the west across the Quantocks were camp-guarded. There were

name of the "Harepath" or "Hareknaps"--the way, or the ridge, of the host-and the other, still used in part, but even where unused yet to be traced, and of untold age, leads from the Combwich ford to the great hill fort which crests the rounded summit of Danesboro' or Dowsboro' hill, midway on the highest part of the range. The great Roman roads passed to the southward of the Tone fenland, but a secondary road ran from Street along the low ridge of the Polden hills to the crossing at Bridgwater, and thence apparently skirted the fenland along the hills to their north toward Taunton, or rather the earlier Norton Fitzwarren station. A strange triangular camp of great strength on this road, near Petherton, has at all events been used by the Romans, and has its legends of buried treasure accordingly.

So isolated, and at the same time so strong, a district would seem to be a natural frontier position between eastward and westward tribes, and our earliest records prove that it was such. The ancient province of Domnonia extended little to the east of the bounding fenlands which parted the men of Dyvnaint of the Goidelic stock from the intrusive later Belgae, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells how, after the battle at Peonna in 658, Kenwalch of Wessex drove the Welsh into the shelter of the district at Petherton, no doubt across the fen paths which he could not penetrate. The same authority records that in 682 Kentwine "drove the Britons to the sea," which can only have been by successful invasion of the Quantock land; but it was not until Ina's victory over Gerent of Dyvnaint in 710 that the district was finally incorporated into the Wessex dominion, and held by the building of the stronghold of Taunton at its south-western angle, where it lay most open to attack from the West Welsh lands yet un1A.S. here, an army, and cnap, a hill-top, ridge.

subdued. Later, in 878, the Quantock stronghold lay in the rear of Alfred as he planned in Athelney, and there is no record that it was held by the Danes.

The lateness of the Saxon conquest has had a very great effect on the population of the district. In the early eighth century it had ceased to be the Saxon policy to drive out or enslave the conquered, and the Welsh, under the laws of Ina, were treated on something more like an equality with the conquerors. The physique of the present population bears unmistakably the mark of the Celtic as well as of the Saxon type, while the dialect is akin to the Devon rather than to the Wessex division, though rapidly losing its distinctive points. In 1876 Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte made a special visit of research into the district, and the results were recorded in the Transactions of the Philological Society for that year. He then concluded that the Devon type of dialect was rapidly passing into that of south-western Somerset; but the difference between the speech of the Quantock villages and that of the country just across the Parrett is still marked enough. It is the tale in Stoke Courcy that a man thence went to work at Puriton, beyond the river, and returned after a week or two because "they did talk so terrible broad there that he could not rightly zince what they did zay." We share with Devon, accordingly, Celtic place-names, and Church dedications to Celtic Saints-those to St. Dubric and St. Decuman1 being instances of the latter, and probably the name Quantock itself being one of the former.2

The proportion of well-marked dark and brachycephalic individuals among the population is about equal

1At Porlock and Watchet respectively. Also St. Petroc at Timberscombe, St. Culbone at Culbone, St. Congar at Badgworth.

2 This is usually given as from "Gwant og," " 'many hollows"; but the Saxon form "Cantuc" seems hardly to bear this out.

to that of folk of the Saxon type, but on the coast, from the Parrett mouth to Porlock, a third type, of which more is to be said, occurs.

One may take it that the few traditions which have been mentioned as remaining with reference to the Roman camp near Petherton can only come to us from British sources. They are our earliest, at all events, and refer to times when the garrison and inhabitants were at peace. The field adjoining the camp is still called "the money field," and coins are now and then found there. Probably it was the place of market with the troops. But a tradition recorded in 1857 by the Rev. J. W. Collins1 still lingers, to the effect that just outside the camp enclosure is a buried treasure-house, with an iron door, which can only be found at full moon, containing untold wealth. This buried treasure legend occurs constantly in connection with Roman camps elsewhere, in one form or other, and such large finds as those at Caerwent of last year, and along the Roman wall, bear out the tradition, and the statement of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that the Romans on their departure from England took some of their treasure into Gaul and buried the rest.2

We have no tradition of Roman warfare, or indeed of the Romans by name. The next hero of tradition, Arthur of Britain, has left no mark on the Quantock memory as it exists to-day, though to the southward he is still remembered round Cadbury camp, the Camelot of the "Green Knight." Capgrave has given a legend 1Journal Brit. Arch. Assoc., vol. xxi., 1857, p. 297.

2 Anglo-Saxon Chron., Anno 418. Treasure is said to be buried in a field at the back of Stockland church, where the traces of the stone-pits whence the material for the old building was taken are still visible; “But the man who is to find that treasure isn't born yet." The stone would almost certainly have been a gift, and the reference therefore might possibly be to the "treasure laid up in Heaven" thereby for the donor, in a

« AnteriorContinuar »