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CURIOSITIES OF OLDEN TIMES

by

S. BARING-GOULD, M.A.

Author of 'Iceland, Its Scenes and Its Sagas,' 'Mehalah,' etc.

Revised and Enlarged Edition







Edinburgh
John Grant
31 George IV. Bridge
1896




PREFACE


An antiquary lights on many a curiosity whilst overhauling the dusty tomes
of ancient writers. This little book is a small museum in which I have
preserved some of the quaintest relics which have attracted my notice
during my labours. The majority of the articles were published in 1869. I
have now added some others.

  LEW TRENCHARD,
    _September 1895_.




CONTENTS


                                    PAGE

  THE MEANING OF MOURNING              1

  CURIOSITIES OF CYPHER               17

  STRANGE WILLS                       39

  QUEER CULPRITS                      57

  GHOSTS IN COURT                     74

  STRANGE PAINS AND PENALTIES         89

  WHAT ARE WOMEN MADE OF?            102

  "FLAGELLUM SALUTIS"                119

  "HERMIPPUS REDIVIVUS"              135

  THE BARONESS DE BEAUSOLEIL         153

  SOME CRAZY SAINTS                  167

  THE JACKASS OF VANVRES             207

  A MYSTERIOUS VALE                  217

  KING ROBERT OF SICILY              237

  SORTES SACRAE                      256

  CHIAPA CHOCOLATE                   268

  THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE            280




CURIOSITIES OF OLDEN TIMES




THE MEANING OF MOURNING


A strip of black cloth an inch and a half in width stitched round the
sleeve--that is the final, or perhaps penultimate expression (for it may
dwindle further to a black thread) of the usage of wearing mourning on the
decease of a relative.

The usage is one that commends itself to us as an outward and visible sign
of the inward sentiment of bereavement, and not one in ten thousand who
adopt mourning has any idea that it ever possessed a signification of
another sort. And yet the correlations of general custom--of mourning
fashions, lead us to the inexorable conclusion that in its inception the
practice had quite a different signification from that now attributed to
it, nay more, that it is solely because its primitive meaning has been
absolutely forgotten, and an entirely novel significance given to it, that
mourning is still employed after a death.

Look back through the telescope of anthropology at our primitive ancestors
in their naked savagery, and we see them daub themselves with soot mingled
with tallow. When the savage assumed clothes and became a civilised man,
he replaced the fat and lampblack with black cloth, and this black cloth
has descended to us in the nineteenth century as the customary and
intelligible trappings of woe.

The Chinaman when in a condition of bereavement assumes white garments,
and we may be pretty certain that his barbarous ancestor, like the Andaman
Islander of the present day, pipeclayed his naked body after the decease
and funeral of a relative. In Egypt yellow was the symbol of sorrow for a
death, and that points back to the ancestral nude Egyptian having smeared
himself with yellow ochre.

Black was not the universal hue of mourning in Europe. In Castile white
obtained on the death of its princes. Herrera states that the last time
white was thus employed was in 1498, on the death of Prince John. This use
of white in Castile indicates chalk or pipeclay as the daub affected by
the ancestors of the house of Castile in primeval time as a badge of
bereavement.

Various explanations have been offered to account for the variance of
colour. White has been supposed to denote purity; and to this day white
gloves and hat-bands and scarves are employed at the funeral of a young
girl, as in the old ballad of "The Bride's Burial":--

  A garland fresh and fair
    Of lilies there was made,
  In signs of her virginity,
    And on her coffin laid.
  Six pretty maidens, _all in white_,
    Did bear her to the ground,
  The bells did ring in solemn swing
    And made a doleful sound.

Yellow has been supposed to symbolise that death is the end of human
hopes, because falling leaves are sere; black is taken as the privation of
light; and purple or violet also affected as a blending of joy with
sorrow. Christian moralists have declaimed against black as heathen, as
denoting an aspect of death devoid of hope, and gradually purple is taking
its place in the trappings of the hearse, if not of the mourners, and the
pall is now very generally violet.

But these explanations are afterthoughts, and an attempt to give reason
for the divergence of usage which might satisfy, but these are really no
explanations at all. The usage goes back to a period when there were no
such refinements of thought. If violet or purple has been traditional, it
is so merely because the ancestral Briton stained himself with woad on the
death of a relative.

The pipeclay, lampblack, yellow ochre, and woad of the primeval mourners
must be brought into range with a whole series of other mourning usages,
and then the result is something of an "eye-opener." It reveals a
condition of mind and an aspect of death that causes not a little
surprise and amusement. It is one of the most astonishing, and, perhaps,
shocking traits of barbarous life, that death revolutionises completely
the feelings of the survivors towards their deceased husbands, wives,
parents, and other relatives.

A married couple may have been sincerely attached to each other so long as
the vital spark was twinkling, but the moment it is extinguished the dead
partner becomes, not a sadly sweet reminiscence, but an object of the
liveliest terror to the survivor. He or she does everything that ingenuity
can suggest to get him or herself out of all association in body and
spirit with the late lamented. Death is held to be thoroughly demoralising
to the deceased. However exemplary a person he or she may have been in
life, after death the ghost is little less than a plaguing, spiteful
spirit.

There is in the savage no tender clinging to the remembrance of the loved
one, he is translated into a terrible bugbear, who must be evaded and
avoided by every contrivance conceivable. This is due, doubtless, mainly
to the inability of the uncultivated mind to discriminate between what is
seen waking from what presents itself in phantasy to the dreaming head.
After a funeral, it is natural enough for the mourners to dream of the
dead, and they at once conclude that they have been visited by his
_revenant_. After a funeral feast, a great gorging of pork or beef, it is
very natural that the sense of oppression and pain felt should be
associated with the dear departed, and should translate itself into the
idea that he has come from his grave to sit on the chests of those who
have bewailed him.

Moreover, the savage associates the idea of desolation, death, discomfort,
with the condition of the soul after death, and believes that the ghosts
do all they can to return to their former haunts and associates for the
sake of the warmth and food, the shelter of the huts, and the
entertainment of the society of their fellows. But the living men and
women are not at all eager to receive the ghosts into the family circle,
and they accordingly adopt all kinds of "dodges," expedients to prevent
the departed from making these irksome and undesired visits.

The Venerable Bede tells us that Laurence, Archbishop of Canterbury,
resolved on flying from England because he was hopeless of effecting any
good under the successor of Ethelbert, king of Kent. The night before he
fled he slept on the floor of the church, and dreamed that St. Peter
cudgelled him soundly for resolving to abandon his sacred charge. In the
morning he awoke stiff and full of aches and pains. Turned into modern
language, we should say that Archbishop Laurence was attacked with
rheumatism on account of his having slept on the cold stones of the
church. His mind had been troubled before he went to sleep with doubts
whether he were doing right in abandoning his duty, and very naturally
this trouble of conscience  his dream, and gave to his rheumatic
twinges the complexion it assumed.

Now Archbishop Laurence regarded the Prince of the Apostles in precisely
the light in which a savage views his deceased relatives and ancestors. He
associates his maladies, his pains, with theirs, if he should happen to
dream of them. If, however, when in pain, he dreams of a living person,
then he holds that this living person has cast a magical spell over him.

Among nature's men, before they have gone through the mill of
civilisation, plenty to eat and to drink, and some one to talk to, are the
essentials of happiness. They see that the dead have none of these
requisites, they consider that they are miserable without them. The writer
remembers how, when he was a boy, and attended a funeral of a relative in
November, he could not sleep all night--a bitter, frosty night--with the
thought how cold it must be to the dead in the vault, without blankets,
hot bottle, or fire. It was in vain for him to reason against the feeling;
the feeling was so strong on him that he was conscious of an uncomfortable
expectation of the dead coming to claim a share of the blanket, fire, or
hot bottle. Now the savage never reasons against such a feeling, and he
assumes that the dead will return, as a matter of course, for what he
cannot have in the grave.

The ghost is very anxious to assert its former rights. A widow has to get
rid of the ghost of her first husband before she can marry again. In
Parma a widow about to be remarried is pelted with sticks and stones, not
in the least because the Parmans object to remarriage, but in order to
scare away the ghost of No. 1, who is hanging about his wife, and who will
resent his displacement in her affections by No. 2.

To the present day, in some of the villages of the ancient Duchy of Teck,
in Wuertemberg, it is customary when a corpse is being conveyed to the
cemetery, for relatives and friends to surround the dead, and in turn talk
to it--assure it what a blessed rest it is going to, how anxious the
kinsfolk are that it may be comfortable, how handsome will be the cross
set over the grave, how much all desire that it may sleep soundly and not
by any means leave the grave and come haunting old scenes and friends, how
unreasonable such conduct as the latter hinted at would be, how it would
alter the regard entertained for the deceased, how disrespectful to the
Almighty who gives rest to the good, and how it would be regarded as an
admission of an uneasy conscience. Lively comparisons are drawn between
the joys of Paradise and the vale of tears that has been quitted, so as to
take away from the deceased all desire to return.

This is a survival of primitive usage and mode of thought, and has its
analogies in many places and among diverse races.

The Dacotah Indians address the ghost of the dead in the same "soft
solder," to induce it to take the road to the world of spirits and not to
come sauntering back to its wigwam. In Siam and in China it is much the
same; persuasion, flattery, threats are employed.

Unhappily all ghosts are not open to persuasion, and see through the
designs of the mourners, and with them severer measures have to be
resorted to. Among the Sclavs of the Danube and the Czechs, the bereaved,
after the funeral, on going home turn themselves about after every few
steps and throw sticks, stones, mud, even hot coals in the direction of
the churchyard, so as to frighten the spirit back to the grave so
considerately provided for it. A Finnish tribe has not even the decency to
wait till the corpse is covered with soil; they fire pistols and guns
after it as it goes to its grave, and lies in it.

In _Hamlet_, at the funeral of Ophelia, the priest says--

                          For charitable prayers,
  Shards, flints, and pebbles should be thrown on her.

Unquestionably it must have been customary in England thus to pelt a ghost
that was suspected of the intention to wander. The stake driven through
the suicide's body was a summary and complete way of ensuring that the
ghost would not be troublesome.

Those Finns who fired guns after a dead man had another expedient for
holding him fast, and that was to nail him down in his coffin. The Arabs
tie his legs together. The Wallacks drive a long nail through the skull;
and this usage explains the many skulls that have been exhumed in Germany
thus perforated. The Icelanders, when a ghost proved troublesome, opened
the grave, cut off the dead man's head, and made the body sit on it. That,
they concluded, would effectually puzzle it how to get about. The
Californian Indians were wont to break the spine of the corpse so as to
paralyse his lower limbs, and make "walking" impossible. Spirit and body
to the unreasoning mind are intimately associated. A hurt done to the body
wounds the soul. Mrs. Crowe, in her _Night Side of Nature_, tells a story
reversing this. A gentleman in Germany was dying--he expressed great
desire to see his son, who was a ne'er-do-well, and was squandering his
money in Paris. At that same time the young man was sitting on a bench in
the Bois de Boulogne, with a switch in his hand. Suddenly he saw his old
father before him. Convinced that he saw a phantom, he raised his switch,
and cut the apparition once, twice, and thrice across the face; and it
vanished. At that moment the dying father uttered a scream, and held his
hands to his face--"My boy! my boy! He is striking me again--again!" and
he died. The Algonquin Indians beat the walls of the death-chamber to
drive out the ghost; in Sumatra, a priest is employed with a broom to
sweep the ghost out. In Scotland, and in North Germany, the chairs on
which a coffin has rested are reversed, lest the dead man should take the
fancy to sit on them instead of going to his grave. In ancient Mexico,
certain professional ghost ejectors were employed, who, after a funeral,
were invited to visit and thoroughly explore the house whence the dead had
been removed, and if they found the ghost lurking about, in corners, in
cupboards, under beds--anywhere, to kick it out. In Siberia, after forty
days' "law" given to the ghost, if it be still found loafing about, the
Schaman is sent for, who drums it out. He extorts brandy, which he
professes to require, as he has to conduct the deceased personally to the
land of spirits, where he will make it and the other guests so fuddled
that they will forget the way back to earth.

In North Germany a troublesome ghost is bagged, and the bag emptied in
some lone spot, or in the garden of a neighbour against whom a grudge is
entertained.

Another mode of getting rid of the spirit of the dear departed is to
confuse it as to its way home. This is done in various ways. Sometimes the
road by which it has been carried to its resting-place is swept to efface
the footprints, and a false track is made into a wood or on to a moor, so
that the ghost may take the wrong road. Sometimes ashes are strewn on the
road to hide the footprints. Sometimes the dead is carried rapidly three
or four times round the house so as to make him giddy, and not know in
which direction he is carried. The universal practice of closing the eyes
of the dead may be thought to have originated in the desire that he might
be prevented from seeing his way.

In many places it was, and is, customary for the dead body to be taken out
of the house, not through the door, but by a hole knocked in the wall for
the purpose, and backwards. In Iceland in the historic period this custom
was reserved for such as died in their seats and not in their beds. One or
two instances occur in the Sagas. In Corea, blinders made of black silk
are put on the dead man's eyes, to prevent him from finding his way home.

Many savage nations entirely abandon a hut or a camp in which a death has
occurred for precisely the same reason--of throwing out the dead man's
spirit.

It was a common practice in England till quite recently for the room in
which a death had occurred to be closed for some time, and this is merely
a survival of the custom of abandoning the place where a spirit has left
the body. The Esquimaux take out their dying relatives to huts constructed
of blocks of ice or snow, and leave them there to expire, for ghosts are
as stupid as they are troublesome, they have no more wits than a peacock,
they can only find their way to the place where they died.

Other usages are to divert a stream and bring the corpse in the river-bed,
or lay it beyond running water, which according to ghost-lore it cannot
pass. Or again, fires are lighted across its path, and it shrinks from
passing through flames. As for water, ghosts loathe it. Among the Matamba
<DW64>s a widow is flung into the water and dipped repeatedly so as to
wash off the ghost of the dead husband, which is supposed to be clinging
to her. In New Zealand, among the Maoris, all who have followed the corpse
dive into water so as to throw off the ghost which is sneaking home after
them. In Tahiti, all who have assisted at a burial run as hard as they can
to the sea and take headers into it for the same object. It is the same in
New Guinea. We see the same idea reduced to a mere form in ancient Rome,
where in place of the dive through water, a vessel of water was carried
twice round those who had followed the corpse, and they were sprinkled.
The custom of washing and purification after a funeral practised by the
Jews is a reminiscence of the usage, with a novel explanation given to it.

In the South Pacific, in the Hervey Islands, after a death men turn out to
pummel and fight the returning spirit, and give it a good drubbing in the
air.

Now, perhaps, the reader may have been brought to understand what the
sundry mourning costumes originally meant. They were disguises whereby to
deceive the ghosts, so that they might not recognise and pester with
their undesired attentions the relatives who live. Indians who are wont to
paint themselves habitually, go after a funeral totally unbedecked with
colour. On the other hand, other savages daub themselves fantastically
with various colours, making themselves as unlike what they were
previously as is possible. The Coreans when in mourning assume hats with
low rims that conceal their features.

The Papuans conceal themselves under extinguishers made of banana leaves.
Elsewhere in New Guinea they envelop themselves in a wickerwork frame in
which they can hardly walk. Among the Mpongues of Western Africa, those
who on ordinary occasions wear garments walk in complete nudity when
suffering bereavement. Valerius Maximus tells us that among the Lycians it
was customary in mourning for the men to disguise themselves in women's
garments.

The custom of cutting the hair short, and of scratching and disfiguring
the face, and of rending the garments, all originated from the same
thought--to make the survivors irrecognisable by the ghost of the
deceased. Plutarch asserts that the Sacae, after a death, went down into
pits and hid themselves for days from the light of the sun. Australian
widows near the north-west bend of the Murray shave their heads and
plaster them with pipeclay, which, when dry, forms a close-fitting
skull-cap. The spirit of the late lamented on returning to his better
half either does not recognise his spouse, or is so disgusted with her
appearance that he leaves her for ever.

There is almost no end to the expedients adopted for getting rid of the
dead. Piles of stones are heaped over them, they are buried deep in the
earth, they are walled up in natural caves, they are enclosed in
megalithic structures, they are burned, they are sunk in the sea. They are
threatened, they are cajoled, they are hoodwinked. Every sort of trickery
is had recourse to, to throw them off the scent of home and of their
living relations.

The wives, horses, dogs slain and buried with them, the copious supplies
of food and drink laid on their graves, are bribes to induce them to be
content with their situation. Nay, further--in very many places no food
may be eaten in the house of mourning for many days after an interment.
The object of course is to disappoint the returning spirit, which comes
seeking a meal, finds none, comes again next day, finds none again, and
after a while desists from returning out of sheer disgust.

A vast amount of misdirected ingenuity is expended in bamboozling and
bullying the unhappy ghosts; but the feature most striking in these
proceedings is the unanimous agreement in considering these ghosts as such
imbeciles. When they put off their outward husk, they divest themselves of
all that cunning which is the form that intelligence takes in the savage.
Not only so, but although they remember and crave after home comforts,
they absolutely forget the tricks they had themselves played on the souls
of the dead in their own lifetime; they walk and blunder into the traps
which they had themselves laid for other ghosts in the days of their
flesh.

Perhaps the lowest abyss of dunder-headedness they have been supposed to
reach is when made to mistake their own identity. Recently near Mentone a
series of prehistoric interments in caves have been exposed. They reveal
the dead men as having had their heads daubed over with red oxide of iron.
Still extant races of savages paint, plaster, and disfigure their dead.
The prehistoric Greeks masked them. The Aztecs masked their deceased
kings, and the Siamese do so still. We cannot say with absolute certainty
what the object is--but we are probably not far out when we conjecture the
purpose to be to make the dead forget who they are when they look at their
reflection in the water. There was a favourite song sung some sixty years
ago relative to a little old woman who got "muzzy." Whilst in this
condition some naughty boys cut her skirts at her knees. When she woke up
and saw her condition, "Lawk!" said the little old woman, "this never is
me!" And certain ancient peoples treated their dead in something the same
way; they disguised and disfigured them so that each ghost waking up
might exclaim, "Lawk! this never is me!" And so having lost its identity,
did not consider it had a right to revisit its old home and molest its old
acquaintances.




CURIOSITIES OF CYPHER


In 1680, when M. de Louvois was French Minister of War, he summoned before
him one day a gentleman named Chamilly, and gave him the following
instructions:

"Start this evening for Basle, in Switzerland; you will reach it in three
days; on the fourth, punctually at two o'clock, station yourself on the
bridge over the Rhine, with a portfolio, ink, and a pen. Watch all that
takes place, and make a memorandum of every particular. Continue doing so
for two hours; have a carriage and post-horses awaiting you;, and at four
precisely mount, and travel night and day till you reach Paris. On the
instant of your arrival, hasten to me with your notes."

De Chamilly obeyed; he reached Basle, and on the day and at the hour
appointed, stationed himself, pen in hand, on the bridge. Presently a
market-cart drives by; then an old woman with a basket of fruit passes;
anon, a little urchin trundles his hoop by; next an old gentleman in blue
top-coat jogs past on his gray mare. Three o'clock chimes from the
cathedral tower. Just at the last stroke, a tall fellow in yellow
waistcoat and breeches saunters up, goes to the middle of the bridge,
lounges over, and looks at the water; then he takes a step back and
strikes three hearty blows on the footway with his staff. Down goes every
detail in De Chamilly's book. At last the hour of release sounds, and he
jumps into his carriage. Shortly before midnight, after two days of
ceaseless travelling, De Chamilly presented himself before the minister,
feeling rather ashamed at having such trifles to record. M. de Louvois
took the portfolio with eagerness, and glanced over the notes. As his eye
caught the mention of the yellow-breeched man, a gleam of joy flashed
across his countenance. He rushed to the king, roused him from sleep,
spoke in private with him for a few moments, and then four couriers who
had been held in readiness since five on the preceding evening were
despatched with haste. Eight days after, the town of Strasbourg was
entirely surrounded by French troops, and summoned to surrender: it
capitulated and threw open its gates on the 30th of September 1681.
Evidently the three strokes of the stick given by the fellow in yellow
costume, at an appointed hour, were the signal of the success of an
intrigue concerted between M. de Louvois and the magistrates of
Strasbourg, and the man who executed this mission was as ignorant of the
motive as was M. de Chamilly of the motive of his.

Now this is a specimen of the safest of all secret communications, but it
can only be resorted to on certain rare occasions. When a lengthy despatch
is required to be forwarded, and when such means as those given above are
out of the question, some other method must be employed. Herodotus gives
us a story to the point: it is found also, with variations, in Aulus
Gellius.

"Histiaeus, when he was anxious to give Aristagoras orders to revolt, could
find but one safe way, as the roads were guarded, of making his wishes
known: which was by taking the trustiest of his slaves, shaving all the
hair from off his head, and then pricking letters upon the skin, and
waiting till the hair grew again. This accordingly he did; and as soon as
ever the hair was grown, he despatched the man to Miletus, giving him no
other message than this: 'When thou art come to Miletus, bid Aristagoras
shave thy head, and look thereon.' Now the marks on the head were a
command to revolt."--Bk. v. 35.

In this case no cypher was employed; we shall come, now, to the use of
cyphers.

When a despatch or communication runs great risk of falling into the hands
of an enemy, it is necessary that its contents should be so veiled, that
the possession of the document may afford him no information whatever.
Julius Caesar and Augustus used cyphers, but they were of the utmost
simplicity, as they consisted merely in placing D in the place of A; E in
that of B, and so on; or else in writing B for A, C for B, etc.

Secret characters were used at the Council of Nicaea; and Rabanus Maurus,
Abbot of Fulda and Archbishop of Mayence in the ninth century, has left us
an example of two cyphers, the key to which was discovered by the
Benedictines. It is only a wonder that any one could have failed to
unravel them at the first glance. This is a specimen of the first:

   .Nc.p.t v:rs:.:s B::n.f:c.. :rch. gl::r.::s.q:.:: m:rt.r.s

The secret of this is that the vowels have been suppressed and their
places filled by dots,--one for i, two for a, three for e, four for o, and
five for u. In the second example, the same sentence would run--Knckpkt
vfrsxs Bpnkfbckk, etc., the vowel-places being filled by the
consonants--b, f, k, p, x. By changing every letter in the alphabet, we
make a vast improvement on this last; thus, for instance, supplying the
place of a with z, b with x, c with v, and so on. This is the system
employed by an advertiser in a provincial paper which I took up the other
day in the waiting-room of a station, where it had been left by a farmer.
As I had some minutes to spare, before the train was due, I spent them in
deciphering the following:

    Jp Sjddjzb rza rzdd ci sijmr, Bziw rzdd xr ndzt:

and in ten minutes I read: "If William can call or write, Mary will be
glad."

A correspondence was carried on in the _Times_ during May 1862 in cypher.
I give it along with the explanation.

    Wws.--Zy Efpdolj T dpye l wpeepc ez mjcyp qzc jzf--xlj T daply qfwwj
    zy lww xleepcd le esp tyepcgtph? Te xlj oz rzzo. Ecfde ez xj wzgp--T
    lx xtdpclmwp. Hspy xlj T rz ez Nlyepcmfcj tq