FOLK-PRAYERS

It is a singular fact, but fact it is, that very little of what may be termed peculiarly Romish superstition lingers among the peasantry of England; this goes far to show how very little hold such superstition had on their minds or hearts. It may be almost said that there is more of pre-Christian paganism, of usages condemned by the Catholic Church surviving, than of any practices recommended by her.

I do know, indeed, of one instance of a Cornish Methodist, who, when unable to attend his distant chapel, resorted to a rude granite cross of Brito-Roman date, and there said his prayers; but even in this case one cannot be certain that there did not linger on a reverence for the stone itself, which had been a prehistoric menhir before it was sanctified by being chipped into the sign of our salvation.

In Yorkshire, Milly (my Lady) boxes are carried about by children at Christmas: these are cradles containing dolls, one to represent the Virgin Mother, another the Divine Child; and the grocers send candles to their customers on Christmas Eve, for the lights to be burned at the Midnight Mass. But such usages are few, and have almost wholly lost their meaning, were never more than folk customs, and were never inculcated by the Church before the Reformation. The midsummer bonfires, the Yule log, the mumming at Christmas, the Maypole, the November “soul-cakes,” the “sin-eating” at funerals, and a thousand other customs are purely heathen survivals. The writer knew of a case in Yorkshire of a man who was buried in his coffin with a candle “to light him on his way to Jerusalem” and a penny “to pay the toll,” altogether a pagan reminiscence; but has never in all his experience come across any practice connected with the doctrine of purgatory, one insisted upon with immense emphasis before the Reformation, as the saying of masses for the dead brought in a large revenue for the clergy.

Superstition connected with holy wells is heathen, and was given a reluctant sanction by the Roman Church, because so deep-rooted that the people could not be weaned from it.

The custom, so common in the time of our youth, of drinking healths was a pagan one; the dead were thus saluted silently, and the Bishop of Cork in 1713 charged against it in an address to his diocese. He was answered by “A Country Curate of Ireland,” and the bishop returned to the charge in a pamphlet of two hundred and twenty pages.

In Germany, to gloss the heathenism of the custom, it was usual to drink the first cup to the memory of some saint, usually St. Gertrude, the patroness of the dead, who had stepped into the place of the Goddess Holda or Perchta.

But it is chiefly in the prayers used by the illiterate and poor among the peasantry that we would expect to find some trace of Catholicism, for the prayer employed in private and secret is precisely where no interference could affect the convictions and habits formed by ages, and communicated traditionally at the most impressible age.

Now what do we find actually? That the only prayers used by tens of thousands, only now very slowly being driven out by the Lord’s Prayer, or being abandoned because all prayer is given up, are not a Catholic reminiscence at all, but an heretical one condemned by the Papal Church.

The reader will at once know what the form is to which reference is made.

This is the usual form; but there are verbal variations. Sometimes it stands “four corners” instead of “four posties,” and “two at the feet, and two at the head.” After the first two lines that are invariable, we have—

or—

A much fuller form of the prayer comes from an old woman of near ninety years at Tavistock:—

This is very curious. One may well ask where St. Peter wrote the quotation given in the eighth line. “That heaven hath bote” signifies “that hath bid or prayed for heaven.”

The prayer, or formula, is very old. In the “Towneley Mysteries,” belonging to the beginning of the sixteenth century at the very latest date that can be given, for they are sacred Mysteries which ceased to be performed after the Reformation, in the scene where the shepherds keep their watch by night on the eve of the Nativity, the third shepherd says—

In the second scene of the Shepherds the second pastor says—

The third says:—

Mark says—

Certainly a very odd form of commendation of the soul, and a variant on that of the third shepherd.

Launcelot Sharpe, in his remarks on the “Towneley Mysteries” (ArchÆol., 1838), gives “the rural charm which, when a boy, I have often heard in Kent:—

Ady, in his “Candle in the Dark, or Treatise concerning the Nature of Witches and Witchcraft,” Lond., 1656, says, “An old woman in Essex who was living in my time, she had lived also in Queen Mary’s time, and had learned thence many popish charms, one whereof was this: every night when she lay down to sleep she charmed her bed, saying—

And this she would repeat three times, reposing great confidence therein, because (as she said) she had been taught it when she was a young maid by the churchmen of those times.”

In a MS. collection of notes on superstitions made by John Aubrey, which is in the British Museum, Aubrey enters—

Aubrey adds, “I remember before the civil wars people when they heard the clock strike were wont to say, ‘God grant that my last howre may be my best howre.’”

Robert Chambers, in his “Popular Rhymes of Scotland,” does not speak of this prayer as used north of the Tweed at bed-time, but says: “A curious instance of far-descended nonsense is to be found in another puerile rhyme:—

Boys in Scotland say this in the course of their rollicking sports.”

This singular charm, rather than prayer, is given in a mediÆval magical treatise, “The Enchiridion of Pope Leo,” which was printed at Rome in 1660. It is there called “The White Paternoster,” and runs thus in French—

Under the name of “The White Paternoster” it is referred to by Chaucer in the “Miller’s Tale”—

“Nyghtes verray” is probably a night-were, the hobgoblin. “Were” is an old Saxon word for man, and the night-man is the ghost. In White’s “Way to the True Church,” Lond., 1624, White complains of “the prodigious ignorance” which existed among his parishioners when he entered upon his ministrations. He gives what he considers to be the “White Paternoster,” or a form of prayer used before going to bed.

In the first edition of Wynkyn de Worde’s “HorÆ BeatÆ MariÆ Virginis,” 1502, a copy now in the Gough Library at Oxford has on the margin, written in a contemporary hand, “The Little Credo,” “The White Paternoster,” and “The White Benedictus,” another very curious magical formula. For an account of this see Dibdin’s “Decameron,” second day.

The “White Paternoster” is as generally in use among the peasants in France as in England. It takes various forms. In Quercy, part of our English possessions in Guyenne, it is recited nightly under another name, the “Pater d’habitude.” The patois may be thus translated:—

There are, in fact, in Guyenne four Paternosters—the great one, the small one, the Pater of Nazareth, and the Pater of Habit; and these make up one complete formula. M. Daymard, who has collected the folk-songs of Quercy, the present Department of Lot, says, “Who has not heard some old woman mutter her prayers in a monotonous voice, without accent, with, however, a sort of rhythmic cadence, like the reading of poetry by children in school?” If in the course of her prayers she be interrupted and questioned relative to what she has said, and asked to repeat it, it is rarely that one can be found to continue her prayers without recommencing the recitation.

“Very often the old women do not understand what they say. They repeat words which anciently were in Latin, Romance, or French, and which, passing from mouth to mouth, have become corrupted till they cease to be comprehensible. Then they have not, as an assistance to their memory, the help of an air and of couplets; consequently they slide away into the greatest confusion. Thus it falls out that the majority of these prayers are long, disconnected, made up of patches ill-stitched together, and without affinity, without transition. There are also set phrases and elements of prayer which recur, and which each pious soul throws into her common prayers without rhyme or reason.”

One of the Quercy prayers deserves quotation, because it also is akin to something that was customary in England, the Lykewake Dirge, which is found in Aubrey’s MS., already quoted, and was first published by Sir Walter Scott. The Quercy prayer is called “La Barbe-Dieu,” i.e. Verbum-Dei; barbe is a corruption. It runs thus:—

In a book published at Toulouse in 1673 by the PÈre Amilha, in the Languedoc patois, entitled “Le Tableau de la bido del parfait Chresten,” a popular book of Christian instruction in faith and morals, is a caution against superstitious practices. Among these are the following questions: “Have you tried to make a denier float on the water, whereby to detect the thief who has stolen your goods? Have you taken off the cross from the rosary, and said the Little Pater and the White Pater?”

These prayers, which were supposed to have a power to save from everlasting death by mere recitation of them, are mentioned by J. B. Thiers, in his “Treatise on Superstition,” as condemned by the Church; and he names among them the Barbe de Dieu as heretical.

Quenot, in his “Statistique de la Charente,” in 1818, gives the form in which the White Paternoster was said in that department of France—

The forms in which it is said throughout France are infinitely varied, but the same ideas reign throughout all, and all derived from a common source. That source is apparently Albigensian ManichÆism. It seems from the questions put to these heretics that the “Perfect,” the apostle of the sect, taught a fourfold Paternoster, and taught it as a sort of charm, with the assertion, which repeatedly occurs in all these folk rhymed Paters, that they who recited it secured thereby their eternal salvation.

It is certainly—if this fourfold Albigensian Pater be the origin of our “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John”—a very curious instance of the underground growth of the heresy throughout Europe, and the hold it obtained on the poor and ignorant.

I give a remarkable instance from Lincolnshire of the glossing over of pagan usage by Christianity. I was furnished with it by the Rev. R. M. Heanley, who wrote:—

To return to the White Paternoster. We may well question whether the ManichÆan White Paternoster was not a much earlier form of incantation for blessing the bed, given a slightly Christian complexion. For in the Anglo-Saxon laws, in the “Codex Exoniensis,” is a most curious formula for blessing a field that has been blasted by witchcraft, and this bears some analogy to the blessing of the bed on which the sleeper is about to lie. According to this Anglo-Saxon authority, all sorts of seeds are cast out on the earth as an oblation to the plough. Then turves of green grass from the four corners of the field are cut in the name of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These are carried to the church and four masses said over them, and are replaced at the four corners of the field before sunset, and certain incantations recited over them. At the same time that the four corners of the field are consecrated to the four evangelists the cross of Christ is signed over the centre, just as in the French forms of the prayer of the bed the Virgin or Christ occupies the centre. One is inclined to suspect that in all this there is a reminiscence of the sun and the four quarters of the heavens, with the deities ruling them.