HELL’S MOUTH, DORCHESTER, OXON.

The verse of the Gospel (xix., 12), explains who the person is. “And [the Lord] taking hold of Adam by his right hand he ascended from hell and all the saints of God followed him.” The female figure is of course Eve, who is shewn with Adam in engravings of the subject by Albert Durer (1512, etc.,) and others. The vision of Piers Ploughman (circa 1362), has particular mention of Adam and Eve among Satan’s captive colony. Satan, on hearing the order of a voice to open the gates of Hell, exclaims:—

“Yf he reve me of my ryght he robbeth me by mastrie,
For by ryght and reson the reukes [rooks] that be on here
Body and soul beth myne both good and ille
For he hyms-self hit seide that Syre is of Helle,
That Adam and Eve and al hus issue
Sholden deye with deol [should die with grief] and here dwell evere
Yf thei touchede a tree othr toke ther of an appel.”

A MS. volume in the British Museum, of poems written in the thirty-fourth year of the reign of Henry VI., has “Our Lady’s Song of the Chyld that soked hyr brest,” in which other persons than Adam and Eve are stated to have been taken out of hell on the same occasion:—

“Adam and Eve wyth hym he take,
Kyng David, Moyses and Salamon
And haryed hell every noke,
Wythyn hyt left he soulys non.”

The belief in the descent in Hell can be traced back to the second century. The form of Hell as a mouth is much later.

There is mention of a certain “Mouth of Hell,” which in 1437 was used in a Passion play in the plain of Veximiel; this Mouth was reported as very well done, for it opened and shut when the devils required to pass in or out, and it had two large eyes of steel.

The great east window of York Cathedral, the west front and south doorway of Lincoln, and the east side of the altar-screen, Beverley Minster, have representations of the Mouth of Hell. The chancel arch of Southleigh has a large early fresco of the subject, in which two angels, a good and a bad (white and black), are gathering the people out of their graves; the black spirit is plucking up certain bodies (or souls) with a flesh-hook, and his companions are conveying them to the adjacent Mouth. In a Flemish Book of Hours of the fifteenth century (in the Bodleian Library) there is a representation with very minute details of all the usual adjuncts of the Mouth, and, in addition, several basketsful of children (presumably the unbaptized) brought in on the backs of wolf-like fiends, and on sledges, a common mediÆval method of conveyance.

Sackvil mentions Hell as “an hideous hole” that—

“With ougly mouth and griesly jawes doth gape.”

Further instances of Hell’s Mouth are in the block of the Ludlow ale-wife on a following page.