Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/371

 F L F I 357 found near it. It was one of the manors attached to the Saxon crown, and it was granted by William the Conqueror to his knight William d Avranches, who built a Norman stronghold near the site of the old castle founded by Eadbald, king of Kent, about 630. The cliff on which these stood has been almost wholly swept away by the encroachments of the sea. In the time of Queen Elizabeth Folkestone contained only 120 houses, and it was a mere fishing village until the formation of a harbour in 1809. O O The opening of the railway in 1844, and the establishment of the steam packet service with Boulogne lent additional impulse to the town, and for some years it has been rapidly increasing. Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, was born there in 1578. Folkestone unites with Hythe in returning a member to parliament. The popula tion in 1871 was 12,694. FOLK-LAND, or FOLO-LAND, in early English law was the land belonging to the community at large the ager public us as distinguished from hoc-land, or land granted to individuals in private ownership. The conception of the land as primarily belonging to the nation or tribe appears to be universal in early civilization. As civiliza tion advances the rights of individuals emerge and increase in importance until, as in England at the present day, the original conception has entirely disappeared. The process by which it was lost may be shortly stated as follows. (1) Grants of land were made to individuals and to religious corporations (boc-land), subject only to the trinoda necessitas (military service, and building bridges and fortresses). The king might hold land so granted. (2) Temporary rights over the folk-land were also granted to individuals, subject to various rent services or money payments. (3) The remaining portion of the folk-land not disposed of in this way came to be regarded as belonging to the king. Ulti mately all land was said to be held of the king. Even where traces of the original conception remained in the rights of commoners the natural order was reversed, and they were regarded as deriving their right from the grant of some individual lord. While the folk-land became the terra regis, the private property of the king in land merged in the folk-land, and the king of England for many cent uries occupied the anomalous position of being ultimate owner of all the land, and sole owner of the old folk-land, and yet, at the same time, incapable of holding land in private ownership. If a king purchased land with any private moneys of his own, it devolved upon his successor in office like the rest of the crown lands. All this, how ever, has now been changed. The crown lands have become public lands again, and the management of these is vested in the Commissioners of Woods, Forests, and Land Revenues; and the private estates of the sovereign are now held on the same conditions as those of ordinary persons. FOLK-LORE, This word, formed in imitation of such German compounds as &quot;Volksepos,&quot; &quot;Volksfest,&quot; &quot;Volks- lied,&quot; has recently become current in the English language 1 as a convenient though somewhat vague general heading under which to arrange all that has been observed or recorded of the traditions current among the &quot; common people &quot; of different countries, civilized or uncivilized, whether in ancient, mediaeval, or modern times. Each nation and each locality has, of coarse, a &quot;folk-lore&quot; as it has a language; and it is obvious that to set forth any given folk-lore, with all its stratifications, in a comprehensive and orderly way, would virtually be equivalent to exhibiting fully the past and present intellectual, moral, religious, and social condi tion of the people to whom it belonged. An exhaustive 1 It was first suggested by Mr Thorns in the Athenaeum of 1846 (p. 862). Its equivalent does not actually occur in German. account of the folk-lores of the world would be equivalent to a complete history of the thoughts of mankind. The eccentricities of traditionary story and traditionary practice have always been found a more or less interesting and amusing study by the contemplative observer of human nature ; and almost all travellers and historians, from Herodotus downwards, have occasionally condescended to add something to the general collection of curiosities in that department. But to make a thorough investigation of the &quot; vulgar antiquities &quot; of any country, and especially of one s own, was, until very recently, regarded as childish and use less. An exception, indeed, was made in favour of the folk lores of ancient Greece and Rome, as being intrinsically beautiful and exceptionally instructive. But the very fact that these had been beautified by artistic treatment impaired their usefulness from the purely antiquarian point of view ; and in any case the floating traditions of Attica and Latium were too few, too fragmentary, and gathered from too narrow an area to furnish adequate data for the anthropologist and the sociologist. Here, as in so many other instances, it was necessary that men should greatly extend the area of their investigations before they could rightly understand that which alone they were curious to know. It was in Germany that the study of folk-lore first entered upon its scientific stage. One of the earliest symptoms of the awakening of a wider and more sympathetic interest in the various products of a nation s mind, its legends and its tales, its manners and its customs, its laws, government, religion, and daily life, was the appearance in 1778-9 of Herder s celebrated collection of popular songs. But the new day was fairly ushered in by the successive publications of the brothers Grimm, more particularly of the Kinder- und Ifaus-Mdhrchen in 1812, and of the Deutsche Mythologie in 1835. The latter work, which was closely dependent on the former, showed for the first time what results may be hoped for by an intelligent investigator, if only, laying aside all prejudice, he will put himself to the trouble of collecting largely and widely, and of interpreting faithfully and ration ally, a nation s oral traditions and unwritten customs. It was seen that, although many relics of the past had been irrecoverably lost, enough had been preserved to furnish conclusive proof of the oneness in faith as well as in speech of the Teutonic race, and also to give indications, in many instances, of the precise points at which the divergences had occurred. This new knowledge, derived to a large extent from the skilful use of folk-lore &quot; collected from the mouths of old women in the spinning-rooms of German villages,&quot; acquired an altogether peculiar interest and importance from the other discovery by which the philological labours of Bopp and others had been crowned, the discovery, namely, of the original unity of all the Aryan races, and the demon stration of the fact that the Teutons themselves were but one branch of a greater family, including Hindus and Celts, which had at one time inhabited the central plain of Asia, and before dispersing eastward and westward, had de veloped an iueffaceably characteristic speech, civilization, and religion. The identification verbally of Dyaus, Zeus, Jo(vi)s, Tiw, Zio, and Tyr was followed, as investigation proceeded, by the identification really of many of the strange forms in which religious sentiment had found ex pression ; and comparative mythology became an inseparable companion of comparative philology. (See MYTHOLOGY and PHILOLOGY.) It was thenceforward obvious that every mythology, in the Aryan family at least, however puerile or absurd it might at first sight appear, was a fit subject for scientific investigation, and capable of yielding scientific results. The problem in each case was to trace the nursery tale to the legend, and the legend to the myth, and the myth to its earliest germ, and as far as possible to indicate the foreign interpolations when they occurred, and account