Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/210

204 practice was an actual custom in tribal society, appearing in local survivals both in England and Scotland. Therefore the story must have arisen at a time when this practice was undergoing a change. We must note, too, that the whole story leads up to the finding of a mallet with the rhyming inscription written thereon, connecting it with the instrument of death to the aged, but only upon certain conditions. If, then, we can find that the rhyming inscription on the mallet has an existence quite apart from the story, and if we can find that mallets bearing such an inscription do actually exist, we may fairly conclude that the story which, in Scotland, is the vehicle of transmission of the rhyme is of later origin than the rhyme itself.

First of all it is to be noted under this head that Wright, in a note to the Latin story we have already quoted, gives from John of Bromyard's Summa Predicantium another English version of the verse—

which shows, I think, the popularity of the verse in the vernacular. Clearly, then, the Latin version is a translation of this, and not vice versâ. It must have been a rhyming formula in the vernacular which had a life of its own quite outside its adoption into literature.

This inferential proof of the actual life of the English rhyming formula is proved by actual facts in the case of the corresponding German formula. Nork, in the volume I have already quoted, collects evidence from Grimm, Haupt, and others, which proves that sometimes in front of a house, as at Osnabrück, and sometimes at the city gate, as in several of the cities of Silesia and Saxony, there hangs a mallet with this inscription: