Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/231

 Rh would be ascribed; and in her name and by her permission would all agricultural operations be performed. Such a goddess it is who must have been honoured by the ceremonies already noticed in India, and to such a goddess we may readily believe would be ascribed the privilege of cutting wood. It is quite consistent with this that the payment by every household at St. Briavels should be made to the warden of the forest, and that it should be spent by him on the goddess’s festival. Whether the tolls and burdens vaguely referred to by Roger of Wendover were of an equivalent character we can only surmise.

On the whole, then, I am disposed to think that the legend and procession of Lady Godiva are survivals of a pagan belief and worship located at Coventry; that the legend was concerned with a being awful and mysterious as Dame Berchta, or Hertha herself; and that the incident of Peeping Tom, in spite of the absence of direct evidence in its favour, was from the first, or at all events from an early date, part of the story. The evidence upon which these conclusions rest may be shortly recapitulated thus:—

1. The absence of historical foundation for the tradition.

2. The close resemblance between the tradition and other stories which unquestionably deal with heathen goddesses.

3. The equally close analogy between the procession and that described in Eastern stories, which, so far as we know, could not have reached England at the latest period when the procession could possibly have been instituted; and between the procession and certain heathen rites practised not only in the East, but as near home as Germany.

4. The connection between the analogous legend at St. Briavels and the remains of a sacred communal feast that can hardly be anything else than the degraded remnant of a pagan observance.

I have not ventured to refer to the mysteries of Dêmêtêr, equated by many writers with Tacitus’ account of the