Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/326

 320 not speak too positively. Still, it may be allowable to observe that the battle of Waterloo really was fought, although the Duke of Wellington did not cry, “Up, Guards, and at them!”

III.—The consideration of the influence of Folk-lore on History naturally leads to the subject of the influence of History on Folk-lore.

Surely, in spite of the proverbial “toughness” of “popular tradition”, it cannot fail to have been affected by the changes, the revolutions—political, social, religious—of an indefinite number of centuries. How a struggle, which was at once political, social, and religious, could and did affect old customs, we may learn from Aubrey, who notes over and over again, that things, laid aside when he wrote, had been in use “before the warres”. If we take some complicated piece of folk-lore and examine it closely, we shall find that it bears the marks of many different epochs and influences. Take, for instance, the common Mummers’ Play. There is first the kernel—the world-old story of a dead warrior restored to life by a magic elixir. Then comes the influence of the mediæval Church, adopting the original incident into the legend of the warrior, Saint George. Next, the disuse of popular amusements under Puritan rule, and the revival of them under the Restoration, doubtless account for the fact that the style of the piece, as we now have it, savours of the 17th century. The consecutive reigns of the four Georges have turned Saint George into King George. His antagonist has in some places become Bonaparte, and the conqueror himself is, in a Gloucestershire version, “Duke Wellington”. So our play comes to us like a traveller from a journey, laden with curiosities collected by the way.

I would venture, then, to urge on all collectors the importance of recording not only the custom (or what not), as they see it practised now, but also all that they can discover about the history of the custom in the past. In Wales, I would compare present-day folk-lore with