Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/330

 324 error, if an error it be; but a false oath, that will bring a curse upon the swearer. “I hear Charlie B. has sailed for Australia”, said a respectable woman to me; “but he’ll never prosper, let him go where he will, if he’s taken a false oath, as they say he did.” “Folks say the Devil’s black”, said an old man; “but Jack R. says he’s red; and he knows, for he’s seen him a many times, him and his imps, since he took that false oath.”

When I hear of propositions to abolish the Queen’s Shilling or oaths in our courts of justice, I cannot help thinking that a little practical knowledge of folk-lore—or, rather, of folk—would help the authorities to judge of the probable effect of their measures.

Our people, further, believe implicitly in curses. In the Forty-five, so they say, the wife of a clergyman in North Staffordshire refused to give shelter to Prince Charles Edward, and roughly thrust him out of her house. Since then every clergyman’s wife who has lived in that vicarage house has been visited, they say, with insanity. A Wiltshire farmer wanted his men to work in the hay-harvest on Sunday, not to waste a fine day. So he hid his watch under the last cock of hay in the field, and promised a reward to the finder. The men, of course, turned over every haycock in the field before they came to the watch, and so his end was gained. But the hay from that field has never been made in fine weather since. Constantly, in our country villages, you will find some house of which it is darkly said, “There’ll never go no luck wi’ that house; it didna go to the right heir.”

For this is another point of the folk-morality—the absolute duty of leaving property in the direct line of succession. They recognise no individual rights in the matter, think no man free to do what he will with his own, and any man who presumes to leave his property to any but the next-of-kin, be the latter never so distantly related to him, is held to have offended against the eternal principles of right. I have even heard of a lawyer, who drew