Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/108

94 swept hill-top—High Fernley Hall; built in 1678, and once a large mansion, but now much reduced in size. Mr. James Parker, of Great Horton, near Bradford, a writer on local history and tradition, informs us that in the eighteenth century it was occupied (under the Richardsons) by a family named Bevers, of whom two brothers loved the same lady. The rejected suitor, after witnessing her marriage to his brother in Kirkheaton Church, 5th May, 1742, rode home to High Fernley and told the servants that some misfortune was going to happen to him, but that he would "come again" without his head. He then deliberately cut his head off (!): and afterwards kept his word, appearing every night in the guise of a headless horseman. His family quitted the Hall: it stood empty for many years: no one dared even pass by it at night: and at last the portion of the house where the suicide had taken place had to be pulled down and the mansion reduced to its present size, before a tenant could be found for it. With so active and grewsome a ghost for their only neighbour at the Hall, what is more likely than that the inhabitants of the Farm should have resorted to charms to prevent his entrance into their house?

The charms, which were folded and wafered, appear to us to be in a woman's handwriting. Mr. John Hobson Matthews, writing from the Town Hall, Cardiff, to Notes and Queries (9th Series, ix., 158), suggests that the words "Naadgrass Dyradgrass" are meant for a well-known Welsh bardic motto "Na ad dy ras, Dyro dy ras," (or, Duw dy ras), meaning "Prevent not thy grace, give thy grace," (or, God Thy grace). "Mediæval charms of this kind," he says, "made up of phrases from Latin and Greek liturgies interspersed with Welsh words, were common in the Principality right down to the early part of the nineteenth century."—]

An interesting old custom still exists in Whitby, Yorkshire, at this time of the year known as the carrying round of the "vessel cup." This consists of a common little wooden box, probably a sweetmeat-box, containing a doll reposing on a bed of dried stained moss interspersed with sprigs of holly, bits of tinsel, and