Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/207

Rh with other remains of the church, are engraved in the volume. The suggestion of the writer of the note is that the builder of the mansion, in the early part of the eighteenth century, finding his neighbours too numerous, pulled down the village and incorporated its site in his pleasure grounds—a not unheard-of thing—though he admits that there is a tradition that the place was destroyed by fire at an earlier period. However, the date of the discovery of the remains is about that mentioned by Mr. Manning, viz., eighty years ago. Had not this discovery some connection with the phenomena he describes?



To the best of my recollection "Guys" were carried round by the boys and afterwards burnt, at Headington, near Oxford, fifty to sixty years since, and the rhyme repeated on the occasion was practically that quoted by Miss Burne in your last number. The "Guy" I think often took the form of some objectionable and unpopular person, for I remember a (deservedly) obnoxious local publican being burnt in effigy in front of his house. This was on the fifth of November. My father some years since wrote me the following concerning the local custom at Duffield, in Derbyshire; the date would be somewhere between 1820 and 1838. "The 'Wakes' was the first Sunday in November, and the day following was celebrated as the fifth is in other places—minus the 'Guy.' The boys and young men, long before the time, used to get some one's light cart, 'by hook or by crook,' to which perhaps twenty or thirty of them would be attached, and on moonlight nights would fetch in any rotten stumps or loose wood which was within two or three miles. They did the same thing with regard to coal, but the farmers were always ready to lend a waggon. Yoked to the waggon, as before stated, they would go to the pits about four miles off and buy a couple of tons of coal for about nine or ten shillings (of course previously collected), with which early on Monday morning they made a splendid fire. The more lively ones, however, did not stop long to enjoy it, for directly