Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/223

 Collectanea. 199

Notes on the Stamford Bull-Running.

Read at Meeting, 20th April, 1904.

The practice of chasing a bull helter-skelter through Stamford, and of eating its flesh after it was done to death, seems to have been popular from time immemorial till 1839. The 13th of November, the second day after Martlemas,^ was the day on which the running took place, and it is possible that the custom was once an autumnal sacrifice connected with the appeasing of the spirits of the dead, or with some feast held after the harvest had been safely housed.

As I once pointed out in Folk-Lore (vol. vii., p. 346), it does not seem unlikely that bull-baiting originated in some now discarded worship. " Indications which suggest its association with the cult of water are still to be found. In the Stamford bull-running, for instance, the great object was to ' bridge the bull,' which meant to tumble him by main force over the bridge which spans the Welland into the river beneath. At Tutbury, if the minstrels could succeed in cutting off a piece of the bull's skin before he crossed the River Dove into Derbyshire, he became the property of the King of Music ; but if not he was returned to the prior of Tutbury, who had provided him for the festival." And according to Notes and Queries, 5th S., vol. xii., p. 456, " the last bull-baiting in Rochdale (Lancashire) took place in 1819, when seven people were killed in consequence of the falling in of the river wall. The baiting was performed in the bed of the shallow river (the Roche) in the centre of the town."

In the A?ttiquary, too — vol. xxvii., p. 140, April, 1893 — the Rev. Canon Atkinson stated : " Some twenty-five or thirty years ago I had pointed out to me, at Guisborough, the stone, to a ring socketed into which the bull that was being baited had been customarily chained. The bull-baitings continued, as I was in- formed, down to the commencement of the present century, or nearly so. And I was also informed that the chain used in securing the bull to the ring was the self-same chain that had been used to debar passage across the bridge over the Tees into or from out of the county of Durham after nightfall. My information was, as I had reason to be assured, perfectly trustworthy."

It may be well to point out in this connection that Stamford is

' See Folklore, iv., 107.