Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/410

372 but so that no baptised person's hand touches him. The rope shall then be fastened to the tail of a horse, and he be dragged to the gallows-ditch. (The above refers, though, more especially to suicides.) In a legal paragraph from Goslar it is said: "He who takes his own life must not be carried out through the door, but shall be dug out under the threshold or taken out through the window, and burnt in the field." Another case from Rygen (?) can be compared with this: "If a person hangs himself within doors, he shall be dug out either under the door or through the wall; judgment shall be passed upon him, then a horse shall drag him in a rope to the nearest cross road where three roads meet. His head shall be laid where Christian people have their feet. The rope with which he has hanged himself shall remain round his neck so that the end of it can be three feet above ground," and so on.

A number of other examples could be given; sometimes the hangman is to drag him out under the doorstep, at other times a hole is to be made in the wall; and as no one will have such a dangerous person near their dwelling or on their field, the dead body can be put into a barrel and thrown into the river, from whence it would be carried out into the ocean, where it can do no more harm.

To come nearer home. To the north of Skaane lies a tract called the Värend. In this former borderland lived a hardy and warlike people, the Virdars. A document from thence mentions that in 1611 the judicial court of Sunnerbo passed sentence on an old peasant who, suffering from cancer, had in his distress and despair hung himself, to the effect that as the deceased had deprived himself of life and there was no hope for him, he was to be dug out under the threshold of the house and carried to the gallows-ditch. Thereto was added this explanation; that when a corpse was carried