Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/351

 Hampshire Folklore. 315

pannage months, {i.e. when there was the right of pannage or pasturing swine in the woods). If animals or things were ' lost,' people went to him to have them ' found.' But there seems to have been more fraud than magic in his dealings. As children, the old woman continued, they were "tarble feared " of " the Ridleys," i.e. people who went about selling riddle (raddle) for brick floors. They carried the riddle in bags on donkeys, and " were all the same as Turks." " Gippos } " asked my friend, and the old lady assented. But these were forest terrors, quite distinct from the fears of the Down folk.

There was an old shepherd on the Downs, near Kings- clere, some four years ago, who was credited with an im- mense knowledge of country lore. I made several attempts to meet him ' accidentally,' on the uplands, without success, but gathered a few of his sayings from people who had talked with him. For one thing, though he would stay out night" after night in the solitude of the hilltops with no company but his dog and black-faced sheep, nothing would induce him to spend even an hour alone after dark in his cottage. But then it is never really dark out on the uplands, and there is lightning every night, except on Christmas Eve, (old style), when the cattle still kneel down, being as stubbornly conservative as the Hampshire folk themselves.

IV. Ghosts and Funeral Customs. One fear is, however, common throughout the county, and you will find as many ghosts in hustling Portsmouth as in the remotest village. "Everyone 'walks' in Hamp- shire," a young yeoman farmer in the north of the county told me, but " Old families and old customs be dying out," one good wife remarked sadly. For three generations her people had been the blacksmiths of the village, and she regretted the departure of the "round frocks" her father, who lived " a long age," used to wear. Most of all did she regret the yearly advent of the hop-pickers, — "outliers" all