Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/408

 384 Reviews.

In fact, whoever wishes to find unrecorded folklore in Hereford- shire henceforth, will have to examine the county under a micro- scope.

In a Border county such as this we naturally look for traces of racial influence, and we are not disappointed. Much of the folklore of Herefordshire resembles that of the neighbour county of Shrop- shire, especially of South Shropshire, which is contained in the ancient diocese of Hereford. We have the observance of Mothering Sunday and the custom of "heaving" (here called "hoving") at Easter, — perhaps the southern limit of this last. Evil magicians of both sexes are termed "witches," and the "wise man" of some counties is known as "a clever man" or "a conjurer." Haunted spots are spoken of as places where "there's summat to be seen," and animal ghosts are common, — though surely neither Shrop- shire nor any other county can parallel the apparition of " a pig going up an elm-tree backwards" which haunted the Hereford highroad near Burghill (p. 35).

But Herefordshire is far more Welsh than is Shropshire. It occupies the basin of the Wye, not of the Severn, and it abuts, not upon the half-English Montgomeryshire but upon the purely Welsh counties of Radnor and Brecon. Offa's Dyke crosses it from north-west to south-east as far as Hereford, where the Wye became the early boundary of England and Wales. (Unfortun- ately Mrs. Leather's map of the county does not show the course of the river. It would be worth the reader's while to put it in with a pen.) Most of the western parishes were included in the Welsh Marches throughout the Middle Ages, and were only annexed to Herefordshire by Henry VI 1 1. A few in the south- west corner still belong to the Welsh diocese of St. David's. St. Beuno, St. Weonard, St. Clodock, and St. Dubricius are the local saints, and not St. Chad, St. Milborough, and St. Alkmund, as in Shropshire. The place-names in the western valleys are many of them purely Welsh, and the Welsh language was spoken there so lately as a century ago. In this district stories of fairies are current, and that characteristically Welsh apparition, the phantom funeral, may be heard of. The burial customs, too, here show Welsh features. Within living memory, funeral dirges were sung, the coffin was set down at