Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/149

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requirements of the parishioners. Probably the general reader will be astonished to find how long is the list of what to modern thought seem profane usages. The church fabric was the general repository of the village : not only the armour provided by the township, but more personal property, such as corn and wool, was stored by those whose own buildings were either too small or too damp. The parson in many cases, of course, had his tithe barn, but it seems that the proper place for the payment of tithes, where this was lacking, was the church. At Sarnesfield pigeons were kept in the tower and nesting holes provided. In 161 7 Francis Tresse of Monkton confessed at the archdeacon's visita- tion that he had laid his plough harness "on a wet day" in the belfry. One of the most remarkable cases in point is omitted by Mr. Addy. At Abbot's Bromley the reindeer horns which figure in the annual Horn Dance in September are still warehoused in the church tower. To a certain extent the church played the part of a village clubroom : it served as the village theatre : to the churchyard flocked holiday-makers at the Wakes to buy from pedlars' stalls and to watch wrestling, cock-fights, and the morris dancers. The Horn Dance was in times past carried out in the churchyard, but now the front doors of public-houses form a more lucrative " pitch." Men of the Middle Ages feasted in church : they drank in church : they slept in church. In sterner times men sought sanctuary or staved off a Danish raid in the towers still existing at Salkeld in Cumberland, at Barton-in-Humber, and many other places on the exposed Northumbrian frontier. The church was in a very real sense associated with the everyday life of the population clustered round it. As a diligent and compre- hensive collection of the evidence relating to the secular adapta- tion of the church fabric this book is distinctly suggestive and useful.

Mr. Addy passes to another phase of the same topic. If the parishioners found the church fabric of everyday practical con- venience to them, it is not surprising to find that they were made to pay for it. To see that they did pay through the medium of church- ales held upon festival days was one of the principal labours which devolved upon the churchwardens. Though not accepting that Mr. Addy is right in maintaining that churchwarden and manorial