Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/456

 42 2 The Chevatich(^c dc St. Michel.

even the entire Parish of St. Andrew's, were never visited at all ; 4th. That such an inspection was surely the business of the bailiff and jurate of the Royal Court, and not of an inferior Court, which did not even confine itself to its own fief, but traversed the whole island from one end to the other, levying fines on persons not in its jurisdiction and insisting on the reparation of roads far beyond the limits of its own territory. He concluded by saying that " Toute cette cavalcade (ou plustost mascarade) se fait tout en un jour, depuis une extremite de I'lsle jusques a I'autre, et par consequent fort a la legere, en tant mesure que la pluspart du dit jour se passe en ostentations, menues collations par le chemin, visitation des fers de leurs chevaulx et conte des cloux d'iceux. tournoyements a I'entour de certaines pierres, et autres telles singeries."

The custom, here alluded to, of counting the nails in their horses' shoes seems to have disappeared in later days. It may have had reference to the old superstition, recorded by Culpepper, that the fern Botrychium lunaria — popularly known as Moonwort — would " unshoe such horses as tread upon it," as it has been proved that this fern, although now extinct, was once found in the island. ^^

In trying to unravel the origin and history of a ceremony which was, as far as its details are concerned, exclusively confined to the island of Guernsey, we discover that the abbots of St. Michel claimed the prerogative of holding the Chevauchee from the earliest times. For in the Assize Roll of 1309^' the abbot declared "that at the end of the eyre^^ he ought to cause the rod of the Lord the King to be carried throughout all the highways of his fee of the Vale to search whether any encroachments shall have been made there. And he ought to cause those encroachments to be fined and to take the fines thereof, and so his predecessors

'^'^ Flora of Guernsey, by E. D. Marquand, p. 212. ^-Special publication of the Societe Jersiaise, p. 48. ^" The assize held by the itinerant judges of that time.