Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/315

 Their Bearing on Folklore. 287

property of the community has been duly studied, we can review the knowledge of the individual, the man of the people, as regards the facts of nature, and examine his mental outlook on the problems of daily life.

It is not easy to collect the Folklore of the present day from printed books, though these are as plentiful as black- berries by the wayside, and one might imagine that the mental characteristics even of the illiterate would be inci- dentally recorded here and there in some of them. The difficulties of our problem are greatly increased in dealing with a remote period, when printing was unknown and manuscripts were few.

Let us leave aside the light our material throws upon present-day belief, and take, from the Early South English Legendary, a book of history. The " Life of Beket" deals, as its name tells us, with the period before 1170, and as the MS. from which the tale is edited is computed to be not later than 1295, we have a version of the Archbishop's Life which had no very long period in which to receive any very great additions by way of incrustation upon the original story. In fact, the book gives us a plain tale which is told quite plainly. Two facts stand out on the negative side —

The first is the small proportion of what we should call folklore. Out of over 2400 long lines, very few increase our knowledge of things magical, of proverbs, of luck and ill-luck, of remedies and customs — in a word, of the many things included in the province of folklore. We have an atmosphere which, from the folklore point of view, is not richer than that of, say, Pepys Diary.

The second is the complete absence of that overwhelming fear of witchcraft, amounting to an obsession, which, so some people of the present day fancy, existed during the Middle Ages. Of course it may be urged that the writer was an ecclesiastic, who within the walls of the abbey or priory might feel himself secure. However much this