Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/339

 Collectanea. 307

pieces, not cut with a knife. 1 At Cwm Yoy, in the Black Mountain, beer and cake are partaken of.^ The practice in Upper Wensleydale, at Settle and at Sebergham of wrapping the cake or biscuits in white paper was also followed on the Shropshire border. The cakes there were square, one for each invited guest, " neatly wrapped in white note-paper with a deep black edge, and well sealed at the ends with sealing-wax." ^ Miss Burne writes to me: "I clearly remember (as a small child) the oblong 'funeral biscuits' wrapped in white paper sealed with black wax, distributed at the funeral of a great- uncle at Kingswinford in South Staffordshire, 1856. I watched my father unwrapping the little parcel he brought home from the ceremony. . . . They were still in occasional use at Newport, Shropshire, eleven miles from Market Drayton, in the eighties of the last century." The custom was probably once more extensive, confined, however, to persons who could afford the luxury of comparatively costly funerals.* A correspondent of the Gentleman's Magazine in 1 802 described it thus : " It hath long been the custom in Yorkshire to give a sort of light sweetened cake to those who attended funerals. This cake the guests put in their pocket or in their handkerchief, to carry home and share among the family. Besides this, they had given at the house of the deceased hot ale sweetened, and spices in it, and the same sort of cake in pieces. But if at a funeral of the richer sort, instead of hot ale they had burnt wine and Savoy biscuits, and a paper with two Naples biscuits sealed up to carry home for their families. The paper in which these biscuits were sealed was

' Verbal statement by a Radnorshire woman to Rev. W. E. T. Morgan, vicar of Llanigon.

-Verbal information l)y Mr. Iltyd Gardiner, registrar of the County Court, Abergavenny.

•* Cyvirn Fii Notes and Queries, ii. 275.

^It seems even to have spread as far afield as the island of Antigua, in the West Indies, where species of pastry, called "dyer-bread" and "biscuit- cakes," are said to have been formerly handed round at Negro funerals, enveloped in white paper and sealed with black wax (Antigua and the Antiguans [Anon.], ii. 188). It would be interesting to know how and whence the custom was introduced.