Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/341

 Collectanea. 309

bourhood of Llandebie, near Swansea, as a place where the custom had survived to within a recent period. ^

The evidence has been challenged by writers zealous for what has been thought to be the honour of Wales and the Marches on more than one occasion, but without success.- And recently discoveries in Herefordshire, where the custom of sin-eating was first recorded, have tended to confirm the old accounts. At Cwm Yoy the beer and cake, already mentioned, are par- taken of by the assembled guests after the corpse is brought out and placed on trestles, before the funeral procession starts ; and the ceremony is called " the Last Sacrament." Mrs. Leather relates that a resident in the neighbourhood of Hay on attend- ing the funeral of the sister of a farmer near Crasswall, was to his surprise " invited to go upstairs to the room where the body was lying. He went with the brother and four bearers. At the bottom of the bed, at the foot of the coffin, was a little box, with a white cloth covering it. On it were placed a bottle of port wine, opened, and six glasses arranged round it. The glasses were filled, and my informant was asked to drink. This he refused, saying that he never took wine. ' But you must drink, sir,' said the old farmer ; ' it is like the Sacrament. It is to kill the sins of my sister.' " ^ With this may be compared Mr. Addy's statements about the custom and belief in Derby- shire : " At a funeral in Derbyshire wine is first offered to the bearers who carry the corpse " — that is, as I understand it, before the body is removed. He goes on : " This custom is strictly maintained, the guests not receiving any wine until the funeral party has returned from church." He subsequently says, from the information of a farmer's daughter formerly residing at Dronfield, Derbyshire : " When you drink wine at a funeral every drop that you drink is a sin which the deceased has committed. You thereby take away the dead man's sins

^ Ai-chaeulogia Cainbrensis, N.S. iii. 350.

-The last time to my knowledge was in a correspondence begun in The Times, i8th, 24th September, 14th, 28th October, 1895, and continued in The Academy from the 9th No%'ember, 1895, to the 23rd May, 1896, and in Notes and Queries, 8th ser. viii. 288, 322 ; ix. 109, 169, 236, 296.

^ F.L. of Herefordshire, loc. cit.