Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/130

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{{small-caps|Notes on Welsh Folk-Lore.}}

{Communicated through Mr. {{small-caps|J. G. Frazer}}.)}}

The White Horse.—In South Wales, at a time of the early winter not very easy to determine—most people who remember it say at the end of November—young men go round from house to house with the white horse, expecting trifling presents in money. I remember it well in my young days, at Cowbridge, in Glamorganshire. The essential part of the thing was a framework in the shape of a horse's head, over which was fastened down a white drapery, which fell like a sheet over a boy's body. The white horses, I remember, had gay knots of coloured ribbon stuck on the head. The horse was led by a young man or youth, and the great purpose of it all seemed to be to run after, threaten to bite, and frighten the maids and children. Some of the horses had jaws, which the boy beneath could open and shut. I was told, in December last, that the white horse was put down by the police at Whitland, in Carmarthenshire, only about ten years ago, because there had been some servant girls frightened into fits; and another man in the neighbourhood told me that some very rough play was carried on sometimes in connection with it. The Principal of Cardiff College, Mr. Viriamu Jones, remembers the white horse in the Swansea Valley, as I do at Cowbridge. He suggested it might have to do with the invading and conquering white horse of King Arthur's legend. Is it in any way connected with the different white horses carved on chalk hills, such as the one in the Vale of White Horse, in Berkshire? Oris it connected with the pale or white horse of Death and the Erlkonig legend? Some say that the proper day for the white horse was the last day of November; others say that it came round shortly before Christmas.

Round, flat, white Loaves distributed on old New Year's Day.—In Pembrokeshire, on January 12th (old New Year's Day), people used to go round to neighbours' houses to fetch a present of a white wheaten loaf. My grandfather was a large yeoman-farmer in South Pembrokeshire; and a very intelligent man of 60, who has lived in the same part of the country all his life, and who worked as a lad on my grandfather's farm, remembers well this distribution of round white loaves. He says that there was quite a cartload of them piled up in readiness