Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/378

 348 Whence the Isle of Axholme game was derived is likely to remain a debateable question. The district affords many instances of purely Scandinavian names; but Axholme itself, when written as it used to be—Axelholme—is formed of Celtic, English, and Danish elements, the two former of which also appear in Haxey. It is possible, therefore, that the earliest Teutonic population took over this observance from a pre-existing race of Celtic stock, or that they introduced it themselves. It is also possible, although hardly so likely, perhaps, that the intruding sea-rovers of a later age may have instituted it among the townships lying near Haxey, in imitation of some Danish, Swedish, or Norwegian ceremony, or even that the Normans brought it with them over the English Channel. The fact that the secondary festival at Haxey falls at old Midsummer ought to be noted; more especially as it, like the similar "Midsummer" held at Winterton and in several other Lincolnshire parishes, has no connection with the dedication of the church. Another trace of ancient nature-worship is also to be found in a custom which was still observed at Burnham, a hamlet of Haxey, in the last century. There, according to Stone-house, the holy-well, which was dedicated to the Redeemer, was supposed to possess the power of healing all sorts of deformities, weaknesses, and cutaneous diseases in children who were dipped in it on Ascension Day, and numbers of sufferers accordingly bathed at that feast. Holy Thursday is a day frequently connected with water-worship, a fact which has given rise to the supposition that it now fills the place of some holy-tide once sacred to a sky-god, whose cult was more or less connected with rain, and the replenishment of springs and streams. This god may have had near kinship with the solar deity, or he may even have been the great ruler himself; for it is beyond doubt that the cult of the sun is closely connected with that of lightning and rain, and therefore with the reverence shown to terrestrial water. In Lincolnshire, if it lightens and thunders about the