Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/423

 Rh long before, and long after, parish maps had come into existence.

There is much more that I could add, did the limits of this paper permit. I have said nothing of our local municipal customs; of the Tutbury Bull-running, now disused, nor the Whit-Monday Bower at Lichfield, still continued. Nor have I entered on the traditions of our old families. I can but barely mention the breed of goats in Bagot's Park, on whose existence the existence of the Bagot peerage depends; the black calf occasionally occurring among the wild white cattle in Chartley Park, whose birth portends a death in the Ferrers family; the aloe in the gardens at Sandon Hall which flowers before the death of the Lord Harrowby of the time; the custom, once common among our old families, but now kept up only by the Dyotts of Freeford, of burying their dead at midnight by torchlight, and, what is more singular, without the presence of any relative.

Much more might be said too of the beliefs of the poorer classes. As to death, for example: a farmer's wife of my acquaintance at Eccleshall lost her husband in the summer of 1892, and in her grief and distress forgot to tell the bees. Some time after all the hives but one were found to be deserted, and she hit on a plan for preserving this last. She gave it to her little boy, and explained to the bees that they had a new master and must stay and work for him. At the other end of the county a pit-sinker's widow was about to marry again. Her daughter in grief and indignation went to the churchyard arid told her father. Then as to marriage: quite of late years the idea that a wife might be held like any other property on a lease for a term of years came to light in the police-court at Stone; and in the Black Country there are plenty of authentic cases (not, I am glad to say, very modern ones) of wives being haltered and led through a turnpike gate, toll being paid for them like cattle, and sold in open market.