Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/401

Rh Letourneau shows that several varieties of the rite have flourished in various parts of the globe; and he evidently holds the opinion that it has been actually observed among Christians, for he says:

"Under the feudal system in Europe this right of prelibation, or marquette (designated in old French by the expressive term droit du culage), has been in use in many fiefs, and until a very recent epoch. Almost in our own days certain lords of the Netherlands, of Prussia, and of Germany still claimed it. In a French title-deed of 1507 we read that the Count d'Eu has the right of prelibation in the said place when anyone marries. More than this, ecclesiastics, and even bishops, have been known to claim this right in their quality of feudal lords. 'I have seen,' says Boetius, 'in the court at Bourges, before the metropolitan, an appeal by a certain priest, who pretended to claim the first night of young brides, according to the received usage. The demand was rejected with indignation, the custom unanimously proscribed, and the scandalous priest condemned to pay a fine.

It is obviously unlikely that "the received usage" was ever put into force after Christianity gained a real hold. No doubt, the legal right would be bought off by a money payment. But is it not possible that the custom did survive for a short time subsequent to the nominal conversion of Europe, and that the memory of it lingered in men's minds long after it became morally impossible to make good any such claim?

Another well-known belief: that which relates to the walling-up alive of erring nuns, and other sinners, seems to be based on the faint recollection of a time when the pagan practice of enclosing living creatures in the structure of a building still survived. Such a habit would, it is to be imagined, soon die out after the spread of Christianity; but there is some reason to believe that the immuring of human beings while alive may have been modified into placing the corpse of a person who had died at a convenient season in any erection which appeared to need the presence of a protecting spirit. In the blood-stained days of feudal government dead bodies would be easily procurable if the purpose to which they were to be applied was deemed meritorious. In some very old churches unmistakable traces of wall-burial have been found. Yet it would be unreasonable to assume that the bones