Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/77

 The country girls and swains danced around the pole on May Day; on Christmas Eve, when the oxen were supposed to be on their knees in the stables, the waits went about chanting old noels; conjurors were consulted at dead of night; the old play of St. George, beginning with the lines,

periodically slaked the popular thirst for the drama; people who were intensely disliked, or whose manner of living provoked criticism, were subjected to "skimmity-riding"; to pierce a waxen image of one's enemy with needles and to melt it over a fire while reciting the Lord's Prayer backwards three times was considered equivalent to murder and damnation.

"Superstitions linger longest on these heavy soils," Hardy has remarked of the central Vale of Blackmore. "Having once been forest, at this shadowy time it seemed to assert something of its old character, the far and the near being blended, and every tree and tall hedge making the most of its presence. The harts that had been hunted here; the witches that had been pricked and ducked; the green-spangled fairies;—the place teemed with beliefs in them still, and they formed an impish multitude now."

Thus paganism lingered on through the early part of the last century. The folk were church-goers, of course, and their speech was punctuated by frequent turns of phrase out of the Bible and Prayer Book. Their clergy forced them to maintain the proper respect for the cere-