Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 4.djvu/142

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NOTES AND QUERIES.

[12 S. IV. MAY, 1918.

from the hall, bearing some young women to the station. " Another batch leaving the hall ! " said her gossip ; and she then learnt that no real improvement had been effected by the gathering of good men.

Were it a tale of Ireland, not of Southern England, the explanation would be simple indeed : till some one speaks, and boldly asks, " In the Name of God, what do you want ? " the poor spirit cannot rest.

I know of an earlier exorcism which took place successfully in Cornwall about 1880, and freed the disturbed tenants of an old house there from the crying of a little girl who wandered about the attics cold and heart-broken.

Can any one explain the very general belief that our English Church has a form of prayer for exorcism ? In the case of the Cornish haunting I was told that " the clergyman read the prescribed form."

In Norfolk, too land of " John Schorne, gentleman born, 1 ' who was such an expert in laying wandering spirits the same belief is held. People say, " O, of course it is not in the ordinary Prayer Book, but all clergy- men know it, and can use it if called upon."

Y. T.

One of the biographers of the Rev. R. S. Hawker, Vicar of Morwenstow, relates an occasion on which that poet-priest essayed the laying of a nineteenth -century ghost ; and in Hawker's Prose Works (Blackwood, 1893) is a circumstantial story (based on " the ' diurnal ' of a simple-hearted clergy- man of the seventeenth century") of the laying of the Botathen Ghost. The story is too long for quotation ; but if any of your readers should be sent back once more by this allusion to the original, they will not regret it.

Briefly to summarize the story (first pub- lished in All the Year Round, 1867), one Parson Rudall of Launceston, having sought and obtained episcopal sanction under sig- nature and sifjillum, thus records his en- counters with the ghostly visitant, " a woman with a pale and troubled face. . . . [one] Dorothy Dinglet. . . .that. . . .had now been dead three years " :

" January 11, 1665. Therewithal did I hasten home and prepare my instruments, and cast my figures for the onset of the next day. Took out my ring of brass, and put it on the index-finger o) my right hand, with the scutum Davidis traced thereon."

" January 12, 1665. Rode into the gateway at Botathen, armed at all points .... There danger from the demons, but so there is in the

surrounding air every day. At early morning: then, and alone....! betook me towards the field .... First, I paced and measured out my circle on the grass. Then did I mark my pentacle in the very midst, and at the intersection of the five angles I did set up and fix my crutch of raun (rowan). Lastly, I took my station south, at the true line of the meridian, and stood facing due north. I waited and watched for a long time. At last there was a kind of trouble in the air. a soft and rippling sound, and all at once the shape appeared, and came on towards me gradually." Then follows a singular colloquy, confession of ancient sin and wrong, prediction of " a fearful pestilence." The " diurnal " goes on :

" At even-song, a long discourse with that ancient transgressor Mr. B. Great horror and remorse ; entire atonement and penance ; . . . .full acknowledgment before pardon"

" January 13, 1665. At sunrise I was again in the field. She came in at once, and, as it seemed, with freedom .... Then I rehearsed the penitent words of the man she had come up to denounce, and the satisfaction he would perform. Then said she, ' Peace in our midst.' I went through the proper forms of dismissal, and .... I did dismiss that troubled ghost, until she peacefully withdrew, gliding towards the west. Neither did she ever afterward appear, but was allayed until she shall come in her second flesh to the valley of Arma- geddon on the last day."

Mr. Hawker adds :

" It is a singular fact that the canon which authorizes exorcism under episcopal licence is still a part of the ecclesiastical law of the Anglican Church, although it might have a singular effect on the nerves of certain of our bishops if their clergy were to resort to them for the faculty which Parson Rudall obtained."

S. T. H. PABKES.

In 1879 a service for the exorcism of a lorspath, Oxon, by the Rev. H. C. B. Cruick- shank, chaplain of New College, and Principal of St. Kenelm's School, Horspath. A full choir, with cross and candle-bearers and acolytes, went in procession from the Vicarage" to the National Schools. The ghostly evidences were said to be the ippearance after dark of lights in the school-
 * host was held at the National Schools at

room windows.

W. P. H. POLLOCK.

The Spectator for July 6, 1711 (No. 110),

states :

" My friend Sir Roger de Coyerley has often told me, with a great deal uf mirth", that at his first coming to his estate he found three parts of his house altogether r,seless ; that the best room in it had the reputation of being haunted, and by that means was locked up ; that noises had been heard in his long gallery, so that he could not get a servant to enter it after eight o'clock at night ; that the door of one of his chambers was nailed up because there went a story in the family that