Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/12

viii natives of it, who zealously aided my researches, I was enabled to lay before the members of the Athenæum a considerable collection of the stories, sayings, and superstitions of old Northumbria.

It was plain that the mine was one of great riches, and it was to some extent unworked. Strangely enough, the mention of North Country Folk-Lore in Choice Notes, reprinted from Notes and Queries, is exceedingly scanty and meagre; and though Brand’s Popular Antiquities contains a fairer proportion of matter from this district, and there is a good deal that is interesting in Richardson’s Local Historian’s Table Book, much more clearly remained to be gathered up. But there was no time to lose. Old traditions were no longer firmly rooted in the popular mind, old customs were fast dying out, old sayings and household tales lingering only on the lips of grandsires and grandames; they had ceased to be the spontaneous expression of the thoughts and feelings of the mass of our peasantry. And this, I believe, from two causes: first, the more generally diffused education of the people, and the fresh subjects of thought supplied to them in consequence; and again, the migration of families which has taken place since the working of collieries and the extension of railways. Formerly, as our parish registers would show, families lived on for centuries in the same village or small town, sending out offshoots far or near, as circumstances might lead. Now whole families uproot themselves and move into other districts; and it has been found that when people are wrenched away from local associations, though they