Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 2 1884.djvu/254

246 Newell's collection, "the Knights of Spain," are still acted, not only throughout England and the United States, but also in Spain and Sweden, in Italy and Ireland, among the Baltic Finns and the Moravian Sclavs. The "Knights of Spain" was originally based on the idea of a courtship conducted in the strictly mercantile spirit which probably pervaded the next stage of marriage-making after the primitive carrying off of the bride. Of that earlier system there are also reminiscences in some surviving games and in many popular customs. At Bocking, in Essex, the parents of the bride keep studiously out of the way at the time of the marriage ceremony. I remember the surprise, not to say horror, of an old gardener, who was asked why he did not attend his daughter's wedding. "Such a thing was never heered of in this here parish!" said he; by which he meant among people of his own sort, for a little higher in the social scale there is no rule of parental abstention. A version of the "Knights of Spain" was included in the Bocking Singing Games which appeared in the Folk-Lore Record (iii. 169); and it is interesting to note that four other songs of that small collection figure in Mr. Newell's work. They are: "Nuts in May," "Thread the Tailor's Needle," "Milking Pails," and "Jenny Jones." It is more than hazardous to endeavour to fix the precise route followed by any particular song in the course of its migrations; still it may not be irrelevant to point out that the very steadily kept-up intercourse between the English eastern counties and America would lead us to" expect the community of traditions which we thus find them to possess. In the village of Bocking, at the present time, there is hardly a poor family which has not kindred settled in the United States. Many went out from this part on the fall of the Commonwealth. A few years back a gentleman wrote from Rhode Island to ask after his ancestors who had lived in Bocking. A few facts were brought to light by diligent hunting in the old registers and parish books: one ancestor, charitably disposed, had given sixpence "To the rescue of Englyshe men out of Turkish slaverie." But the most important trace was not of a wholly satisfactory nature: a "comer" in the neighbourhood where three roads met was discovered to be popularly called by that gentleman's not common name, and report said that a man was once buried there with