FOOTNOTES:
[444] Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Bury), iii. 214-15.
[445] Royal Irish Academy, viii. 258; Brit. Arch. Assoc. (Gloucester volume), 62.
[446] "The Story of the Ere Dwellers," Morris, Saga Library, ii. 8.
[447] Camden, Britannia, s.v. "Ireland."
[448] Henderson, Folklore of Northern Counties, 16.
[449] Glas, Canary Islands, 148.
[450] Betham, Gael and Cymbri, pp. 236-8.
[451] Decline and Fall, iii. p. 214 (edit. Bury).
[452] Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, by Stallybrass, iii. pp. 35, 36. A passage from Hakon's Saga, quoted by Du Chaillu in his Viking Age, i. p. 464, shows that the northern peoples adopted the same measures.
[453] Beda, lib. i. cap. 30; and consult Mr. Plummer's learned notes on this (vol. ii. 57-61).
[454] Stanley, Memorials of Canterbury, 37-38.
[455] Cf. my Ethnology in Folklore, 30-36, 136-140. Compare St. Patrick's dedication of pagan sacred stones to Christian purposes.—Tripartite Life of St. Patrick, i. 107.
[456] Thus Henry of Huntingdon records that Redwald, King of the East Angles, after his conversion to Christianity, "set up altars to Christ and the devil in the same chapel" (lib. iii.).
[457] Cf. Kemble, Saxons in England, i. 330-335. Dr. Hearn writes: "Even as the good Pope Gregory the Great permitted the newly converted English to retain their old temples and accustomed rites, attaching, however, to them another purpose and a new meaning, so his successors found means to utilize the simple beliefs of early animism. Long and vainly the Church struggled against this irresistible sentiment. Fifteen centuries ago it was charged against the Christians of that day that they appeased the shades of the dead with feasts like the Gentiles. In the Penitentials we find the prohibition of burning grains where a man had died. In the Indiculus superstitionum et Paganiarum among the Saxons complaint is made of the too ready canonisation of the dead; and the Church seems to have been much troubled to keep within reasonable bounds this tendency to indiscriminate apotheosis. At length a compromise was effected, and the Feast of All Souls converted to pious uses that wealth of sentiment which previously was lavished on the dead" (The Aryan Household, p. 60). And, to close this short note upon an important subject, Mr. Metcalfe, speaking of the old poetic literature of the pagan English, says: "It was kidnapped, and its features so altered and disguised as not to be recognisable. It was supplanted by Christian poetical legends and Bible lays produced in rivalry of the popular lays of their heathen predecessors. Finding that the people would listen to nothing but these old lays, the missionaries affected their spirit and language, and borrowed the words and phrases of heathenism" (Metcalfe's Englishman and Scandinavian, p. 155).
[458] For some reason not apparent in the document itself, Mrs. S. C. Lomas, the editor of this report, says this interesting letter gives "a curious and evidently prejudiced description of the religious houses and observances." See preface to Hist. MSS. Com. Report on the MSS. of Chequers Court, Bucks, p. x.
[459] Hist. MSS. Com., Chequers Court Papers, pp. 171-2.
[460] Vestiges of Ancient Manners and Customs in Italy, p. 1.
[461] Corpus insc. Lat., i. 409; and cf. Cumont's Mysteries of Mithra (1903).
[462] Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains (1892).
[463] Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Bury), ii. 15.
[464] Decline and Fall, ii. 17.
[465] Evidence is scattered far and wide in most of the reliable studies in folklore. Two special books may be mentioned. A great storehouse of examples is to be found in The Popish Kingdoms, by Thomas Naogeorgus, Englyshed by Barnabe Googe, 1570, a new edition of which was published by Mr. R. C. Hope in 1880; and Mr. H. M. Bower has exhaustively examined one important Italian ceremony in his The Elevation and Procession of the Ceri at Gubbio, published by the Folklore Society in 1897.