GOING ROUND THE CHURCH.
This kind of divination was perhaps of a more uncanny character than anything I have hitherto mentioned, and a custom which both young men and young women very commonly practised, even within the last 50 years as I have been told by old people. This weird practice was to go round the parish church seven times, some say nine times, whilst others again say nine times-and-half, and holding a knife in the hand saying the while:—
“Dyma’r twca, lle mae’r wain?”
“Here’s the knife, where is the sheath?”
It was also the practice to look in through the key-hole of the church door each time whilst going round, and many people assert to this very day that whoever performed this mode of divination in proper order, that the spirit of his or her future wife or husband would appear with a sheath to fit the knife; but, if the young man or woman was to die single, a coffin would meet him or her. Mr. John Jones, of Pontrhydfendigaid, an intelligent old man of 95, with a wonderful memory, told me that, when a boy, he had heard his mother giving a most sad account of what happened to a young woman who did this at Ystrad Meurig in Cardiganshire about the year 1800. She was the daughter of a public house in the village, and the name of her mother was Catherine Dafydd Evan. Mr. Jones’s mother knew the family well; some of them emigrated to America.
This young woman was in love with one of the students of St. John’s College, in the neighbourhood, and being anxious to know whether he was to be her husband or not, she resorted to this uncanny practice of walking nine times round Ystrad Meurig Church. Around and round she went, holding the knife in her hand and repeating the words of incantation, “Here’s the knife, where is the sheath?” And whilst she was performing her weird adventure, to her great alarm, she perceived a clergyman coming out to meet her through the church door with his white surplice on, as if coming to meet a funeral procession. The frightened young woman fell down in a swoon, almost half dead, as she imagined that the one she met with a surplice on was an apparition or the spirit of a clergyman officiating at the phantom funeral of herself, which prognosticated that instead of going to be married, she was doomed to die.
It turned out that the apparition she had seen was only one of the students, who, in order to frighten her, had secretly entered the Church for the purpose. But the poor girl recovered not, and she died very soon afterwards.
I heard the following story from my mother when I was a boy. A girl had determined to obtain a sight of her future husband by going round the parish church nine times at All Hallows’ Eve in the same manner as the young woman I mentioned in the above story, but with more fortunate results. This also happened somewhere in Cardiganshire or Carmarthenshire. Just as the young woman was walking round the ninth time, she saw, to her great surprise, her own master (for she was a servant maid) coming to meet her. She immediately ran home and asked her mistress why she had sent her master after her to frighten her. But the master had not gone out from the house. On hearing the girl’s account, the mistress was greatly alarmed and was taken ill, and she apprehended that she herself was doomed to die, and that her husband was going to marry this servant girl, ultimately. Then the poor woman on her death bed begged the young woman to be kind to her children, “For you are to become the mistress here,” said she, “when I am gone.”
It was also a custom in Wales once for nine young girls to meet together to make a pancake, with nine different things, and share it between them, that is, each of the girls taking a piece before going to bed in order to dream of their future husbands.
Another practice among young girls was to sleep on a bit of wedding cake.