I find in a document written by the Rural Dean for the guidance of the Bishop of St. Asaph, in 1729, that the stag was started in a thicket where the Church of Llangar now stands. “And (as the tradition is) the boundaries of the parish on all sides were settled for ’em by this poor deer, where he was forc’d to run for his life, there lye their bounds. He at last fell, and the place where he was killed is to this day called Moel y Lladdfa, or the Hill of Slaughter.”
VIII. ST. DAVID’S CHURCH, DENBIGH.
There is a tradition connected with Old St. David’s Church, Denbigh, recorded in Gee’s Guide to Denbigh, that the building could not be completed, because whatever portion was finished in the day time was pulled down and carried to another place at night by some invisible hand, or supernatural power.
The party who malignantly frustrates the builders’ designs is in several instances said to have been the Devil. “We find,” says Mr. William Crossing, in the Antiquary, vol. iv., p. 34, “that the Church of Plymton St. Mary, has connected with it the legend so frequently attached to ecclesiastical buildings, of the removal by the Enemy of Mankind of the building materials by night, from the spot chosen for its erection to another at some distance.”
And again, Mr A. N. Palmer, quoting in the Antiquary, vol. iv., p. 34, what was said at the meeting of the British Association, in 1878, by Mr. Peckover, respecting the detached Tower of the Church of West Walton, near Wisbech, Norfolk, writes:—“During the early days of that
Church the Fenmen were very wicked, and the Evil Spirit hired a number of people to carry the tower away.”
Mr. W. S. Lach-Szyrma, in the Antiquary, vol. iii., p. 188, writes:—“Legends of the Enemy of Mankind and some old buildings are numerous enough—e.g., it is said that as the masons built up the towers of Towednack Church, near St. Ives, the Devil knocked the stones down; hence its dwarfed dimensions.”
The preceding stories justify me in relegating this kind of myth to the same class as those in which spirits are driven from churches and laid in a neighbouring pool; and perhaps in these latter, as in the former, is dimly seen traces of the antagonism, in remote times, between peoples holding different religious beliefs, and the steps taken by one party to seize and appropriate the sacred spots of the other.
Apparitions of the Devil.
To accomplish his nefarious designs the Evil Spirit assumed forms calculated to attain his object. The following lines from Allan Cunningham’s Traditional Tales, p. 9, aptly describe his transformations:—