That a wailing chorus answered her wailing there can be no doubt, though nothing is said of it; that the song is not quoted, that the record of these rites is brief, can be explained easily enough, when one remembers the monk who set down this fine old epic with pagan delight in his heart but a crucifix before his eyes, and constant thunder of ecclesiastical denunciation in his ears. Those neniae inhonestae, the singing of diabolical songs and the dancing of diabolical dances[[512]] about a corpse, all the “payens corsed olde rites,” were denounced by bishops and councils of the church with a fervid iteration which at once accounts for the silence of the poets and testifies to the stubborn vogue of the ceremony. The dance is of course a survival of very primitive rites, as will be seen in the study of the actual vocero, and as can be learned from ethnology; for the epics it has been developed into funeral games, although in the Béowulf one finds an older stage of these ceremonies than in Homer. Besides Hrothgar’s lament over Aeschere, a lament intensified by the absence of the dead body,[[513]] and the moanings of old Hrethel for his son,[[514]] there is the hero’s own funeral, where, when all the clan, presumably, have mourned their lord, presumably in song, and when the wife has sung, like Hildeburh, her giomorgyd, her song of lamentation, at last the ashes are placed in the barrow, and twelve noble youths ride round it chanting the praises of the dead king. A close parallel to this ceremony is found far to the eastward. In what is now known to have been a Gothic rather than a Hunnish rite, warriors rode, “as in the games of the circus,” round the body of Attila where he lay in state, and as they rode sang also a funeral song of praise; Jordanis[[515]] gives a Latin version of it, but as it stands in this guise, it has a very artistic and even artificial ring. The clan-grief and the clan-praise at Beowulf’s funeral are nearer to the facts. As regards the riding, it is clear that this takes the place of an older dance or march, just as the song takes the place of older wailings and cries. The processions of a whole community, at times of planting and of harvest, round the field, the barn, the village, to which we shall presently refer when considering the refrain, are matched by similar rites of marching with dance and song round hearth, grave, altar, in the ceremonies of wedding and burial. On the Isle of Man a wedding party goes three times round the church before it enters; and in many places the corpse is carried in the same way for a funeral. In the latter case, the solemn march is only a repetition of the dance round the corpse itself, the mourners going hand in hand, now slowly, now tumultuously, to the sound of their own wailing. Ethnological evidence, again, puts the songs and dances for the dead, as found among savage tribes throughout the world, in line with these survivals among the peasantry of Europe; no chain of evidence could be more complete. To this ethnological material we shall presently return; meanwhile it is in order to note the evidence in literature.
We have seen obvious cases of the vocero in oldest English, and it could be followed in other Germanic records. Probably many of the English and Scottish ballads began as a kind of vocero, something like the coronach of Highland clans: one thinks of Bonny George Campbell, with its repetition and refrain, and of The Bonny Earl of Murray, with its triad of incremental repetitions, ballads which follow close upon the death of their hero; of ballads less immediate but still memorial, like The Baron of Brackley, and perhaps The Lowlands of Holland; even of the widely spread ballads of a condemned criminal, the Good Nights, and such admirable precipitates of this kind as Mary Hamilton. For more direct evidence, the refrain line Ohon for my son Leesome Brand![[516]] is promising; but it is only a line. One vocero, however, has come down to us, although considerably changed from the normal and original pattern. In Aubrey’s Remains of Gentilisme and Judaisme,[[517]] mention is made of “Irish howlings at Funeralls, also in Yorkshire within these 70 yeares (1688)”; and again, quoting the song, This can night, Aubrey says it is from Mr. Mawtese, “in whose father’s youth, sc. about sixty years since (now 1686), at country vulgar Funeralls was sung this song,” by a woman like a praefica. Scott has a like account; it was sung a century ago[[518]] “by the lower ranks of Roman Catholics in some parts of the north of England. The tune is doleful and monotonous.” The refrain, or, as Scott calls it, the chorus, is very insistent and belongs to genuine communal tradition; he quotes an account of Cleveland, Yorkshire, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, which was found by Ritson in a manuscript of the Cotton library: “When any dieth, certaine women sing a song to the dead bodie, recyting the journey that the partye deceased must goe.” The following stanzas will serve as specimens of this highly developed but interesting vocero:—
This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
Every night and alle;
Fire and sleete and candle-light,
And Christe receive thye saule.
When thou from hence away art paste,
Every night and alle,
To Whinny-muir thou comest at laste,
And Christe receive thye saule.