Page 123. The blessing of the bridal bed had doubtless, during the dark ages that preceded the promulgation of the gospel in many parts of Europe, been deemed the immediate office of fairies and other supernatural beings. The object of it was to make the issue of the marriage happy, and to avert deformity. In this, as in numerous other instances, the priests felt themselves obliged, in their attempt to do away a Pagan superstition, which, as we see, continued notwithstanding to maintain its influence, to substitute some congenial ceremony that should console the deluded people; but their particular enmity to fairies on the present occasion seems manifest in the passage cited from the Salisbury manual, in the words "ab omnibus fantasmaticis demonum illusionibus;" unless they should be thought rather to allude to the subject which is particularly noticed in the subsequent remarks on the night-spells.
The above ceremony is thus mentioned by Chaucer in his description of the marriage of January and May:
"The bride is brought a-bed as stil as ston;
And whan the bed was with the preest yblessed,
Out of the chambre hath every wight him dressed."
Marchantes tale, v. 9692.
On the evidence relating to the consummation of the marriage between prince Arthur and the Lady Catharine, Robert Viscount Fitzwater deposed that "the prince was then about fifteen, and queen Katherine elder, and that the next day after being in bed together (which he remembred after they entered to have been solemnly bless'd), he waited at breakfast on prince Arthur, &c."—Lord Herbert's Life of Henry the Eighth, p. 243. It is said that some vestiges of this custom still remain among the Presbyterians in Scotland.
Page 169. There is a story of two caskets, &c., in Morlini novellæ, nov. 5.
Quære if the general construction of all these stories have not been borrowed from the trick related to have been put by Prometheus on Jupiter with the two bull-skins filled with flesh and bones?
Page 178 (note). Dr. Taylor, in his treatise De inope debitore in partes dissecando, has offered some strong arguments against the supposed mutilation of the debtor's body, and endeavoured to show that the law in question demanded nothing more than that the produce of his servitude should be divided among the creditors. Yet Aulus Gellius was of a different opinion. At a very early period, among the Jews, the creditor had a right to make a slave of the debtor. See 2 Kings, chap. iv. ver. 1.
Page 185. To the explanation of sans, add that in the early editions of the dictionaries of Coles and Littelton the word is printed sance.
Page 214. Morgan the herald must be acquitted of having conveyed to us the original information that "Jesus Christ was a gentleman and bore arms." He was indebted for it to Dame Julian Berners, who, in her treatise on coat armour, speaks of "the gentyl Jesus," and states that "Cryst [was] a gentylman of his mother's behalf and bare cote armure." She also tells us that "Cain became a churl from the curse of God, and Seth a gentleman through his father and mother's blessing." So that we find J. C. was not the first gentleman.