I will refer to one more local example. In Dorsetshire and Wiltshire fairs are held upon sites which are often marked by the remains of ancient works, or distinguished by some dim tradition of vanished importance.[51] One has only to refer to the history of the market as "a contribution to the early history of human intercourse" as Mr. Grierson puts it,[52] and to the extremely important and archaic constitution of the market, a glimpse of which has been afforded by Sir Henry Maine, alone among scholars who have investigated earliest English institutions, to know how valuable such a note as this must be if it can be confirmed by extended research. Local investigation of these places and their traditions would, no doubt, lead to many points in the tribal settlement of the district, an important fact of history nowhere found in history.
No one, I think, taking into consideration this view of the relationship of local and personal traditions to history will deny that history is likely to gain much by the proper interpretation of such traditions. Every yard of British territory has its historic interest, and there are innumerable peaks above the general level which should be worth much to national history. Every epoch of British history has its great personage, who in popular opinion stands out from among his fellows. When once it is understood that traditions attaching to places and persons yield facts of a kind worth searching for, there will arise the desire to obtain all that is now obtainable from this source, and to add thereto the deductions to be drawn from their geographical distribution.
II
If the accretion of myth around the lives of great historic personages, and the persistence of tradition in historic localities, may be accepted as one phase of the necessary relationship of tradition to history, we may proceed to inquire how far the unattached traditions, the folk-tales pure and simple, contain or are based upon historic details. These details will not tell us of any one historic personage, or relate to any one historic locality, but will relate to the peoples before personages and localities figured in their history, and will explain facts in culture-history rather than in political history. We shall be approaching the period before written history had begun, and for which, so far as written history is concerned, we are dependent upon foreign or outside authority. I think, perhaps, Dr. Karl Pearson has put the case for this view in the best form. "As we read fairy stories to our children," he says,
"we may study history for ourselves. No longer oppressed with the unreal and the baroque, we may see primitive human customs and the life of primitive man and woman cropping out at almost every sentence of the nursery tale. Written history tells us little of these things, they must be learnt, so to speak, from the mouths of babes. But there they are in the Märchen, as invaluable fossils for those who will stoop to pick them up and study them. Back in the far past we can build up the life of our ancestry—the little kingdom, the queen or her daughter as king maker, the simple life of the royal household, and the humble candidate for the kingship, the priestess with her control of the weather and her power over youth and maid. In the dimmest distance we can see traces of the earlier kindred group marriage, and in the near foreground the beginnings of that fight with patriarchal institutions which led the priestess to be branded by the new Christian civilization as the evil-working witch of the Middle Ages."[53]
I should not have ventured to quote this long passage if my own studies, before Dr. Pearson's book was published in 1897, had not led me to much the same conclusions.[54] But Dr. Pearson assists me in a special way. His methods are scientific. He is not a folklorist because he loves folklore, but because he sees in it the materials for elucidating the early life of man. He is not, so to speak, prejudiced in its favour. He brings to his aid the practical mind of the statistician and the psychologist, and his conclusions may not, therefore, be put on one side as easily as those of myself and other students of folklore.
It is due to the folklorist, however, to say that this aspect of the folk-tale had already been discovered by one of the greatest of the earlier collectors of traditional lore, the late Mr. J. F. Campbell. Thus, writing, in 1860, of his grand collection of "Highland Tales," Mr. Campbell very truly says: "The tales represent the actual everyday life of those who tell them, with great fidelity. They have done the same, in all likelihood, time out of mind, and that which is not true of the present is, in all probability, true of the past; and therefore something may be learned of forgotten ways of life."[55] Readers of Mr. Campbell's books well know how he has traced out from these traditions from the nursery, identical customs with Highland everyday life, and relics also of a long-forgotten past state of things; how he points to the records of the stone age and the iron age in these representatives of the scientific memoirs of the past; how very significantly he answers his own supposition, that if these tales "are dim recollections of savage times and savage people, then other magic gear, the property of giants, fairies, and bogles, should resemble things which are precious now amongst savage or half-civilized tribes, or which really have been prized amongst the old inhabitants of these islands or of other parts of the world."[56]
This is an extremely important conclusion on the relationship of history and tradition, and it will be well to illustrate it by turning to some obvious details of primitive life, which are to be seen with more or less clearness enshrined in the folk-tales which have been preserved in our own country.
In Kennedy's Fireside Stories of Ireland, it is related in one of the tales that there was no window to the mud-wall cabin, and the door was turned to the north;[57] and then, again, we have this picture given to us in another story: on a common that had in the middle of it a rock or great pile of stones overgrown with furze bushes, there was a dwelling-house, and a cow-house, and a goat's-house, and a pigsty all scooped out of the rock; and the cows were going into the byre, and the goats into their house, but the pigs were grunting and bawling before the door.[58] This takes us to the surroundings of the cave-dwelling people.
Then in other places we come across relics of ancient agricultural life preserved in these stories. In the Irish story of "Hairy Rouchy" the heroine is fastened by her wicked sisters in a pound,[59] an incident not mentioned in the parallel Highland tale related by Campbell.[60] Many Irish stories contain details of primitive life that the Scottish variants do not contain. The field that was partly cultivated with corn and partly pasture for the cow,[61] the grassy ridge upon which the princess sat, and the furrows wherein her two brothers were lying,[62] are instances.