[27] Bishop Kennett, quoted in Notes and Queries, fourth series, ix. 258.
[28] Mommsen's account of the Pontifex Maximus should be consulted, Hist. Rome, i. 178; and cf. Fowler, Roman Festivals, 114, 147, 214.
[29] Mrs. Gomme, Traditional Games, i. 347.
[30] Bingley, North Wales, 1814, p. 252.
[31] See my Folklore Relics of Early Village Life, 29; Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 97. This case was reported in the newspapers at the time of its occurrence. It came to England from the London and China Telegraph, from which the Newcastle Chronicle, 9 February, 1889, copied the following statement:—
"The boatmen on the Ganges, near Rajmenal, somehow came to believe that the Government required a hundred thousand human heads as the foundation for a great bridge, and that the Government officers were going about the river in search of heads. A hunting party, consisting of four Europeans, happening to pass in a boat, were set upon by the one hundred and twenty boatmen, with the cry 'Gulla Katta,' or cut-throats, and only escaped with their lives after the greatest difficulty."
[32] I have worked out this fact in my Governance of London, 46-68, 202-229.
[33] See Turner, Hist. of Anglo-Saxons, ii. 207-222; Y Cymmrodor, xi. 61-101.
[34] A passage in William of Malmesbury points to the fact of the Bretons in the time of Athelstan looking upon themselves as exiles from the land of their fathers. Radhod, a prefect of the church at Avranches, writes to King Athelstan as "Rex gloriose exultator ecclesiæ ... deprecamur atque humiliter invocamus qui in exulatu et captivitate nostris meritis et peccatis, in Francia commoramur" etc., De Gestis Regum Anglorum (Rolls Ed.), i. 154.
[35] Rhys, Celtic Folklore, ii. 466. Sir John Rhys acknowledges his indebtedness to me for lending him my Swaffham notes, but at that time I had not formed the views stated above and Sir John Rhys confessed his difficulty in classifying and characterising these stories (p. 456).