Having set his labourers to work, the legend continues that Barbara’s father departed thence and went into a far country, where he long sojourned: the Greeks used the word barbaroi to mean not ruffians but those who lived or came from abroad; the same sense is born by the Hebrew word obr, and it is to this root that anthropologists assign the name Hebrew which they interpret as meaning men who came from abroad.
Fig. 208.—Temple at Abury.
From The Celtic Druids (Higgens, G.).
It is noteworthy that, according to Herodotus, the messengers of the Hyperboreans who came from abroad, i.e., barbaroi, were entitled by the Delians, “Perpherees” and held in great honour:[376] the inverted commas are original, whence it would seem that perpheree was a local pronunciation of hyperboreæ.
The general impression is that the Hebrew, or Ebrea as the Italians spell it, derived his title from Abraham whose name means Father of a Multitude. At Hebron Abraham, the son of Terah, entertained three Elves or Angels: “He saw three and worshipped one”:[377] at Hebron Abram bought a piece of land from a merchant named Ephron,[378] and I cannot believe that Ephron really meant, as we are told, of a calf; it is more probable that he derived his title from Hebron where Ephron was evidently a landowner. Tacitus records a tradition that the Hebrews were originally “natives of the Isle of Crete,”[379] and my suggestion that the Jews were the Jous gains somewhat from the fact that York—a notorious seat of ancient Jewry—was originally known as Eboracum or Eboracon. Our chroniclers state that York was founded by a King Ebrauc, the Archbishop of York signs himself to-day “Ebor,” and the river Eure used at one time to be known as the Ebor: the Spanish river Ebro was sometimes referred to as the Iber.[380]
Fig. 209.—From The Everyday Book (Hone, W.).
An interesting example of the Cabiri or Adelphi once existed at the Kentish village of Biddenden where the embossed seven-spiked ladies here illustrated, known as the Biddenden Maids, used to be impressed on cakes which were distributed in the village church on Easter Sunday. This custom was connected with a charity consisting of “twenty acres of land called the Bread and Cheese Land lying in five pieces given by persons unknown, the rent to be distributed among the poor of this parish”. The name of the two maidens is stated to have been Preston, and that this was alternatively a name for Biddenden is somewhat confirmed by an adjacent Broadstone, Fairbourne, and Bardinlea. Whether it is permissible here to read Bardinlea as Bard’s meadow I do not know, but considered in connection with the local charity from five pieces of land it is curious to find that according to the laws of Dyvnwal Moelmud, the different functionaries of the Bardic Gorsedd had a right each to five acres of land in virtue of their office, were entitled to maintenance wherever they went, had freedom from taxes, no person was to wear a naked weapon in their presence, and their word was always paramount.[381] In view of this ordinance it almost looks as though the charitable five acres at Biddenden were the survival of some such privileged survival.
As Biddy is a familiar form of Bridget or Bride, Biddenden may be understood as the dun or den of the Biddys, and the modern sense of our adjective bad is, it is to be feared, an implication either that the followers of the Biddy’s fell from grace, or that at any rate newer comers deemed them to have done so. The German for both is beide, but that both the Biddenden maidens were bad is unlikely: the brace of chickabiddies[382] illustrated overleaf may perhaps have fallen a little short of the designer’s ideals, yet they were undoubtedly deemed fit and good, otherwise they would not have survived. That their admirers, while seeing Both or Twain, worshipped Ane is obviously possible from the popular “Heathen chant” here quoted from Miss Eckenstein’s Comparative Study of Nursery Rhymes:—