STRANGE REVELATIONS
the Catholic faith.” He said this in a joking manner truly, but I could see that he jested in earnest: he further assured me as a positive fact that both devil-worship and a belief in witchcraft existed in the county. He said, “I could tell you many strange things of my rural experiences,” and he did—how the devil is supposed to haunt the churchyards in the shape of a toad, and how witchcraft is practised, etc. “You may well look astonished,” he exclaimed, “at what I tell you, but these things are so; they have come under my notice, and I speak advisedly from personal knowledge.”
Presently we reached the village of Osbournby; here the church looked interesting, so we stopped in order to take a glance inside, and were well rewarded for our trouble by discovering a number of very fine and quaintly-carved medieval bench-ends in an excellent state of preservation. Medieval carvings have generally a story to tell, though being without words some people are forgetful of the fact, deeming them merely ornamental features, and so miss the carver’s chief aim because they do not look for it; sometimes, by way of relief, they have a joke to make, now and then they are keenly sarcastic: but the stories—not the jokes—mostly need time to elucidate, for they often mean more than meets the eye at a hurried glance; moreover they have to be read in the spirit of the age that produced them. One of the bench-end carvings at Osbournby that is particularly noticeable represents a cunning-looking fox standing up in a pulpit preaching to a silly-looking congregation of geese, a favourite subject by the way with the monkish sculptors, and a telling contemporary satire on the priesthood by those who ought to know it best. It is remarkable that this peculiar subject should have been so popular, for I have met with it frequently; there is a good example of the same on one of the miserere seats in St. David’s Cathedral. What does it signify?
Still more curious does this strange satire seem when we remember that in the dark ages such carvings were the poor man’s only literature, for then even reading was a polite art confined to the learned few, and spelling was in its infancy. One finds it difficult to conjecture why the Church allowed such ridicule of its religious preaching to be thus boldly proclaimed, so that even the unlettered many could hardly fail to comprehend its meaning, for in this case the story meets the eye at once and was manifestly intended to do so.
If we may judge them solely by their carvings the monks of old, at a certain period, appear to have been craftsmen clever beyond cavil, full of quaint conceits, not over refined, often sarcastic, sometimes severely so, but curiously broad in their selection of subjects for illustration. Of course they carved religious subjects as in duty bound, and with painstaking care, but these all look stiff and mechanical, forced and not spontaneous, possibly because they had to work more or less in a traditional groove, and consequently there was no scope for originality; but in their less serious
A MEDIEVAL LEECH
moments, and these seemed many, when the mood inclined them they wrought carvings that were imbued with life; and laughed, or grinned, or joked in stone or wood to their heart’s content; then the whole soul of the craftsman entered into his work—and the inanimate matter lived, breathed, and struggled. His comicalities are simply delightful; he was the medieval Leech and Keene! Truly not all the old monks took religion seriously! but whatever their virtues or failings they were artists of no mean merit.
CHAPTER XII
A civil tramp—Country hospitality—Sleaford—A Lincolnshire saying—A sixteenth-century vicarage—Struck by lightning—“The Queen of Villages”—A sculptured anachronism—Swineshead—A strange legend—Local proverbs—Chat with a “commercial”—A mission of destruction—The curfew—Lost our way—Out of the beaten track—A grotesque figure and mysterious legend—Puzzling inscriptions—The end of a long day.
Journeying leisurely on we presently arrived at the curiously entitled village of Silk Willoughby; here again on asking the name of the place, which we did before consulting our map, a native shortened it to Silkby. It is a marked tendency of the age to contract the spelling and the pronunciation of names to an irreducible minimum,—a tendency that I have already remarked upon. Well, perhaps for everyday speech, Silk Willoughby is rather overlong, and the more concise Silkby serves all needful purposes. Still this pronouncing of names differently from what they are spelt on the map is sometimes inconvenient to the stranger, as the natives have become so accustomed to the abbreviated expression that the full title of a place, given precisely as on the map, is occasionally unfamiliar to them, and they will declare hopelessly that they “never heard of no such