The bed be blest that I lye on.’
And this she would repeat three times, reposing great confidence therein, because (as she said) she had been taught it when she was a young maid by the churchmen of those times.”
In a MS. collection of notes on superstitions made by John Aubrey, which is in the British Museum, Aubrey enters—
“A Prayer used when they went to bed.
“Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,
Bless the bed that I lie on,
And blessed guardian angels keep
Me safe from dangers whilst I sleep.”
Aubrey adds, “I remember before the civil wars people when they heard the clock strike were wont to say, ‘God grant that my last howre may be my best howre.’”
Robert Chambers, in his “Popular Rhymes of Scotland,” does not speak of this prayer as used north of the Tweed at bed-time, but says: “A curious instance of far-descended nonsense is to be found in another puerile rhyme:—