I give a remarkable instance from Lincolnshire of the glossing over of pagan usage by Christianity. I was furnished with it by the Rev. R. M. Heanley, who wrote:—
“The Vicarage,
Upton Grey, Winchfield,
Nov. 16, 1890.
“Dear Mr. Baring Gould,—I wonder if you ever came across a case of the following strange survival, which I met with in the Lincolnshire marshes, as a cure for ague. It was in the autumn of 1857 or 1858 that I had taken some quinine to a lad who lived with his old grandmother. On my next visit the old dame scornfully refused another bottle, and said she ‘knowed on a soight better cure nor your mucky stuff.’ With that she took me round the bottom of the bed and showed me three horse-shoes nailed there, with a hammer crosswise upon them.
“On my expressing incredulity, she waxed wroth, and said, ‘Naay, lad, it’s a charm. I takes t’ mell (hammer) i’ my left haan, and I mashys they shoon throice, and Oi sez—
‘Feyther, Son, and Holi Ghoast,
Naale the divil to this poast,
Throice I stroikes with holi crook,
Wun fur God, and wun fur Wod, and wun fur Lok.’”
“Wod is of course Woden, and Lok is the evil-god Loki of Scandinavian mythology.”
To return to the White Paternoster. We may well question whether the Manichæan White Paternoster was not a much earlier form of incantation for blessing the bed, given a slightly Christian complexion. For in the Anglo-Saxon laws, in the “Codex Exoniensis,” is a most curious formula for blessing a field that has been blasted by witchcraft, and this bears some analogy to the blessing of the bed on which the sleeper is about to lie. According to this Anglo-Saxon authority, all sorts of seeds are cast out on the earth as an oblation to the plough. Then turves of green grass from the four corners of the field are cut in the name of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These are carried to the church and four masses said over them, and are replaced at the four corners of the field before sunset, and certain incantations recited over them. At the same time that the four corners of the field are consecrated to the four evangelists the cross of Christ is signed over the centre, just as in the French forms of the prayer of the bed the Virgin or Christ occupies the centre. One is inclined to suspect that in all this there is a reminiscence of the sun and the four quarters of the heavens, with the deities ruling them.