In the farmhouse of Tresmarrow in Cornwall, in a niche, is preserved a human skull. Why it is there, no one knows. It has been several times buried, but, whenever buried, noises ensue which disturb the household, and the skull is disinterred and replaced in its niche. Formerly it occupied the gable head.
As already said, these heads were regarded as oracular. In one of Grimm’s “Folk-Tales” a King marries a chamber-maid by mistake for her mistress, a princess, who is obliged to keep geese. The princess’s horse is killed, and its head set up over the city gate. When the princess drives her geese out of the town she addresses the head, and the head answers and counsels her. So in Norse mythology Odin had a human head embalmed, and had recourse to it for advice when in any doubt. In the tale of the Greek King and Douban, the Physician, in the Arabian Nights’ Tales, the physician’s head, when he is decapitated, is set on a vase, where it rebukes the King. Friar Bacon’s brazen head whereby he conjured is a reminiscence of these oracular heads.
Fig. 10.—RIDGE-TILE, TOTNES.
In one of the Icelandic Sagas, the gable ends whistle in the wind, and give oracles according to the tone or manner in which they pipe.
The busts that occupy niches in Italian buildings are far-off remembrances of the real human heads which adorned the fronts of the wigwams of our savage ancestors. So, also, as already said, are the head corbels of Norman buildings.
On old Devonshire houses, the first ridge-tile on the main gable was very commonly moulded to represent a horse and his rider. The popular explanation is that these tiles were put up over the houses where Charles I. slept; but this is a mistake; they are found where Charles I. never was.
At one time they were pretty common. Now some remain, but only a few, at Plymouth, Exeter, Totnes, Tavistock, and at East Looe, and Padstow, in Cornwall. One at Truro represents a horse bearing skins on the back, and is so contrived as to whistle in the wind. None are earlier than the seventeenth century, yet they certainly take the place of more ancient figures, and they carry us back in thought to the period when the horse or horse-head was the ornament proper to every gable. These little tile-horses and men are of divine ancestry. They trace back to Wuotan and his hell-horse.[11]
The historical existence of the leaders Hengest and Horsa, who led the Anglo-Saxons to the conquest of Britain, has long been disputed. There probably never were such personages. What is more likely is that they were the horse-headed beams of the chief’s house of the invading tribe. Both names indicate horses. When the Norsemen moved their quarters, they took the main beams of their dwellings with them, and they took omens from these beams, when they warped or whistled in wet and wind. The first settlers in Iceland threw their house-beams into the sea off Norway, and colonised at the spot where they were washed ashore on the black volcanic sands of Iceland.
