Among the legends of the early Celtic saints nothing is more common than the story of the saint being sent to borrow fire, and carrying it in his lap without the fire injuring his garment.
In Ireland, before St. Patrick introduced Christianity, there was a temple at Tara where fire burned ever, and was on no account suffered to go out.
When Christianity became dominant, it was necessary to dissociate the ideas of the people from the central fire as mixed up with the old gods; at the same time some central fire was an absolute need. Accordingly the Church was converted into the sacred depository of the perpetual fire, and a lamp was kept in it ever burning, not only that the candles might be ignited from it for the services, without recourse had to friction or tinder flint and steel, but also that the parish, the village, the town, might obtain thence their fire.
Fig. 30.—CRESSET-STONE, ST. AMBROGIO, MILAN.
Fig. 31.—CRESSET-STONE, LEWANNICK.
There exist still a few—a very few—contrivances for this perpetual fire in our churches; they go by the name of cresset-stones. The earliest I know is not in England, but is in the atrium outside the remarkable church of St. Ambrogio at Milan. It is a block of white marble on a moulded base, it is now broken, but banded together with iron. It stands 3 feet 10 inches high, and is 2 feet 6 inches in diameter at top. It consists of a flat surface in which are depressed nine cuplike hollows. These were originally filled with oil, and wicks were placed in them and ignited. In England one is still in situ, in the church of Lewannick, in Cornwall. There it is not far from the door. It consists of a circular block containing on its flat upper surface, which is twenty-two inches across, seven cuplike hollows, four and a half inches deep. The stone stands on a rudely moulded base, octagonal, and is in all about 2 feet 6 inches high. In Furness Abbey, among the ruins, has been found another, with five cups in it; at Calder Abbey another, with sixteen such cups for oil and wicks. At York is another with six such fire-cups, and at Stockholm another with the same number, in a square stone table. At Wool Church, Dorset, is again another example built into the south wall of a small chapel on the north side of the chancel. It is a block of Purbeck marble, and has in the top five cup-shaped cavities quite blackened with the oil and smoke. In some of the examples there are traces of a metal pin around which the wick was twisted.
In addition to these, in several churches are to be found lamp-niches. Some have chimneys or flues, which pass upwards, in some cases passing into the chimneys of fireplaces. Others have conical hollows in the heads or roofs, in order to catch the soot, and prevent it passing out into the church.
Now, although these lamps and cressets had their religious signification, yet this religious signification was an afterthought. The origin of them lay in the necessity of there being in every place a central light, from which light could at any time be borrowed; and the reason why this central light was put in the church was to dissociate it from the heathen ideas attached formerly to it. As it was, the good people of the Middle Ages were not quite satisfied with the central church fire, and they had recourse in times of emergency to others—and as the Church deemed them—unholy fires. When a plague and murrain appeared among cattle, then they lighted need-fires, from two pieces of dry wood, and drove the cattle between the flames, believing that this new flame was wholesome to the purging away of the disease. For kindling the need-fires the employment of flint and steel was forbidden. The fire was only efficacious when extracted in prehistoric fashion, out of wood. The lighting of these need-fires was forbidden by the Church in the eighth century. What shows that this need-fire was distinctly heathen is that in the Church new fire was obtained at Easter annually by striking flint and steel together. It was supposed that the old fire in a twelvemonth had got exhausted, or perhaps that all light expired with Christ, and that new fire must be obtained. Accordingly the priest solemnly struck new fire out of flint and steel. But fire from flint and steel was a novelty; and the people, Pagan at heart, had no confidence in it, and in time of adversity went back to the need-fire kindled in the time-honoured way from wood by friction, before this new-fangled way of drawing it out of stone and iron was invented.