Now curiously enough, I had a theory about folk-lore. It was the simple common idea that comes to many children even in their earliest school-days. The schoolmasters were all wrong. The professors of folk-lore were teaching it upside down. Instead of beginning with ancient legends and working back towards to-day, they should begin with to-day and march forward into the past. I wired to the Professor about it—reply prepaid. His answer was encouraging. “Theory probably Celtic origin; stick.”
As my business is to preside over a County Court, I went down to my work full of my theory and determined at all costs to stick to it. I know that to the pathologist a County Court is merely a gathering-place for microbes, and a centre point of infection; that the reformer sees in it only a cumbrous institution for deciding unnecessary disputes, whilst the facile reporter comes there to wash from its social dirt a few ounces of golden humour for his latest headline. These are but surface views. I went there like the poet, “whose seed-field is Time,” to find folk-lore, and I was overwhelmed.
No sooner did I enter the Court, as I had done many and many a hundred times, than the High Bailiff, rising in his place, called out, as he, too, had done many a hundred times, “Oh yes! Oh yes! Oh yes! All persons having business in the Manchester County Court draw near and give attention.” At once I knew that the place I was in belonged to the old days of fairies and knights, and ladies and giants, and heroes and dragons. The “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” struck my certain ear and told me I was in the presence of folk-lore. The creeping voice of the old world came stealing across the ages, calling upon me “Oyez!” “Hear!” and if you can “Understand!” It seemed to bring its message with a sly chuckle as if to say, “There you are, my modern, up-to-date, twentieth century judicial person, beginning your day’s work with the same old cry that has called men together to listen to official wisdom for centuries of time.”
My friend the High Bailiff has not, I am sure, the least notion that he is, from a folk-lore point of view, a man of parallels and analogues, or that the “fancy” would undoubtedly classify him along with that most beautiful of human fritillaries, the Herald. For indeed, in everything but glory of costume, he is one of those delightful figures of the middle ages who carried challenges and messages of peace and war, and set out the lists in jousts and tournaments, and witnessed combats and wagers of battle—which my friend sits and watches to-day—and recorded the names of those who did valiantly, and remembered the dead when the fight was over—which to-day he leaves to the reporters. Here in this dingy court in a Manchester back street students of folk lore may see a real Herald calling out “Oyez! Oyez!” announcing that the lists are open, and that anyone may come prancing into Court and throw down his glove—with the post-heroic gloss of a treasury hearing fee upon it—and that if the challenge be taken up, the fight may proceed according to the custom of County Courts.
I would inaugurate a movement to apparel the High Bailiff in scarlet and gold lace, and I would have him ride into Court on a white palfrey, sounding a trumpet, but that I fear it would lead to jealousy among Registrars. Besides, some envious German Professor will, I know, point out that as a crier my High Bailiff is more akin to the Praeco of a Roman auction, and that the village town crier is his poor relation. The answer to this is that his auctioneering tendencies really belong to his bailiff cycle, as the “fancy” would say. And as a bailiff we could, did time permit, trace him in dry-as-dust glossaries and abridgments, through a line of sheriffs of counties, and stewards of manors, and in various forms of governors and superintendents, until we lose sight of him as a kind of tutor to the sons of emperors in the twilight of the gods.
Let the High Bailiff call on the first case, and say with Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York:
This is the day appointed for the combat,
And ready are the appellant and defendant,
The armourer and his man to enter the lists;