394 CRANE— MEDIEVAL SERMON-BOOKS AND STORIES. 



pass a night at the spot where the murdered man Has. There he 

 beholds the dead man stretch his hands to heaven and implore jus- 

 tice. A voice declares that he shall be revenged in thirty years. 

 The lady thinking that the murderer will certainly repent before 

 that time marries him. He and his family flourish and penance is 

 postponed. The fated day comes at last and a great feast is given 

 to which are invited all whom he has no cause to fear. A minstrel 

 is admitted, but a wag rubs the strings of his fiddle with grease 

 and the minstrel withdraws in confusion. When he has gone some 

 distance he finds that he has left his glove. He returns and dis- 

 covers that the castle has disappeared, and where it once stood is a 

 fountain and near it his glove. This story was told by Friar Hugo 

 de Succone in a sermon preached in foreign parts. He said he 

 told it as he had heard it, without vouching for it. One of his 

 hearers said : " Brother, you can tell this story with assurance, for 

 I know the place where it happened." Mr. Little cites two curious 

 Welsh parallels in Rhys, " Celtic Folklore," pp. 73, and 403. 



The second story (No. 192) occurs in the chapter " De ludis in- 

 ordinatis," and refers to a curious custom in Dacia, related by a cer- 

 tain friar Peter, who was from that country. When women are in 

 childbed their neighbors come to assist them with dancing and sing- 

 ing. Sometimes in carrying out their jokes they make a straw man 

 and put on it a hood and girdle, calling it " bovi " and dragging it 

 between two women. At times they cry out to it, "gestu lascivo," 

 " Canta bovi, canta bovi, quid faceret?" (sic, 1. facis? or taces?). 

 Once the devil answered from the image with such a terrible voice, 

 " I shall sing," that some of the women fell down dead. Mr. Little 

 remarks that " there is no reason to doubt the English friar's report. 

 The story agrees with the ' Konebarsel ' or ' Kvindegilde ' custom : 

 a party of women gathering in a house after a birth. The women 

 drink themselves merry, then they dance, then they go in a rout and 

 break into houses and revel along the street, and make every man 

 dance with them, and take the breeches ofif him, or in more recent 

 times more frequently the hat." The various elements of our story 

 are well known in Danish folklore, but the straw man at the lying- 

 in-revels is elsewhere unknown. 



In many respects the most important of recent publications of 



