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the rope towards their respective goals. The meed of victory and the cessation 

 of pulling took place as soon as one or other party succeeded in pulling the rope 

 beyond its prescribed limits. This arduous and frequently dangerous contest I 

 myself have several times witnessed as a boy, from the windows of the building 

 whence the rope was thrown. To the best of my recollection, it had been wholly 

 discontinued before I went to live at Ludlow in 1852 as a man. No explanation 

 of the custom has, so far as I am aware, ever been authoritatively given, though it 

 seems to be symbolical of some famous faction fight, or struggle betwixt two contend- 

 ing parties in time past. It used to be said that the Corporation knew the inner 

 meaning of the custom. If they did, they kept it to themselves in a spirit of pro- 

 foundest wisdom, or that which passed for it, mystery. Perhaps the corporative 

 wisdom shone brightest when it decided on abolishing a custom fraught with 

 little less than rough horse-play, a good deal of beer-swilling, many bloody noses, 

 and not seldom a broken limb ! It would be possible, doubtless, to add largely to 

 the list of the above customs, which does not pretend to be anything approaching 

 to exhaustion ; but as I scruple to tax too heavily the patience of my hearers, I will 

 only now add a notice of one other singular and superstitious custom which (we have 

 it on the authority of John Aubrey) formerly existed in this county, and which 

 numerous writers on Herefordshire matters have unhesitatingly received and 

 adopted, although it seems that modern Welshmen repudiate Aubrey's affirm- 

 ation that it could ever have been practised among themselves or their ancestors 

 on that side the border. I mean the superstitious custom of the sin-eater, a sort 

 of social and human scape-goat, whose office is thus described in " Brand's Popu- 

 lar Antiquities, from the Lansdowne MSS. in the British Museum, the parti- 

 cular MS. being "Remains of Gentilisme and Judaisme," by John Aubrey, R.S.S. 

 "In the county of Hereford," it runs, "was an old custom at funerals to hire 

 poor people who were to take upon them the sins of the party deceased. One of 

 them (he was a long, lean, ugly, lamentable, poor rascal), I remember, lived in a cot- 

 tage on Ross highway. The manner was, that when the corpse was brought out of 

 the house and laid on the bier, a loaf of bread was brought out and delivered to the 

 sin-eater over the corpse, as also a mazard bowl of maple, full of beer (which he was 

 to drink up) and sixpence in money, in consideration whereof he took upon him ipso 

 facto the sins of the defunct, and freed him or her from walking after they were dead. 

 This custom alludes, methinks, something to the scape-goat in the Levitical law, 

 and, though rarely used in our own days, yet by some persons was observed even 

 in the strictest time of the Presbyterian Government, as at Dinedor [nolens volens 

 the parson of the parish) — so that if the rector pleads ignorance we shall know the 

 reason. The kindred of a woman deceased had this ceremony punctually per- 

 formed, according to her will, and, also, the like was done in the city of Hereford 

 in those times, where a woman kept many years before her, a mazard bowl for the 

 sin-eater." I may notice that the above extract may be seen without going to 

 the British Museum, by reference to p. 160 of the late Mr. Richard Johnson's well 

 known and able volume on the " Ancient Customs of the City of Hereford." In 

 the section devoted to this curious subject in Bohn's edition of " Brand's Anti- 

 quities " (vol. 2, p. 247), an extract is quoted from " Leland's Collectanea," which 



