CHAPTER XXVIII 



FISHING WITH THE HAIR OF THE DEAD 



This chapter owes its birth to a passage of intrinsic interest but 

 gruesome nature. 



Before quoting or dealing with it, I may be allowed a few 

 words as to my running it to ground and the curiosity it excited 

 among Angling scholars. 



Some years ago I read in an article that " fishing with the 

 hair of a dead person, iBr^rrev veKpa rpixi ^IXmp, was practised 

 by the Egyptians, as is shown by discoveries during the last 

 thirty years." No authority, no reference was given. " Thirty 

 years " opened up a search too extensive to waste on an 

 anonymous statement. 



Even so this fishing with an unknown gut, dead men's hair, 

 kept worrying me. Aristotle and others had written of the 

 use of horse-hair, but none of my friends or I had ever come 

 across this Egyptian tackle. A great authority suggested 

 that it was possibly taken from a body of which the hair con- 

 tinued to grow after death, and thus possessed much value 

 because of length and strength. 



Instantly floated before us visions of obtaining by a new 

 Rape of the Lock this most desirable gut. Two nefarious 

 courses were discussed. First, to rifle the coffin of Edward I., 

 which when last opened in Dean Stanley's time revealed {teste 

 the Verger) long hair still growing. Second, to raid the tomb 

 of the Countess of Abergavenny {nee Isabella Despencer) in 

 Tewkesbury Abbey, in which (to use Canon Ernest Smith's 

 words) " at the restoration of the Abbey in 1875 was disclosed 

 bright auburn hair, apparently as fresh and as plentiful, as 

 when the body was buried four and a half centuries ago." ^ 



^ Aristotle (H. A., III. ii, states that the hair does grow in dead bodies. 

 Since his time many descriptions of remarkable growth after death have been 



340 



