516 REPORT— 1895. 



several miles oflf, ' but the Devil every night removed the stones, and the 

 architect was obliged at last to build it where it now stands.' This is, of 

 course, a common tradition. The peculiarity of the case is that at Bisley 

 its meaning has been discovered. The spot where, we are told, ' the 

 church ought to have been buUt was occupied formerly by a Roman villa ; ' 

 and when the church was restored some years ago ' portions of the mate- 

 rials of that villa were found embedded in the church walls, including the 

 altars of the Penates, which are now, however, removed to the British 

 Museum.' ^ Here, as Sir John Dorington said, addressing this Society 

 some years ago at Stroud, is a tradition which has been handed down for 

 fifteen or sixteen hundred years. This is in our own country, and it may 

 be thought hard to beat such a record. But at Mold, in Flintshire, there 

 is evidence of a tradition which must have been handed down from the 

 prehistoric iron age — that is to say, for more than two thousand years. 

 A cairn stood there, called the Bryn-yr-Ellyllon, the Hill of the Fairies. 

 It was believed to be haunted ; a spectre clad in golden armour had been 

 seen to enter it. That this story was current before the mound was 

 opened is a fact beyond dispute. In 1832 the cairn was explored. Three 

 hundred cartloads of stones were removed, and beneath them was found a 

 skeleton ' laid at full length, wearing a corslet of beautifully wrought 

 gold, which had been placed on a lining of bronze.' The corslet in ques- 

 tion is of Etruscan workmanship, and is now, I believe, to be seen in the 

 British Museum.^ 



Examples like these — and they stand by no means alone — inspire con- 

 fidence in the permanence of what seems so fleeting and evanescent. Folk- 

 lore is, in fact, like pottery, the most delicate, the most fragile of human 

 productions : yet it is precisely these productions which prove more dur- 

 able than solid and substantial fabrics, and outlast the wreck of empires, 

 a witness to the latest posterity of the culture of earlier and ruder 

 times. 



But if these traditions have thus been preserved for centuries and even 

 millenniums, they have been modified — nay, transformed — in the process. 

 It is not the bare fact which has been transmitted from generation to 

 generation, but the fact seen through the distorting medium of the popu- 

 lar imagination. This is a characteristic of all merely oral records of an 

 actual event ; and this it is which everywhere renders tradition, taken 

 literally, so untrustworthy, so misleading a witness to fact. The same 

 law, however, does not apply to every species of tradition. Some species 

 fall within the lines of the popular imagination ; and it is then not a dis- 

 torting but a conservative force. The essential identity of so many stories, 

 customs and superstitions throughout the world is a sufficient proof of this, 

 on which I have no space to dwell. But their essential identity is over- 

 laid with external differences due to local surroundings, racial peculiari- 

 ties, higher or lower planes of civilisation. There is a charming story told 

 in South Wales of a lady who came out of a lake at the foot of one of the 

 Carmarthenshire mountains and married a youth in the neighbourhood, 

 and who afterwards, offended with her husband, quitted his dwelling for 

 ever and returned to her watery abode. In the Shetland Islands the tale 



' Gloucestershire N. ^- Q. vol. i. p. 390 quoting an article in the Building Neivs. 

 See also Six John Dorington's Presidential Address, Tram. B. Sc G. Arch. Soc.vol. v. 

 p. 7. 



^ Boyd Dawkins, Earli/ Man in Britain, p. 431, citing Archaologia and Arch. 



Camhrensis. 



