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ON THE ETHNOGRAPHICAL SURVEY OF THE UNITED KINGDOM. 639 
transition period. He was known as the Bruighfer chief ; and among his 
duties and privileges, enumerated with the usual precision of the Irish 
legal treatises, are certain objects which ‘he shall have without borrow- 
ing—a grinding-stone, a mallet, an axe, a hatchet, a spear for killing 
cattle, ever-living fire, a candle upon a candelabra without fail, a perfect 
plough with all its requirements.’! I refer back to the Burghead custom 
to note the significant parallel in the taboo against borrowed articles, to 
the specified articles themselves in connection with the construction of the 
clavie, and to the ‘ ever-living fire’ of the Bruighfer chief. 
Here the examination of the more perfect examples of the custom 
fire—that is, those which contain the element of the house-fires of the 
family units being derived from the village-fire—ends ; and we must next 
ask as to the less perfect examples. These will be found to consist of 
many well-known, but little understood, customs, which equate with the 
examples just dealt with in one or more particulars, and which gradually 
shade off into examples which have reached the last stages of decadence. 
Perhaps with few other instances of traditional usage has the unfettered 
imagination of writers been more busy than with this. The lighting of 
fires at Easter, May-day, Midsummer, and Yule, has been so wide- 
spread in the Celtic parts of the islands that the subject has been 
peculiarly attractive to every school of Celtic scholarship. The result is 
unfortunate for the cause of science. It has served to make the subject 
peculiarly distasteful to sober inquirers who do not care to go on a roving 
expedition to Pheenicia and all sorts of ancient civilisations for the origin 
of a cult the remnants of which exist in modern Britain ; and hence very 
little attention has been given to the evidence supplied by the customs 
themselves when studied with due regard to scientific conditions. 
Leaving out of consideration all those general statements as to lighting 
of fires on particular festivals, which do not supply any of the details which 
have been the subject of particular observation, I will proceed to classify 
those definite examples of ceremonial fires which do not contain the 
essential feature of supplying the flame for the household fire, the object 
of the classification being to see how far their elements equate with the 
elements of the more perfect examples already examined. 
In Cornwall the festival fires were kindled on the eve of St. John the 
Baptist. The people attended with lighted torches and made their 
perambulations round the fires and proceeded from village to village.* 
Later writers give further details, but do not state that the house-fires 
were lighted from the village-fire. At Penzance young men and women 
passed up and down the streets where fires were lighted, swinging round 
their heads heavy torches, the flames of which almost equalled those of 
tar-barrels. At the close of the proceedings a great number of persons of 
both sexes used to join hand in hand forming a long string, and running 
through the streets playing thread-the-needle, and leaping over the yet 
glowing embers.4 Sir Arthur Mitchell has collected from the Kirk 
1 Brehon Law Tracts, iv. 311. 
* It seems probable that the word bonfire is derived from boon-fire, i.e. from he 
fact that the materials were obtained by boons gathered from everyone in the neigh- 
bourhood. (See Ellis’s Brand, i. 301.) Murray, however, decides that etymologi- 
cally the derivation is from bone fire. 
® Borlase, Antiquities of Cornwall. 
* Edmond’s Land’s End District, 66 ; Hunt’s Pop. Rom. of West of England, pp. 
207, 208; Brand, Pop. Antig. (Ellis), quotes an eighteenth-century writer that these 
fires were called ‘ Blessing Fires’ in the west parts of England. 
