The thought of a sacrifice to the Earth goddess was quite lost, but not the conviction that by a sacrifice the cracking walls could be secured.
The vast bulk of the clergy in the early Middle Ages were imbued with the superstitions of the race and age to which they belonged. They were of the people. They were not reared in seminaries, and so cut off from the influences of ignorant and superstitious surroundings. They were a little ahead of their fellows in culture, but only a little. The mediæval priest allowed the old Pagan customs to continue unrebuked, he half believed in them himself. One curious and profane incident of the close of the fifteenth century may be quoted to show to how late a date heathenism lingered mixed up with Christian ideas. An Italian contemporary historian says, that when Sessa was besieged by the King of Naples, and ran short of water, the inhabitants put a consecrated host in the mouth of an ass, and buried the ass alive in the porch of the church. Scarcely was this horrible ceremony completed, before the windows of heaven were opened, and the rain poured down.2
In 1885, Holsworthy parish church was restored, and in the course of restoration the south-west angle wall of the church was taken down. In it, embedded in the mortar and stone, was found a skeleton. The wall of this portion of the church was faulty, and had settled. According to the account given by the masons who found the ghastly remains, there was no trace of a tomb, but every appearance of the person having been buried alive, and hurriedly. A mass of mortar was over the mouth, and the stones were huddled about the corpse as though hastily heaped about it, then the wall was leisurely proceeded with.
The parish church of Kirkcudbright was partially taken down in 1838, when, in removing the lintel of the west doorhead, a skull of a man was found built into the wall above the doorway. This parish church was only erected in 1730, so that this seems to show a dim reminiscence, at a comparatively recent date, of the obligation to place some relic of a man in the wall to insure its stability.
In the walls of the ancient castle of Henneberg, the seat of a line of powerful counts, is a relieving arch, and the story goes that a mason engaged on the castle was induced by the offer of a sum of money to yield his child to be built into it. The child was given a cake, and the father stood on a ladder superintending the building. When the last stone was put in, the child screamed in the wall, and the man, overwhelmed with self-reproach, lost his hold, fell from the ladder, and broke his neck. A similar story is told of the castle of Liebenstein. A mother sold her child for the purpose. As the wall rose about the little creature, it cried out, “Mother, I still see you!” then, later, “Mother, I can hardly see you!” and lastly, “Mother, I see you no more!” In the castle of Reichenfels, also, a child was immured, and the superstitious conviction of the neighbourhood is, that were the stones that enclose it removed, the castle would fall.
In the Eifel district, rising out of a gorge is a ridge on which stand the ruins of two extensive castles, Ober and Nieder Manderscheid. According to popular tradition, a young damsel was built into the wall of Nieder Manderscheid, yet with an opening left, through which she was fed as long as she was able to eat. In 1844 the wall at this point was broken through, and a cavity was discovered in the depth of the wall, in which a human skeleton actually was discovered.
The Baron of Winneburg, in the Eifel, ordered a master mason to erect a strong tower whilst he was absent. On his return he found that the tower had not been built, and he threatened to dismiss the mason. That night someone came to the man and said to him: “I will help you to complete the tower in a few days, if you will build your little daughter into the foundations.” The master consented, and at midnight the child was laid in the wall, and the stones built over her. That is why the tower of Winneburg is so strong that it cannot be overthrown.
When the church of Blex, in Oldenburg, was building, the foundations gave way, being laid in sand. Accordingly, the authorities of the village crossed the Weser, and bought a child from a poor mother at Bremerleke, and built it alive into the foundations. Two children were thus immured in the basement of the wall of Sandel, one in that of Ganderkesee. At Butjadeirgen, a portion of the dyke gave way, therefore a boy named Hugo was sunk alive in the foundations of the dam. In 1615 Count Anthony Günther of Oldenburg, on visiting a dyke in process of construction, found the workmen about to bury an infant under it. The count interfered, saved the child, reprimanded the dam-builders, and imprisoned the mother who had sold her babe for the purpose. Singularly enough, this same count is declared by tradition to have buried a living child in the foundations of his castle at Oldenburg.
When Detinetz was built on the Danube, the Slavonic settlers sent out into the neighbourhood to capture the first child encountered. A boy was taken, and walled into the foundations of their town. Thence the city takes its name, dijete is the Slavonic for boy.
In the life of Merlin, as given by Nennius and by Geoffrey of Monmouth, we are told that Vortigern tried to build a castle, but that the walls gave way as fast as he erected them. He consulted the wise men, and they told him that his foundations could only be made to stand if smeared with the blood of a fatherless boy. Thus we get the same superstition among Celts, Slaves, Teutons, and Northmen.
Count Floris III. of Holland, who married Ada, daughter of Henry, the son of David, King of Scotland, visited the island of Walcheren in 1157, to receive the homage of the islanders. On his return to Holland he despatched a number of experienced workmen to repair the sea-walls which were in a dilapidated condition. In one place where the dam crossed a quicksand, they were unable to make it stand till they had sunk a live dog in the quicksand. The dyke is called Hontsdamm to this day. Usually a live horse was buried in such places, and this horse haunts the sea-walls; if an incautious person mounts it, the spectre beast plunges into the sea and dissolves into foam.
The dog or horse is the substitute for a child. A few centuries earlier the dyke builders would have reared it over an infant buried alive. The trace of the substitution remains in some folk-tales. An architect promises the devil the soul of the first person who crosses the threshold of the house, or church, or goes over the bridge he has built with the devil’s aid. The evil one expects a human victim, and is put off with a wolf, or a dog, or a cock. At Aix-la-Chapelle, as we have seen, a wolf took the place of a human victim: at Frankfort a cock.
In Yorkshire, the Kirk-Grim is usually a huge black dog with eyes like saucers, and is called a padfoot. It generally frequents the church lanes; and he who sees it knows that he must die within the year. And now – to somewhat relieve this ghastly subject – I may tell an odd incident connected with it, to which the writer contributed something.
On a stormy night in November, he was out holding over his head a big umbrella, that had a handle of white bone. A sudden gust – and the umbrella was whisked out of his hand, and carried away into infinite darkness and mist of rain.
That same night a friend of his was walking down a very lonely church lane, between hedges and fields, without a house near. In the loneliest, most haunted portion of this lane, his feet, his pulsation and his breath were suddenly arrested by the sight of a great black creature, occupying the middle of the way, shaking itself impatiently, moving forward, then bounding on one side, then running to the other. No saucer eyes, it is true, were visible, but it had a white nose that, to the horrified traveller, seemed lit with a supernatural phosphoric radiance. Being a man of intelligence, he would not admit to himself that he was confronted by the padfoot; he argued with himself that what he saw was a huge Newfoundland dog. So he addressed it in broad Yorkshire: “Sith’ere, lass, don’t be troublesome. There’s a bonny dog, let me pass. I’ve no stick. I wi’nt hurt thee. Come, lass, come, let me by.”
At that moment a blast rushed along the lane. The black dog, monster, padfoot, made a leap upon the terrified man, who screamed with fear. He felt claws in him, and he grasped – an umbrella. Mine!
That this idea of human victims being required to ensure the stability of a structure is by no means extinct, and that it constitutes a difficulty that has to be met and overcome in the East, will be seen from the following interesting
Jovienus Pontanus, in the fifth Book of his History of his own Times. He died 1503.
