The Dialect and Folk-Lore of Northamptonshire (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: FOLK-LORE. FAIRY-FOLK. Fairies black, gray, green, and white. Shakespeare. The belief in fairies, the most poetical of all our popular superstitions, still lingers among the rural population of Northamptonshire and South Warwickshire. That knavish sprke, Will-with-the-Wisp, or, as we call him, Jinn with the burnt tail, still, as in the days of Shakespeare? Misleads night wanderers, laughing at their harm. The hell-hounds, and their ghostly huntsman, are still heard careering along the gloomy avenues of Whittle- bury; and tales of elfin deeds in auld lang syne yet constitute a leading feature of the winter's evening hearth-talk. It is almost unnecessary to add that the faith is in its last stage of decay. Sunday-schools have proved more potent exorcists than the holy frercs, to whom Chaucer attributed their expulsion; and the fairies, like all other relics of old-world times, are fast following the bygone days of agricultural simplicity.Steam-threshing machines have long superseded the magic flail of the drudging goblin; and even the dancing-grounds of Queen Mab and her tiny lieges are menaced by the sacrilegious coulters of patent ploughs. The few gleanings which the most industrious researches have enabled us to collect, are arranged in the following notes, and the original narrations have, in all cases, been strictly adhered to. The traditions of the Northamptonshire peasantry concerning the elves, or fairies proper, of the popular creed, do not differ from those current in other parts of the kingdom, and are in all respects conformable to the mythological system preserved in the writings of the Elizabethian dramatists. They are believed to be diminutive in stature, and in their dealings with mankind exhibit the same mixture of good and evil ...