Corn-Dollies
Just outside Stadhanapton in this area I saw three of these ricks in line, and each of them was crowned at the apex with a corn-dolly in the shape of a straw cross that swung round in the wind. This heartening emblem of a traditional mystique very deep in time has become of the utmost rarity in England, though twenty years ago I used to see them here and there in Gloucestershire and the Western Midlands. They took almost as great a diversity of form as of name—neck, mell, dolly, cock, crown, kern-baby, &c.—and were most consummately woven of strands of straw, often decorated with- ribbons like the one, made in Essex, that I have over my mantelpiece. The cruciform dolly is one of the most unusual forms, possibly because of the pagan ancestry of this votive symboL In Hone's Everyday Book (1801) are descriptions of the elaborate rituals attending the cutting of the last sheaf from which the dolly was always made. Without doubt this sheaf was once the embodiment of the corn-goddess, the local Demeter, and the dolly was a variant of the fertility figurines of the mother goddess which go back to the statuette in oolite limestone of the so-called Venus of Willendorf belonging to the upper Aurignacian culture of 250 centuries ago.
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