CEREMONY AND SURVIVAL.
AVERY ancient ceremony was performed at the Law Courts on Monday, when the King's Remembrancer, ?Hester Mellor, received . from the Corporation of London certain quit-rents due to the King in respect of two plots of land, one in the parish of St. Clement Danes and the other in Shropshire. The quit-rent for the Shropshire property took
the form of two cullers or knives, one of them sharp and the other blunt; the sharp one, a hatchet, was to be capable of cutting a fagot of wood, and the other, a billhook, was to be too blunt to cut the fagot. The quit-rent for the St. Clement ,Danes property was paid in the form of six horseshoes with
ten nails apiece, and Master Mellor, before the ceremony 'of acceptance of the rents and services from the City Solicitor, gave an interesting account of the origin of the 'custom. Henry III., in the year 1235, on the occasion of a tournament on ground belonging to the Knights Teniplars, the 'site of what is now the Victoria Embankment, was delighted with the dexterity shown by one Walter le Brun, a black- smith who had a hovel on the ground, and was employed to shoe the knights' horses and repair their armour. In recog- nition of his skill, he give him a piece of land on which to erect a forge, and fixed as quit-rent six horseshoes with nails complete; and these horseshoes and sixty-one nails were duly counted out on Monday afternoon by the City Solicitor, as they bad been counted out since the year when the rent was fixed. At the end of the counting the Remembrancer said "Good number," and took them back to his office, to be kept there until needed for the ceremony again. The same horseshoes, he added, had been used for the rendering of the rent for five hundred years ; but the hatchet and billhook were presented to the Lady Mayoress in memory of the occasion. " The history of the payment of quit-rent in horseshoes and nails in this case has been preserved and is clear enough, even if there are certain difficulties of which the explanations differ. For instance, the six horseshoes are all fore-shoes, and the reason for that is obscure. It has been supposed that horses ridden in tournaments at the time were only shod on the fore-feet, and possibly there is corroborative evidence for "this theory in the history of another survival from early days. Oxen up to a few years ago were still shod in Sussex for draught and for ploughing, and they were sometimes shod on the fore-feet only. Rents from farriers, and undertakings demanded from farriers in return for the right of working a forge, are, of course, ancient history dating back much earlier than Henry III. In Domesday Book, for instance, there are six smiths mentioned as belonging to the city of Hereford, and each of these paid a penny rent for his forge, and could be called upon to make horseshoes for the King at a fixed rate. But curious observance of custom and quaint tradition seem to have gathered naturally round the work of the black- smith and his forge. He has always been a fascinating figure, from the myths grouped around Hephaestus to Longfellow's poem of the smithy under the chestnut-tree. Wayland the Smith is one of the earliest of English legendary figures. "Who knows now the bones of the Wise Weland, under what barrow they are concealed P "—so runs King Alfred's reference to him in his translation of Boethins. The legend of Wayland Smith, the farrier living by the dolmen on the Icknield Way, has become familiar to a later generation through Scott's treatment of it in "Kenliworth" ; but the appearance of the strolling player at the forge, as Scott introduces him, takes away a little from the sense of -mystery and antiquity which belongs to the legend alone. 1 Tradition spoke of an invisible smith to whom a traveller might bring his horse, if it had lost a shoe ; the traveller was to place a piece of money on the cap of the dolmen and retire,
and on his return he would find the money gone and the horse shod. How could the fear and superstition surrounding the gradual knowledge of the art of working iron in days when iron-smiths were few, and the art little understood, be better embodied in tradition P The smith, perhaps, would work in a cave so as to get a draught for his forge ; he would work unseen because of the fear felt by the ignorant for the resound- ing hammer, the fire, and the glowing metal ; and so would grow up the legend of his invisibility. His businesslike honesty and the good quality of his work are as unquestioned in the ancient legend as in Longfellow. The money is always taken, but there is no question that the horse will not be well shod.
Is it from the fear and veneration of the smith's art and the skill of the farrier, spreading among a simpler folk unused to the moulding and tempering of metals, that there springs the peculiar virtue of the horseshoe itself ? The question is disputed whether the virtue lay originally in the horseshoe, or in the crescent-shaped metal which seems to take its place with certain nations. Mr. Walter Johnson in his book "Folk-Memory," in bringing together a large number of instances of the value attached to the possession of horseshoes as spells and charms, and of the use of crescent-shaped pieces of metal with the same underlying idea, suggests that the two superstitions are collaterals derived from the same stock of primitive ideas. But the crescent regarded as an amulet must come before the horseshoe in the case of at least two civilised peoples, for the Greeks and Romans, who did not shoe their horses as we do, used to ornament them with trappings on which the crescent is as frequent as the boss of metal. One of the most wonderful of all survivals is the continuance into our own day of this ornamenting of horses with trappings of metal crescents. The brass that is bestowed so liberally over the harness of our London and country carthorses is struck in patterns which are sometimes almost identically the same as the patterns familiar to Virgil and Livy. The brass crescent survives as a protection and a charm even on the harness of an animal which is wearing four horseshoes on its feet. But the veneration and respect paid to the metal iron, super. added to the crescent shape of the horseshoe, remain undeniable. In the other of the ceremonies which took place in the Law Courts on Monday, the rendering of the quit-rent of the sharp and blunt knives, the noticeable point is that the knives, sharp or blunt, were of iron. Iron, with its wonderful powers of cutting, moulding, and striking, became from the day when it first began to be dimly understood as a new force in the world at once a symbol and an influence. Presents of iron, purchases of iron, debts paid in iron, became significant and notable events. The tradition and the belief remain with us. Still, when we deal in iron with each other, we demand certain formalities to appease the latent powers in the obscure and potent metal. When we give presents of knives and pairs of scissors we ask in return, not even now shamefacedly, but in a spirit acquiescent in the thought of a thousand generations, that the receiver shall return to us a piece of an older, easier metal. We present a schoolboy with a pocket- knife, and ask him for a halfpenny back, "or else we shall quarrel." Knives "sever friendships." The power of the wonderful metal survives in a dozen different ways in the ordinary life of the town and countryside of to-day. The story which is still one of the most popular of all the nursery fairy-tales is of the Princess who must be guarded from child- hood from the prick of a needle. The custom still survives in Scottish households, when a death has occurred in the house, of thrusting a needle or a nail into butter or meat or whisky to prevent death from entering the provisions. The Irishman is no further from the fears of his ancestors. Mr. Walter Johnson in "Folk-Memory" instances the custom of the Irish peasant who wishes to keep the fairies from his child until the christening day, and so lays an iron poker across the baby's cradle.
The King's Remembrancer, in commenting upon the survival of the old ceremonies performed on Monday, remarked that such ceremonies were "curiously interesting, especially to Americans. A Chicago Judge bad said to hint that the traditions of England were of enormous value, and were exactly what the Americans wanted, but had not got." Traditions of quit-rents paid to the King in horseshoes doubtless cannot belong to the United States. But if the survival of ancient ceremony, is so peculiarly interesting to
Americans, it might at least be argued that "what the Americans want" has its own influence already. The latest, contributor to new knowledge of a poet who belongs to Americans as well as to Englishmen came from the United States. To Americans as well as to Englishmen belong the oldest traditions of all. Further back into what is con- jecture rather than history, Wayland Smith is common ancestral property to the two nations ; he remains the progenitor of the energies of Pittsburg as well as those of Middlesbrough or Sheffield.
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