Part 1

THE IRISH PENNY JOURNAL.

NUMBER 51. SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 1841. VOLUME I.

There are perhaps no objects in our own dear Ogygia, or Sacred Island, as it was also anciently called, which strike the minds of strangers with greater surprise, and excite them to more meditative reflection, than the holy wells which are so numerous in it, and the religious observances--to them so strange--which they see practised at them. By the devout of the reformed creeds, among such observers, these sacred fountains, with their adjacent and almost equally sacred trees, covered with bits of rag and other votive offerings of propitiation or gratitude to the presiding spirit of the spot, who is generally the patron saint of the district, are usually regarded with horror, as objects closely allied to pagan idolatry; and the religious devotions which they see practised at them excite only feelings of pity or contempt for what they consider the debased intellect of the votaries who frequent them. By the painter, poet, and the mere man of taste, however, they are viewed in a spirit of greater toleration, and with a more pleasing interest, particularly in the western portions of our island, where the wild scenery amid which they are generally to be met with, the symmetrical forms and often beautiful faces of the devotees, and the brilliant colours of their ancient national costumes, impart that interest and picturesqueness to the spectacle of which our own great national painter Burton has so admirably availed himself, and made familiar to the world, in his picture of the Blind Girl at the Holy Well. It is, however, by the antiquary and the philosopher that they are viewed with the deepest interest, for to the one they present in all their vividness the still existing images of customs which originated in the earliest period of the history of our race, while to the other they supply the most touching evidences of the strength of that devotional instinct, however blind and misapplied, that humble faith in the existence and omnipotence of a Divine Intelligence, which are among the loftiest feelings of our nature, and which, when properly directed, must lead to the noblest results. In the minds of such philosophers, a contemplation of the usages to which we have referred will be apt to excite, not feelings of depression and despondency, but rather cheering anticipations of hope for the future prospects and ultimate happiness of the human race; and they who practise those usages will be regarded, even in their present meanness of garb, and concomitant vulgarity of habits, not as degraded outcasts from society, grovelling in the mire of ignorance and superstition, but as members of the universal human family, to be tolerated and cherished in all kindliness; while, with respect to their peculiar devotion, for which so many censure them, it can still be said,

----“This may be superstition, weak or wild, But even the faintest relicts of a shrine Of any worship, wake some thoughts divine.”

The Pagan origin of well-worship is now established beyond the possibility of contradiction, and its extreme antiquity is lost in the night of time. This has been satisfactorily shown in a very interesting essay, written with a view to the annihilation of its remains in Ireland, by a Roman Catholic clergyman of distinguished abilities and learning, the late Dr Charles O’Conor. This learned writer attributes its introduction into the British islands, and Ireland in particular, to the Phœnicians, and quotes several authorities to show that if it had not its origin with the Chaldeans, it can at least be traced as far back as to them, and that from Chaldea and Persia it passed into Arabia, thence into Egypt and Lybia, and lastly into Greece, Italy, Spain, and Ireland. In all these countries its vestiges are still to be found, but in none of them at this day so numerous as in Ireland; and it is remarkable that its usages are still identical in the far distant regions of the east with those in our own _Ultima Thule_ of the west. This identity is clearly evidenced by Hanway, in his “Travels in Persia,” in which he says, “We arrived at a desolate caravanserai, where we found nothing but water. I observed a tree _with a number of rags to the branches_. These were so many charms which passengers coming from Ghilan, a province remarkable for agues, had left there in a fond expectation of leaving their disease also in the same spot.” Similar instances have been adduced by later travellers in the east, in reading whose descriptions we might almost suppose that they were depicting scenes in Ireland; and if all other evidences were wanting, these facts alone would be sufficient to establish the conclusion that the worship of fountains in Ireland was of Pagan origin. But we have in our ancient manuscripts the most satisfactory historical evidences to establish the fact. Thus, in Tirechan’s Life of St Patrick, preserved in the Book of Armagh, and St Evin’s Life as published by Colgan, it is stated, in detailing the progress of the Irish Apostle through Ireland, that he came to the fountain called Slan [that is, health], “because it was indicated to him that the Magi honoured this fountain, and made donations to it as gifts to God.” This fountain was square, and there was a square stone in the mouth of it, and the water came over the stone, that is, through the interstices; and the Pagans told him that a certain Magus, who worshipped water as a divinity, and considered fire as a destroyer, when dying, made a shrine for his bones in the water beneath the stone, in order that they might be preserved. Patrick told the assembled congregation that it was not true that the king of the waters was in the fountain, and bade them raise up the stone, remarking that the bones of a man were not beneath it, but that he thought there was some gold and silver appearing through the joinings from their impious offerings; no such valuable offerings were, however, found; and Patrick consecrated the stone so raised to the true Divinity. It may not be unworthy of remark, that the well of Finnmagh is still, as in the time of St Patrick, equally reverenced, though under a different name and with a different faith. It is now called Tober Brighde, or Bride’s Well, having been subsequently dedicated to that saint as well as all the churches in the plain of Finnmagh, and under this name the Druidical well of _Slan_ is one of the most frequented and honoured in the whole of the county of Roscommon.

Several authorities of the same character as that now adduced may be found in the lives of other early Irish saints, but it is not necessary to our purpose to quote them.

Dr O’Conor shows from various evidences that on the firm establishment of Christianity in various parts of Europe the most severe ordinances of the church were promulgated against the continuance of well-worship in any form. “I have already stated,” he observes, “that well-worshipping has been utterly abolished by the Catholic religion in Italy. The _Fontinalia_ exist no longer; the fountain of Egeria, which I have seen near Rome, is known only to the learned; and I have seen the common peasantry of Castel Gandolfo and Marino washing their linen in the sacred waters of the _Ferentine_ Assemblies of Latium and of Rome!”

In reference to its abolition in England, he adduces a canon made in the reign of Edgar, A.D. 960, by which it was ordained “that every priest _do forbid the worship of fountains_, and necromancy, and auguries, and enchantments, and soothsayings, and false worship, and legerdemain, which carry men into various impostures, and to groves and Ellens, and also many _trees_ of divers sorts, and _stones_.”

He also shows that similar ordinances appear in the Capitularies of Charlemagne, and that amongst the laws of the reign of Ecgbright, A.D. 740, the 148th canon is:--“If any man, following the custom of the Pagans, introduce diviners or sorcerers into his house, or attend the _lustrations_ of Pagans, let him do penance for five years.”

It may be asked, then, how has it happened that the veneration paid to wells has continued in Ireland even to the present day, and to this question it is not very easy to give a satisfactory answer. It may be remarked, however, that no evidences have yet been discovered to show that similar local ordinances were made to destroy their continuance in Ireland, and that it may hence be inferred that the attachment of the Irish People generally to their ancient usages in this instance, as well as in their funeral lamentations, May-fires, and many other ceremonies of a religious character derived from the same eastern and Pagan origin, was too strong even for the power of the clergy to eradicate or greatly diminish. Certain it is, that the pilgrimages to Lough Derg, which, there is every reason to believe, derive their origin from the same source, were abolished by an order of Pope Alexander VI, in 1497, and yet the people returned to them again, and they are at the present moment as numerously made, if not more so than ever. And, in like manner, the pilgrimages to wells, even where discountenanced and punished by the Roman Catholic clergy, as they are now in almost every part of Ireland, are still continued in secrecy, with a tenacity to ancient usages singularly characteristic of the Irish race, and which will ensure their existence for a considerable time longer.

St Senan’s Well, which we have selected as a characteristic example of the holy wells of Ireland, is situated near the west bank of the Shannon, near Dunass, in the county of Clare. There is nothing very peculiar to distinguish this well from a thousand other fountains of the same kind, but the unusual character of the votive offerings made at it, which, as our engraving exhibits, consist chiefly of wooden bowls, tea-cups whole and broken, blacking-pots, and similar odd offerings of gratitude to St Seanan Liath, or Seanan the Hoary, the patron saint of the parish.

P.

A FAIR-DAY IN NORMANDY,

BY MARTIN DOYLE.

Having a strong desire to procure some of the small compact Norman draught horses for my farm-work, I ventured last year to visit Normandy, for the purpose of making the desired selections. I took with me a young friend, who had been partly educated in France, as my interpreter with the French horse-dealers, and to arrange every particular for me during my intended hasty intercourse with the foreigners. But previously we went for passports to the office in Poland-street, where the Consul filled up the documents without ever looking at our faces, and I believe very incorrectly as to portraiture. “Your profession?” inquired he in French, as he was scribbling down the length of my nose, the colour of my hair and eyes, &c. “Homme de lettres,” responded my companion for me. I nodded my head in acquiescence, without knowing anything about the matter; but I was quite satisfied when my friend explained it afterwards to me, and assured me that Lord Brougham, when Lord Chancellor, had from sheer modesty sunk his rank and other artificial honours on going to Paris, and simply designated himself as “Avocat, et homme de lettres.” “Does not all the world,” said my companion, “know perfectly well that you are, in the first place, one of the props of the Irish Penny Journal?” “Enough,” said I, somewhat tickled by the reference to Lord Brougham; “be it as you please--though I think that, as a farmer going to France merely to buy horses, I might as well have been written down under the useful character of ‘agriculturist.’” My passport, however, was by this time in my pocket, and any alteration in it was out of the question.

I had ascertained that a fair would be held on a particular day at Falaise, and having time enough to make a long journey by land, and much curiosity to see Calais, I determined to go there: we reached that port early in the day.

“Well, then, I am in France,” said I, as we landed from the steamer on the pier; “here I am, actually on the Continent, looking at French soldiers, who won’t shoot me, stab me, nor take me prisoner, and on fishwomen, with kerchiefs tastily arranged on their heads, large ear-rings, and brown faces, and hearing a language altogether strange to me.” After staring about me there for half a day, and eating a very nice dinner in a very grand hotel, fitted up as if there was never any winter in that part of France, we moved onwards in a most extraordinary kind of coach: such a lumbering machine!--less than an entire troop of cavalry appeared to me insufficient to move its prodigious wheels; yet five miserable-looking horses, with dirty half rotten harness, were compelled to pull it along towards Boulogne at the rate of more than four miles an hour.

I know not how it happened--perhaps it was fatigue--possibly a dose of claret, which caused me to fall asleep in the cuppy[1] soon after I had passed the barriers of Calais. Be this as it may, while I was dreaming of home, there was a sudden stop, which aroused me. I could have sworn at the moment that I was upon a dreary part of the road between Wexford and Dungarvan; for, besides the general features of the locality, I saw on the door of a very Irish-like looking public-house, these words--“John Cullen sells beer and brandy.” “Where am I?” said I to myself; “surely not in France.” The matter was explained to me. There are several hundred families of English manufacturers, principally from Nottingham, employed at their trade in Calais and its vicinity; and John Cullen, who says he is a Yorkshireman, and has certainly been for more than twenty years established where he now is, and has married a Frenchwoman, finds it his interest to brew good beer, and to keep a public-house for the entertainment of his neighbours and the operatives of Calais, although the town is three miles distant. But at the moment I was fully impressed with the notion that John Cullen and his house were in the barony of Bargy, or in that of Forth.

As the horses at this place were not disposed to run away with the diligence, and the conductor had no indisposition to a glass of brandy, I contrived to enter John Cullen’s house, which certainly has nothing English about it, and asked for the landlord, who soon appeared--an apparently thoroughbred Irishman, and with a fry of half-bred youngsters at his heels, speaking the oddest jargon that ever man heard. At first I hoped that it might have been the old dialect of the barony of Forth, but I was grievously disappointed. Though John Cullen brews very good beer, which he sends regularly into Calais, and sells very fair brandy, it would be no harm, from what I could learn, if Father Mathew could spare time to make a morning visit to his neighbourhood.

The greater part of the way from Calais to Boulogne is bleak, open, and ill drained, and altogether more of a snipe-shooting country than a farmer would desire to see, with a good deal of wheat, however, here and there, but not in the regularly formed ridges which I had seen in England.

We reached Boulogne that night, and fixed ourselves quietly in an English kind of hotel, after having been well tormented, before we were fairly housed, by emissaries from half a dozen establishments, pressing us in French, English, and German, to patronise their respective employers. We started at five o’clock the next morning from a coach-office very like one of our own in its arrangement of desks, clerks, way-bills, and weighing machines.

On _some_ parts of my journey, as we receded from the coast, the drill husbandry, the garden-like culture, and the open country entirely under tillage, resembled portions of England, especially in those districts where the rural population is confined to villages very distant from each other, and concealed from the road. The French peasants are very early risers; I saw many of them at their various labours at four o’clock in the morning; some women at that hour were leading cows by a string--three very frequently connected together--or a few wretched-looking sheep, to pasture on the margin of the road. The dresses of these people, and the appearance of the sheep, in those spots, informed me very unmistakeably that I was no longer in England. Sometimes, however, an entire flock of sheep met our observation. One of these, under the care of a shepherd, and two dogs which showed remarkable sagacity, we particularly noticed. The sheep, when I caught the first view of them, were huddled together in a fallow field, looking wistfully at, but not presuming to touch, a compartment of luxuriant clover within a few feet of them. The shepherd, leaving one of the dogs with the flock, and having the other at his heels, paced off a square of ten or twelve yards, slightly marking the limits with his foot; he then made a signal to the sentry dog, which at once allowed the sheep to pass on to the clover, while the other dog perambulated the prescribed limits, and prevented them from encroaching a single foot.

As I do not mean to trouble the reader with all the details of my journey, I need only say that I reached in safety the very heart of Normandy; and on the way, while admiring the woods, rivers, meadows, and undulating scenery through which we passed, I perceived a resemblance to the county of Wicklow, and many other well-wooded and fertile parts of Ireland.

I had been unable to reach Falaise the night before the fair, but I was there in time for an early breakfast; and certainly this breakfast was of an extraordinary kind. We had broth well thickened with vegetables; the bouilli from which the juices had been extracted made its appearance as a matter of course, and the whole company took a bit of it. Then came the liver of a sheep fried in oil, a dish of white beans well mashed and buttered, cheese, cider, and (though last not least appropriately to the breakfast table) coffee and boiled milk, with eggs and bread and butter. Many of the company, including some lady-like looking females, dipped their well-buttered bread into their coffee, and swallowed it in this nasty greasy manner with great apparent relish, and several of the party pocketed the lumps or sugar which they did not use with their coffee. But every country has its own fashions; and if people are here put upon an allowance in the article of sugar, and pay for a fixed quantity, why should they not take away that for which they pay, if they please?

I hastened away from the breakfast table to the place where the fair was held, and was surprised at the similarity of the scene before me to those which I have so often witnessed at home. It had nothing of the English character, excepting some wooden drinking-booths and caravans for showmen; there were no smart-looking horse-jockeys, no well-dressed grooms, not a white smock-frock, a laced buskin, a well-trimmed bonnet, nor a neatly appointed tax-cart or gig in view; but a crowd of men generally dressed in blue jackets and trousers and glazed hats, among whom were interspersed some wearing the blue blouse, and a cloth cap or red worsted nightcap, and a great number of women in their striped woollens, and high white linen or muslin coifs--nay some of these (on the heads of the rich farmers’ wives) were of lace, and worth scores of pounds sterling. The whole assemblage (combining with it groups of country fellows mounted on hardy ponies, with here and there a woman _en croupe_, or independently on a pad, with bags behind and before her, kicking away at the ribs of their horses with their heavy sabots) reminded me of what we see on a market-day in several parts of Ireland. Then, to render the similitude more striking, there were the clamour and jargon of persons buying and selling; and now and then a half drunken fellow singing in the lightness of his heart, or very noisy in argument; but generally courteous, and _never_ daring to strike a blow, and a pedlar selling beads and almanacks amidst a din of oaths and imprecations, and the embarrassments occasioned by the movements of a team of four bullocks and three little horses in single file, dragging each other along with a huge tonneau of cider for the refreshment of the thirsty crowd, on a two-wheeled waggon, in the rear. We had passed this rude and very dirty vehicle, when the roll of a drum startled me. Thinks I to myself, “war is about to commence in earnest,” but it was only the preliminary flourish of a drummer, who immediately afterwards read out a notice that a celebrated dentist was about to appear in his voiture, for the purpose of relieving sufferers from those ailments which, alas! are incidental to us in every stage of life. Having raised his hat from respect to the majesty of the sovereign people, he moved off to an adjacent street, while the great operator himself appeared at hand in a showy kind of cab drawn by two horses (one in the shafts and the other in the outrigger style), with a tawdrily dressed postilion to guide them. Being in haste to reach the open square where the horse fair was held, I had little time for witnessing the operations of the tooth-drawer, who was flourishing his case of instruments in a most attractive way. When he had trapped his victim, he blew a long loud blast upon a horn to intimate that he was going to operate before the crowd, and after keeping the sufferer in an agony of suspense and nervousness, he pulled out one or more teeth with a _large nail_ (sometimes a screw) in the twinkling of an eye, and with a degree of dexterity which I had conceived impossible. I was afterwards told that he had several patients in succession, from whom as they sat backwards in the cab, within view of hundreds of spectators, he extracted teeth at the rate of sixpence each. This practitioner, however, was not without a rival: another dentist was mounted on a high, raw-boned horse, with his case of instruments, and some physic for curing the rheumatism, in a leathern portmanteau strapped upon the pommel of his saddle: his dress was of a military character--his coat being braided like an undress frock; his bridle and saddle of the cavalry form; his headpiece, a forage cap; and his boots and spurs like those of a dragoon in the days of the Duke of Marlborough; a _coronet_ hung from his saddle-bow; and whenever the other dentist sounded his bugle, this man blew from beneath the overhanging cover of thick hair on his upper lip, a longer and a louder strain. But the peculiarity of his style of operating was really striking: instead of dismounting and removing the tooth, he remained steadily in his saddle, examined the mouths of the patients who presented themselves for relief, and from his vantage ground pulled or rather pushed out the diseased grinder. While I was looking on, he poked out three with a hooked nail for one sous, saying, successively, as he drew them in a few seconds (as my companion translated his expressions for me), “Here’s a long one; here’s a longer; and here’s the longest of all.”