Subject: LL-L: "Folk Beliefs" [E] LOWLANDS-L, 12.JUN.1999 (04)

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From: "Sandy Fleming" <sandy at fleimin.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Rustic Beliefs

Reading into the local dialects here in the West Country (Wessex, the
south-west of England), I've come across a phenomenon that seems to have no
parallel in my own Lowland Scots culture. It involves the ways rural people
see and describe the natural world, and I was wondering if in any other
Lowland cultures, whether rural or urban, illogical (to us) behaviour was
once the norm and, an whether some of these things are or were widespread?

Some of you may remember some West Country dialect stories I submitted to
Lowlands-L a few months ago, from a 1923 book called "Cluster o Vive". Many
of these involve what seem to be deliberate attempts to show how foolish
people from other villages are, for example, the story of people in the
inland village of Shapwick being mystified at coming across a crab and
calling it a "monster", of Wiltshire folk seeing the reflection of the moon
and trying to rake it out of a pond, and of Somerset folk attempting to hold
on to summer by "hedgen the gookoo" (hedging-in the cuckoo) and so on.

Now, I don't find it hard to believe that in the days before TV and easy
travel, the appearance of a crab might cause a great stir in an inland
village, but I can't see the other two examples above as being anything but
fiction. But another neighbourly slur in this book is that involving the
village of Hornblotton:

"You midden believe it, but I've known scores o folk ready to take their
solemn oath that you can always tell a Hornblotton man by his putting the
hand o'n out o window in the morning to feel if 'tis light!"

("the hand o'n" = "his hand")

This I also consigned to the realms of fantasy. However, in reading James
Atwell's "Dorset Dialect Days" (memoirs of 1930's Dorset), I came across an
actual incident where Atwell's family are out on the road and a thunderstorm
approaches. His mother is anxious to get them all home and prepare the house
against the storm:

"We must hurry," urged my mother, "We must git hwome an cover up the
looken-glasses, 'vore do come on too heavy, an wopen all the doors."

Atwell goes on to explain the logic in this: the mirrors had to be covered
up because it was thought that they might attract lightening, and all the
doors had to be opened to let the thunder out. It was thought that, since
you can hear the thunder in the house, it must have come down the chimney
and therefore would have to be let out through the doors.

Now in the light of this, suddenly the Hornblotton story doesn't seem as
impossible as I once thought! Could it be that in Hornblotton, people once
felt that you couldn't honestly be sure of a thing unless you had been in
proper contact with it, hence the need to put your hand out of the window in
the morning to be absolutely sure that it was light?

Sandy Fleming
http:\\www.fleimin.demon.co.uk

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