Curiosities of Olden Times

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Transcriber's note:

Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (italics).

The original text includes Greek characters that have been replaced with transliterations in this text version.

CURIOSITIES OF OLDEN TIMES

by

S. BARING-GOULD, M.A.

Author of ‘Iceland, Its Scenes and Its Sagas,’ ‘Mehalah,’ etc. Revised and Enlarged Edition

Edinburgh John Grant 31 George IV. Bridge 1896

PREFACE

An antiquary lights on many a curiosity whilst overhauling the dusty tomes of ancient writers. This little book is a small museum in which I have preserved some of the quaintest relics which have attracted my notice during my labours. The majority of the articles were published in 1869. I have now added some others.

LEW TRENCHARD, September 1895.

CONTENTS

PAGE

THE MEANING OF MOURNING 1

CURIOSITIES OF CYPHER 17

STRANGE WILLS 39

QUEER CULPRITS 57

GHOSTS IN COURT 74

STRANGE PAINS AND PENALTIES 89

WHAT ARE WOMEN MADE OF? 102

“FLAGELLUM SALUTIS” 119

“HERMIPPUS REDIVIVUS” 135

THE BARONESS DE BEAUSOLEIL 153

SOME CRAZY SAINTS 167

THE JACKASS OF VANVRES 207

A MYSTERIOUS VALE 217

KING ROBERT OF SICILY 237

SORTES SACRÆ 256

CHIAPA CHOCOLATE 268

THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE 280

CURIOSITIES OF OLDEN TIMES

THE MEANING OF MOURNING

A strip of black cloth an inch and a half in width stitched round the sleeve--that is the final, or perhaps penultimate expression (for it may dwindle further to a black thread) of the usage of wearing mourning on the decease of a relative.

The usage is one that commends itself to us as an outward and visible sign of the inward sentiment of bereavement, and not one in ten thousand who adopt mourning has any idea that it ever possessed a signification of another sort. And yet the correlations of general custom--of mourning fashions, lead us to the inexorable conclusion that in its inception the practice had quite a different signification from that now attributed to it, nay more, that it is solely because its primitive meaning has been absolutely forgotten, and an entirely novel significance given to it, that mourning is still employed after a death.

Look back through the telescope of anthropology at our primitive ancestors in their naked savagery, and we see them daub themselves with soot mingled with tallow. When the savage assumed clothes and became a civilised man, he replaced the fat and lampblack with black cloth, and this black cloth has descended to us in the nineteenth century as the customary and intelligible trappings of woe.

The Chinaman when in a condition of bereavement assumes white garments, and we may be pretty certain that his barbarous ancestor, like the Andaman Islander of the present day, pipeclayed his naked body after the decease and funeral of a relative. In Egypt yellow was the symbol of sorrow for a death, and that points back to the ancestral nude Egyptian having smeared himself with yellow ochre.

Black was not the universal hue of mourning in Europe. In Castile white obtained on the death of its princes. Herrera states that the last time white was thus employed was in 1498, on the death of Prince John. This use of white in Castile indicates chalk or pipeclay as the daub affected by the ancestors of the house of Castile in primeval time as a badge of bereavement.