the Masse Book" as an authorised dish for this occasion. At Gray's Inn, and perhaps at the other Inns of Court, there is the testimony of Dugdale that the commons used to consist on this day of the same sort of viands (so to speak), and until the 23 Eliz. the charge of providing the repast for the students devolved on the chief cook; after that, it was defrayed by the Society. A superstitious practice appears to have prevailed upon the Continent, of abstaining from flesh on Easter Sunday, to escape a fever for the whole year. I know not whether it ever reached this Island. It was condemned by the Provisional Council of Rheims in 1583, and by that of Toulouse in 1590. See "Traite des Superstitions," vol. i., p. 319, 320. The first dish that was brought up to the table on Easter Day, was a red herring riding away on horseback; i.e., a herring ordered by the cook something after the likeness of a man on horseback, set in a corn-salad. The custom of eating a gammon of bacon at Easter, which is still kept up in many parts of England was founded on this, viz., "to shew their abhorrence to Judaism at that solemn commemoration of our Lord's Resurrection." Aubrey (1679). It was the practice in Germany (during the sixteenth century at least) for the preachers to intermix their sermons with facetious stories on Easter Day. This may be gathered from the "Convivialium Sermonum Liber." Bas. 1542, sig. K8. Douce's MSS. Notes. It is still a common usage, of which the origin is assuredly not held in remembrance by many of those who observe it, of wearing something new on Easter Sunday. Poor Robin says:

"At Easter let your clothes be new, Or else be sure you will it rue." Lamb is very usually eaten for the first time on this festival. An old - established usage at Northmore, near Witney, in Oxfordshire, was for the men and women, after evening service, to throw apples in the churchyard, those that had been married within the year throwing thrice as many as the rest; and all subsequently adjourned to the minister's house, where they were entertained on bread and cheese. Hearne's Diary, Jan. 19, 1725, and Note. Comp. Sun.

Eating. If, says Grose, in eating, you miss your mouth, and the victuals fall, it is very unlucky, and denotes approaching sickness.

Eden Hall.-See Luck of Eden Hall. Edgeware. Sir William Blackstone says, that it was usual for the lord of this manor to provide a minstrel or piper for the diversion of the tenants, while they were employed in his service. He refers to the manor-rolls which are among

the Archives of All-Souls' College.-Lysons' Environs, 1st ed., ii, p. 244. Lysons searched the rolls without success, but accepts the statement on Blackstone's authority; and he adds that a piece of ground in the parish still (1795) goes by the name of Piper's Green.

At a Court of the manor of Edgeware, anno 1552, the inhabitants were presented for not having a tumbrel and cuckingstool. This looks as if the punishments were different. Lysons' Environs, ii., 244. At a court of the same Manor, in 1555, "it was presented that the butts at Edgeware were very ruinous, and that the inhabitants ought to repair them; which was ordered to be done before the ensuing Whitsontide."

Edgewell Tree.-Allan Ramsay, speaking of Edge-well Tree, describes it to be an oak tree which grows on the side of a fine spring, nigh the Castle of Dalhousie, very much observed by the country people, who gave out, that before any of the family died, a branch fell from the Edge-well Tree. The old tree some few years ago fell altogether, but another sprung from the same root, which is now tall and flourishing, and lang be't sae.' ""

Egg and Spoon. An amusement which consists in a certain number running a race, each carrying an egg on a flat spoon, and the one, who arrives at the goal without disaster, wins. We seem here to have an evolution from the Venetian egg-game, described in Zompini's Cries of Venice, 1785.

Egg Feast.-The Egg Feast, mentioned in the Oxford Almanack, and formerly held there on Egg Saturday, that immediately preceding Shrove Tuesday, was held when the scholars took leave of that kind of food. Comp. Halliwell, v. Egg-Feast. Novelties in Easter eggs are constantly introduced from year to year in the English market. For 1903 they advertised natural eggs, chocolate eggs, plover's eggs, wooden eggs with snakes, globes, skipping ropes, and other toys inside.

Egg Saturday. The Saturday before Shrove Tuesday. See Easter Eggs.

Egg Service.-One, where eggs are contributed for some special purpose, as when at Biggar, Lanarkshire, eighty dozen were quite recently collected, and sent to the children's hospitals in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Egg Shell.-To break the egg-shell after the meat is out, is a relic of superstition mentioned in Pliny. Sir Thomas Browne tells us that the intent of this was to prevent witchcraft; for lest witches should draw or prick their names therein, and veneficiously mischief their persons, they broke the shell, as Delecampius has observed. Delrio, in his "Disquisitiones

Magicæ," has a passage on this subject. Scot says: "Men are preserved from witchcraft by sprinkling of Holy Water, receiving consecrated salt; by candles hallowed on Candlemas Day, and by green leaves consecrated on Palm Sunday." Coles tells us that "Matthiolus saith that Herba paris takes away evill done by witchcraft, and affirms that he knew it to be true by experience." In Fletcher's Women Pleased occurs:

The Devil should think of purchasing that egg-shell

To victual out a witch for the Burmoothes."

Eggs.-Stocker, on the line in Persius, Sat. v., 1, 185:

when

"Tunc nigri Lemures ovoque pericula rupto, observes: "If an egg broke put on the fire, it portended jeopardy to the person or property of the individual." The Rev. James Layton informed Mr. Roach Smith that the East Anglian rustics had a general custom when an egg was eaten, of thrusting the spoon through the bottom of the shell, so that the witches might not sail in it. But the Romans, according to Pliny, observed a similar usage. C. R. Smith's Richborough, 1850, p. 206.

Elder.

-

Gerarde, "Herball," ed. 1633, p. 1428, says: "The Arbor Judæ is thought to be that whereon Judas hanged himself, and not upon the elder tree as it is vulgarly said." I am clear (says Brand) that the mushrooms or excrescences of the elder tree, called Auricula Judæ in Latin, and commonly rendered "Jews' Eares," ought to be translated "Judas' Eares from the popular superstition above mentioned. Coles says: "It" (Jewes' Eares) "is called in Latine Fungus Sambucinus and Auricula Judæ: some having supposed the elder tree to be that whereon Judas hanged himself, and that, ever since, these mushrooms, like unto eares, have grown thereon, which I will not persuade you to believe." There was an early Italian belief that the tree was the carob or St. John's Bread-tree, which is mentioned in St. Luke, chap. xv. v. 16, and by Pulci in his Morgante Maggiore. The late Mr. Dyce was acquainted with a gentleman, a great travellor, who had seen the tree, whether the ordinary elder or the Arbor Juda, is not clear. Mitford's Notes on Beaumont and Fletcher and Shakespeare, 1856, p. 41.

Lupton, in his fifth book of "Notable Things," edit. 1660, p. 132, says: "Make powder of the flowers of elder, gathered on Midsummer Day, being before well dried, and use a spoonfull

thereof in a good draught of borage water, morning and evening, first and last, for the space of a month and it will make you seem young a great while." Blagrave writes: "It is reported that if you gently strike a horse that cannot stale, with a stick of this elder, and bind some of the leaves to his belly, it will make him stale presently. It is also said, and some persons of good credit have told me, (but I never made any experiment of of elder in his pockets, he shall not fret it), that if one ride with two little sticks nor gaul, let the horse go never so hard." Supplement to Culpeper's English Physician, 1674, p. 62. The first of these superstitions is again mentioned in Coles's "Adam in Eden." In the "Athenian Oracle" is the following relation: "A friend of mine being lately upon the road a horseback, was extremely incommoded by loss of leather; which coming to the knowledge of one of his fellow travellers, he over-persuaded him to put two elder sticks in his pocket, which not only eased him of his pain, but secured the remaining portion of his posteriours, not yet excoriated throughout the rest of his jour111, 545. Coles says: ney," "It hath beene credibly reported to from severall hands, that if a man take an elder stick, and cut it both sides so that he preserve the joynt, and put in his pocket when he rides a journey, he shall never gall." Introduction Flecknoe also mentions, in his Diarium, to the Knowledge of Plants, 1656, p. 63. 1656, p. 65:

me

on

"How alder-stick in pocket carried, By horseman who on high-way feared His breech should nere be gall'd or wearied,

Although he rid on trotting horse,

Or cow, or cowl-staff which was worse,
It had, he said, such vertuous force,
Where Vertue oft, from Judas came
(Who hang'd himself upon the same,
For which, in sooth, he was to blame.)
Or't had some other magick force,
To harden breech, or soften horse,
I leave't to th' learned to discourse."

In the Anatomy of the Elder, 1653, are some particulars in connexion with this part of the subject. "The common people keep as a great secret in curing wounds, the leaves of the elder which they have gathered the last day of April; which, to disappoint the charms of witches, they had affixed to their dores and windows." There is mentioned an amulet against the erysipelas, "made of the elder on which the sunn never shined. If the piece betwixt the two knots be hung about the patient's neck, it is much commended. Some cut it in little pieces, and sew it in a knot in a piece of a man's

shirt, which seems superstitious." Two instances of its success are recorded. There is likewise set down," against the epilepsia, "a singular amulet made of the elder growing on a sallow. If in the month of October, a little before the full moon, you pluck a twig of the elder, and cut the cane that is betwixt two of its knees, or knots, in nine pieces, and these pieces being bound in a piece of linnen, be in a thread, so hung about the neck, that they touch the spoon of the heart, or the sword-formed cartilage; and that they may stay more firmly in that place they are to be bound thereon with a linnen or silken roller wrapt about the body, till the thred break of itself. The thred being broken and the roller removed, the amulet is not at all to be touched with bare hands, but it ought to be taken hold on by some instrument and buried in a place that nobody may touch it." We are told, "Some hang a cross, made of the elder and sallow, mutually inwrapping one another about the children's neck," pp. 54, 207, 211. Among other rustic charms may be mentioned: Curing a lame pig by boring a little hole in his ear, and putting a small peg of elder into it. In the epilogue to Lyly's "Campaspe," 1584, a passage is found which implies that elder was given at that time as a token of disgrace: "Laurell for a garland and ealder for a disgrace." So again, in "An Hue and Crie after Cromwell," 1649, p. 4, we read:

Cooke, the Recorder, have an elder tree,

And steel a slip to reward treacherie." There is a vulgar prejudice that "if boys be beaten with an elder-stick, it hinders their growth."

Elephants. There is a belief founded on observation, that this quadruped will not only start at the grunt of the wild pig, but at a lizard or other small object, from which he may feel a difficulty in protecting himself. This is constantly noticed in respect to the specimens which are brought to Europe, and are disconcerted by a mouse in the den among the straw. Charles Gibbon, in his Order of Equality, 1604, merely mentions that elephants are terrified by the grunting of pigs. He should have explained that the pig in question was the tenant of Indian jungles.

Elf.--The elf was also called urchin or goblin. The "Urchins' Daunce" is preserved in one of Ravenscroft's musical volumes, and has been republished in Dr. Rimbault's book of "Songs and Ballads," 1851.

Elf-Disease. There appear to have been two kinds of elf-disease, land-elf disease, and water-elf disease. The symp

toms and treatment were different. The nostrums which were prescribed by our Saxon doctors in each case are described at length in Mr. Cockayne's "Saxen Leechdoms." Mr. Cockayne includes a "salve against the elfin race and nocturnal goblin visitors, and for the women with whom the devil hath carnal commerce."

The specific is as follows: "Take the ewe hop plant, wormwood, bishopwort, lupin, ashthroat, harewort, vipers bugloss, heathberry plants, cropleek, garlic, grains of hedgerise, githrise, fennel; put these worts into a vessel, set them under the altar, sing over them nine masses, boil them in butter and sheep's grease, add much holy salt, strain through a cloth, throw the worts into running water." If any one was troubled by night elves, his forehead was to be smeared with this salve, and also his eyes, and any sore parts of his body, and he was to be

censed with incense," and signed frequently with the cross, and then his condition would soon be better. A disease, consisting of a hardness of the side, was called in the dark ages of superstition the elf-cake. In the seventh book of Lupton's "Thousand Notable Things," No. 55, is the following prescription which, it is said, will help the hardness of the side called the elf-cake. "Take the root of gladen, and make powder thereof, and give the diseased party half a spoon-ful thereof to drink in white wine, and let him eat thereof so much in his pottage at one time, and it will help him within a while." A cure for the above disorder is in Harl. MS. 2378, f. 47 and 57: "For the elf-cake." This is of the time of Henry VI., and the same as that from Lupton. Camden says: "When any one in Ireland happens to fall, he springs up again, and turning round three times to the right, digs the earth with a sword or knife, and takes up a turf, because they say the earth reflects his shadow to him: (quod illi terram umbram reddere dicunt: they imagine there is a spirit in the earth); and if he falls sick within two or three days after, a woman skilled in those matters is sent to the spot, and there says, 'I call thee P. from the east, west, south, and north, from the groves, woods, rivers, marshes, fairies white, red, black, &c.' and, after uttering certain short prayers, she returns home to the sick person, to see whether it be the distemper which they call esane, which they suppose inflicted by the fairies, and whispering in his ear another short prayer, with the Pater-noster, puts some burning coals into a cup of clear water, and forms a better judgment of the disorder than most physicians." Britannia, 1789, iii., 668.

Elf-Fire or the ignis fatuus.-"Wredeld vocatur Ignis qui ex attritu duorum

Lignorum elicitur, & quia superstitiosis varie usurpari dicitur." Ihre, "Glossar. Suio-Goth."' 1769. Comp. Will o' the Wisp.

Elf-Locks.-A matted lock of hair in the neck. See the glossary to Kennet's "Parochial Antiquities," v. Lokys. "His haires are curl'd and full of elves-locks, and nitty for want of kembing." He is speaking of a Ruffian, a swash buckler, and a braggart.' Lodge's "Wits Miserie," 1596, p. 62. So Shakespear, in 'Romeo and Juliet," 1597:

This is that very Mab,

That plats the manes of horses in the night,

And brakes the elf-locks in foul sluttish hairs,

Which once untangled, much misfortune bodes."

Warburton thought this superstition had its origin in the "Plica Polonica." Again, in "King Lear," Edgar says, Elf all my hair in knots." Drayton, in his "Poems," 1637, says:

"O, that I were but a witch but for her sake!

Yfaith her Queenship little rest should

take;

Id scratch that face, that may not feel the aire,

And knit whole ropes of witch-knots in her haire.

Mr. Halliwell, who cites the above passage in illustration of the word witchknot, in his "Archaic Dictionary," 1847, adds, under Elf: "To Elf-To entangle in knots." In Holland's "Don Zara del Fogo, a mock romance," 1656, My guts, quoth Soto, are contorted like a dragons tayle, in elf-knots, as if some tripe-wife had tack't them together for chitterlings."

Elf Shot. Fairies were sometimes thought to be mischievously inclined by shooting at cattle with arrows headed with flint-stones. These were often found, and called elfshots. They were simply the stone arrowheads used by the aboriginal Irish and by the early Scots. They are still occasionally found in different parts of the world, having been in universal use, before weapons were made of metal. It was thought that if the part of the animal affected by the elf-shot was rubbed with the arrowhead, and was then put into the water which it drank, there was no danger of fever or other ill-effect. Plot, speaking of elf-arrows, says: "These they find in Scotland in much greater plenty, especially in the præfectuary of Aberdeen, which, as the learned Sir Robert Sibbald informs us, they there called elf-arrows, lamiarum sagittas, imagining they drop from the clouds, not being to be found upon a dili

66

gent search, but now and then by chance in the high beaten roads. The animal affected was, in order to a cure, to be touched with one of these, or made to drink the water in which one of them had been dipped." Staffordshire, P. 369. Allan Ramsay, in his Poems," 1721, p. 224, explains elf-shot thus: Bewitch'd, shot by fairies. Country people tell odd tales of this distemper amongst cows. When elf-shot, the cow falls down suddenly dead; no part of the skin is pierced, but often a little triangular flat stone is found near the beast, as they report, which is called the elf's arrow.' In an authoritative Scotish publication of the 18th century, we are told that stone or flint arrow heads, called elf, or fairystones, used not uncommonly to be found in various districts, as at Lauder, at Wick (Caithness), and Fordice (co. Banff). About 1793, the minister of Wick reported: "Some small stones have been found which seem to be a species of flint, about an inch long and half an inch broad, of a triangular shape, and barbed on each side. The common people confidently assert that they are fairies' arrows, which they shoot at cattle, when they instantly fall down dead, though the hide of the animal remains quite entire. Some of these arrows have been found buried a foot under ground, and are supposed to have been in ancient times fixed in shafts, and shot from bows." Again: "Elves, by their arrows, destroyed, and not seldom unmercifully, cows and oxen.' But now, it is added: "the elf has withdrawn his arrow." Stat. Acc. of Scotland, i., 78, x. 15; xxi., 148. The subsequent lines are found in Collins :

"There ev'ry herd by sad experience knows

How, wing'd with fate, their elf-shot arrows fly,

When the sick ewe her summer food foregoes,

Or stretch'd on earth the heart-smit heifers lie."

Odes, p. 10. The author of the "Whitby Glossary," quoted by Atkinson, tells us that, to cure an awf- (or elf-) shotten animal it must be touched with one of the shots, and the water administered in which one of them has been dipped." Mr. Atkinson adds: "In one district of Jutland it is believed that cattle, when elfshot, become stiff, and surely die, unless speedy help is at hand. The quickest and surest remedy consists in driving the beast up out of the moss, and firing a shot over it; only care must be taken to fire from the head in the direction of the tail." Cleveland Glossary, 1868, v. Elf.. The naturalists of the dark ages owed many obligations to cur fairies, for

I pray God save thy body and Saint Loy.'

Chaucer makes his Prioress swear by St. Eloy :

"Hire gretest othe was but by seint Eloy."

Lyndsay, in his "Monarke," 1554, says:

lish. See Hazlitt's Bibl. Coll, i., 285. The anniversary was subsequently adopted as a festival in honour of the accession of Elizabeth of England on the 17th of the month.

Elizabeth's, Queen, Accession.-(St. Hugh's Day, Nov. 17). From a variety of notices scattered in different publications, the anniversary of Queen Elizabeth's Accession appears to have been constantly observed even within the 18th century; and in many of the almanacks was noted, certainly as late as 1684, and probably considerably later. In "The Pleasant Conceits of Old Hobson," 1607, inserted in "Old English JestBooks," there is the following reference to St. Hugh's Day and its observances: "Vpon Saint Hewes day being the seventeenth of November, upon which day the tryumph was holden for Queene Elizabeths hapy government, as bonefiers, ringing of bells, and such like; but in the parish where Maister Hobson dwelled, he being Churchwarden, was no ringing at all, by reason the steeple was a-mending and the bells downe." It appears from the "Status Scholæ Etonensis," 1560, that the scholars at Eton elected their

"Sent Loy saue your horse, Sent Anthony your swyne."

Taylor the Water-poet has an anecdote of a countryman who was saying his devotions before an old image of the saint, when it fell down, and hurt him severely. It is in "Wit and Mirth," 1629. In the "Booke in Meeter of Robin Conscience" (circa 1585), one of the interlocutors swears by St. Loy. We read in the account of Tottenham High Cross in "The Ambulator," 1790: "In a brick field, on the west side of the great road, belonging to Mr. Charles Saunders, is St. Loy's Well, which is said to be always full, and never to run over and in a field, opposite the Vicarage House, rises a spring called 'Bishop's Well,' of which the common people report many strange cures.'

Eligius in his lifetime was moneyer to Dagobert I. and II., Kings of Paris, and became after death and canonization patron of the Goldsmiths and Farriers. See Hazlitt's supplement to his Coins of Europe, 1897, v. Paris, and Idem, Remains of the Early Popular Poetry of England, 1864-6, iii., 236.

Elizabeth's Day, St. This was the 19th November, and had no original reference to English customs, but to the natal day of Elizabeth, daughter of Alexander, King of Hungary, who was canonized, and of whom there is a life in Eng

lege were accustomed to do on the feast of St. Nicholas. The author of "A Protestant Memorial for the Seventeenth of November, being the Inauguration Day of Queen Elizabeth," 1713, mentions this as still in observance, and adds: "I say we have now a new motive to this zeal, the preservation of our most gracious queen Anne being to be added to the vindication of the most gracious queen Elizabeth."

Elmo's, St., Fire. See Castor and Pollux. We hear of the phenomenon occurring to Helen of Troy and to Servius Tullius, when the future King of Rome was a boy in the household of Tarquinius Priscus. Donaldson's Miscellanea Virgiliana, 1825, pp. 176-7, where other examples or allusions are cited from Virgil and Horace.

Elvish-Marked.-Shakespear

has

the expression elvish-marked, on which Steevens observes: "The common people in Scotland (as I learn from Kelly's Proverbs') have still an aversion to those who have any natural defect or redundancy, as thinking them marked out for mischief." In Ady's Candle in the Dark, 1659, p. 120, we read: "There be also often found in women with childe, and in women that do nurse children with their breasts," and on other occasions, "certain spots, black and blue, as if they were pinched or beaten, which some comignorant people call fairy-nips, which, notwithstanding do come from the

mon

P