Money or food (bread, butter, eggs, etc.) were given them, upon which they feasted in the evening. Sometimes in Ireland, as in the Isle of Man, the bird was hung by the leg in the centre of two hoops crossing each other at right angles.431 In Essex a similar custom used to be observed at Christmas, and the verses sung by the boys were almost identical with those sung in Ireland.432 In Pembrokeshire a wren, called the King, used to be carried about on Twelfth Day in a box with glass windows surmounted by a wheel, from which hung various coloured ribbons. The men and boys who carried it from house to house sang songs, in one of which they wished “joy, health, love, and peace” to the inmates of the house.433

In the first half of this century similar customs were still observed in various parts of the south of France. Thus at Carcassone, every year on the first Sunday of December the young people of the street Saint Jean used to go out of the town armed with sticks, with which they beat the bushes, looking for wrens. The first to strike down one of these birds was proclaimed King. Then they returned to the town in procession, headed by the King, who carried the wren on a pole. On the evening of the last day of the year the King and all who had hunted the wren marched through the streets of the town with torches and music. At the door of every house they stopped, [pg 144] and one of them wrote with chalk on the door vive le roi! with the number of the year which was about to begin. On the morning of Twelfth Day the King again marched in procession with great pomp, wearing a crown and a blue mantle and carrying a sceptre. In front of him was borne the wren fastened to the top of a pole, which was adorned with a wreath of olive, oak, and mistletoe. After hearing high mass in the church, surrounded by his officers and guards, he visited the bishop, mayor, magistrates, and the chief inhabitants, collecting money to defray the expenses of the royal banquet which took place in the evening.434 At Entraigues men and boys used to hunt the wren on Christmas Eve. When they caught one alive they presented it to the priest, who, after the midnight mass, set the bird free in the church. At Mirabeau the priest blessed the bird. If the men failed to catch a wren and the women succeeded in doing so, the women had the right to mock and insult the men, and to blacken their faces with mud and soot, if they caught them.435 At La Ciotat, near Marseilles, a large body of men armed with swords and pistols used to hunt the wren every year about the end of December. When a wren was caught it was hung on the middle of a pole which two men carried, as if it were a heavy burden. Thus they paraded round the town; the bird was weighed in a great pair of scales; and then the company sat down to table and made merry.436

The parallelism between this custom of “hunting the wren” and some of those we have considered, especially the Gilyak procession with the bear, and the Indian one with the snake, seems too close to allow us to doubt that they all belong to the same circle of ideas. The worshipful animal is killed with special solemnity once a year; and before or immediately after death, he is promenaded from door to door, that each of his worshippers may receive a portion of the divine virtues that are supposed to emanate from the dead or dying god. Religious processions of this sort must have had a great place in the ritual of European peoples in prehistoric times, if we may judge from the numerous traces of them which have survived in folk-custom. A well-preserved specimen is the following, which survived in the Highlands of Scotland and in St. Kilda down to the latter half of last century. “On the evening before New Year's Day, it is usual for the cowherd and the young people to meet together, and one of them is covered with a cow's hide. The rest of the company are provided with staves, to the end of which bits of raw hide are tied. The person covered with the hide runs thrice round the dwelling-house, deiseil—i.e. according to the course of the sun; the rest pursue, beating the hide with their staves, and crying [here follows the Gaelic], ‘Let us raise the noise louder and louder; let us beat the hide.’ They then come to the door of each [pg 146] dwelling-house, and one of them repeats some verses composed for the purpose. When admission is granted, one of them pronounces within the threshold the beannachadthurlair, or verses by which he pretends to draw down a blessing upon the whole family [here follows the Gaelic], ‘May God bless this house and all that belongs to it, cattle, stones, and timber! In plenty of meat, of bed and body-clothes, and health of men, may it ever abound!’ Then each burns in the fire a little bit of hide which is tied to the end of the staff. It is applied to the nose of every person and domestic animal that belongs to the house. This, they imagine, will tend much to secure them from diseases and other misfortunes during the ensuing year. The whole of the ceremony is called colluinn, from the great noise which the hide makes.”437 From another authority,438 we learn that the hide of which pieces were burned in each house and applied to the inmates was the breast part of a sheep-skin. Formerly, perhaps, pieces of the cow-hide in which the man was clad were detached for this purpose, just as in the Isle of Man a feather of the wren used to be given to each household. Similarly, as we have seen, the human victim whom the Khonds slew as a divinity was taken from house to house, and every one strove to obtain a relic of his sacred person. Such customs are only another form of that communion with the deity which is attained most completely by eating the body and drinking the blood of the god.

In the “hunting of the wren,” and the procession with the man clad in a cow-skin, there is nothing to show that the customs in question have any relation to agriculture. So far as appears, they may date from the pre-agricultural era when animals were revered as divine in themselves, not merely as divine because they embodied the corn-spirit; and the analogy of the Gilyak procession of the bear, and the Indian procession of the snake is in favour of assigning the corresponding European customs to this very early date. On the other hand, there are certain European processions of animals, or of men disguised as animals, which may possibly be purely agricultural in their origin;439 in other words, the animals which figure in them may have been from the first nothing but representatives of the corn-spirit conceived in animal shape. But it is at least equally possible that these processions originated in the pre-agricultural era, and have only received an agricultural tinge from the environment in which they have so long survived. But the question is an obscure and difficult one, and cannot be here discussed.