demonstrations were the streets of almost as many men carrying torches towns, and especially of the metropolis. A bonfire in a London street seems to us as much out of place as the game of football that was formerly played on every Shrove Tuesday in the streets of many provincial towns. And in days when very many of the houses were still built chiefly of wood, street bonfires were even more dangerous than they would be at the present time. Notwithstanding, however, the inflammability of their houses and the narrowness of their streets, the citizens of old London were not to be baulked of their bonfires. There were a few days every year when these street blazes formed part of the regular programme of rejoicing. The principal annual saturnalia of fire were observed at the end of June and the beginning of July, in celebration of the feasts of the two midsummer saints, St. John the Baptist and St. Peter. And very picturesque and pleasant were these ancient festivals. "In the months of June and July," says Stow, "on the vigils of festivall dayes, and on the same festivall dayes, in the evenings, after the sun-setting, there were usually made bonfires in the streets, every man bestowing wood and labor towards them." Well-to-do citizens also placed tables outside their doors, well furnished with meat and drink, at which their friends and neighbors and the passers-by were invited to regale themselves. The doors of the houses were decorated with boughs of birch and with garlands of flowers, St. John's wort, orpin, fennel, white lilies, and other blossoms, while a general illumination of windows and housefronts completed the festal appearance of the town. | and blazing cressets, marched through the principal streets of the city. From the little conduit by Paul's Gate the brilliant procession made its way to West Cheap, and on through Cornhill, by Leadenhall to Aldgate, then, says Stow, "back down Fenchurch Street, by Grass Church, about Grass Church conduit, and up Grass Church Street into Cornhill, and through it into West Cheap again." Feasting and rejoicing were suspended while the marching watch passed, to the sound of martial music, through the narrow and crowded streets, torch and cresset throwing their flickering glare along the picturesque fronts of the old timbered houses, and for the time almost extinguishing the paler lights of household lamps and candles. This annual march of the watch was greatly loved by the citizens of old London. On St. John's Eve, 1510, Henry VIII. witnessed the show, disguised as a yeoman of the guard, standing with halbert on shoulder at the King's Head in Cheap. The king was so delighted that when the march was repeated a night or two later, on St. Peter's Eve, "he and the queen came royally riding to the sayd place, and there, with their nobles, beheld the watch of the city, and returned in the morning.' Some years later, however, his Majesty became alarmed at so great and so warlike a display on the part of the inhabitants of his capital, and in 1539 the annual show was prohibited. But although the marching watch ceased to appear the good citizens continued to celebrate the midsummer festival as of yore, with decoration of houses, feasting, merriment, and the indispensable street bonfires. And on St. John's Eve through the Stow, evidently supposing that "bon" midst of the quaint old streets, fragrant or "bone" was derived from the Latin with flowers and greenery, and bright | bonus, good, says that these fires were with candles, lamps, and bonfires, called bonefires, "as well of amity wound the famous marching watch. Pike-men and archers, bill-men and gunners, drummers, trumpeters, minstrels, and morris-dancers, in motley and picturesque array, to the number of several thousands, accompanied by amongst neighbors, that being before at controversie were there by the labor of others reconciled, and made of bitter enemies loving friends; as also for the vertue that a great fire hath, to purge the infection of the ayre." The last an bonfires meant not only danger, but uproar. Lincoln's Inn Fields was a favorite site for a great bonfire on this day. Even late in the last century many dozen cart-loads of fuel used to be provided for this gigantic pyre, and the proceedings at night were accompanied by much noise and disturbance. Many other parts of the town glowed with the ruddy blaze of wood fires. "By ten o'clock," it is said, "London was so lit up by bonfires and fireworks that from the suburbs it looked in one red heat." In Puritan times such riotous doings were frowned upon, but on the first 5th of November after the Restoration Mr. Pepys remarked that the day was "observed exceeding well in the City; and at night great bonfires and fireworks." sentence does no doubt point out one possible benefit derived from the numerous street fires. In old days, when sanitary arrangements of almost any kind were practically non-existent, and when, as was only natural, plagues were of frequent occurrence, the fires did, perhaps, some service in purifying the tainted air. Defoe, in his inimitable "History of the Plague," tells us how they were lighted systematically in the streets of London in 1665, with a view to disinfecting the air and abating the plague. The lord mayor issued order that "every six houses on each side of the way, which will be twelve houses, are to join together to provide firing for three whole nights and three whole days, to be made in one great fire before the door of the middlemost inhabitant; and one or more persons In addition to the annual November to be appointed to keep the fire con- and midsummer fires, and those which stantly burning, without suffering the were lighted in times of plague or same to be extinguished or go out all general sickness, great bonfires were the time aforesaid; and this to be always set blazing in the streets on observed in all streets, courts, lanes, occasions of public or national rejoicand alleys; and great care to be taken ing. The coronation of a king or queen, where the streets, courts, lanes, and and often the anniversary of a monalleys are narrow, that the fires arch's birthday, as well as times of may be made of a proportionable big-national victory or deliverance, and, in ness, that so no damage may ensue to the houses." Many physicians, however, opposed this wholesale making of bonfires, declaring them to be utterly useless, and, indeed, it does not appear that they had any effect in restraining the ravages of the plague, for the weekly total of deaths continued to increase for some weeks after the promulgation of the bonfire order. But the notion that the fires would purify the air was of long standing, and bonfires had been lit with this end in view on the occasion of previous outbreaks of the plague, notably that which occurred in 1603, of which Thomas Dekker has left so vivid a series of pictures in his pamphlet entitled "The Wonderful Year." Soon after this 1603 visitation another annual bonfire celebration of a festival kind made its appearance in London streets. This was the display on November 5, when for many years the seventeenth century, popular political triumphs, were all celebrated by street fires. When Queen Mary was crowned in 1553 there were great rejoicings, and a worthy citizen and undertaker named Machyn, whose "Diary" has been preserved for the edification of modern readers, noted therein that at St. Paul's the "Te Deum" was performed "with song and the organ playing," that all the bells throughout London were ringing, and "bone-fyres and tabuls in every street, and wyne and beere and alle, and evere strette full of bone-fyres, and ther was money cast away." It was an auspicious beginning of an unhappy reign. During the troubled times that preceded the outbreak of the great Civil War fires were often lighted in the streets in celebration of victories of the popular party, both in and out of Parliament. And later, when, after some ten or eleven years' experience of the Com monwealth, the temper of the populace | good citizens might well, indeed, have had again changed, bonfires in the London streets accompanied every step in the process which ended in the restoration of Charles II. to his father's throne. When Monk first declared for a free Parliament in February, 1660, the public joy knew no bounds. "Down with the Rump!" was the cry throughout London. Wherever Monk and his soldiers went the people cried, "God bless them!" and gave "extraordinary good words." At night fires were lighted all over the town, at which rumps were roasted on sticks. Mr. Pepys says that there were fourteen bonfires between St. Dunstan's and Temple Bar; and at Strand Bridge he could count thirty-one fires. In the Strand itself there was the same blaze of rejoicing On Ludgate Hill, he says, "at one end of the street you would think there was a whole lane on fire, and so hot that we were fain to keep on the further side." The same sort of thing went on for several nights. A few days later, when the Parliament had accepted the situation, and had appointed Monk general of all their forces, the city seems to have been fairly delirious with joy. Mr. Pepys says, "Here out of the window it was a most pleasant sight to see the city from one end to the other with a glory about it, so high was the light of the bonfires, and so thick round the City; and the bells rang everywhere." It was really wonderful that London, amidst the general joy, did not perish in a general conflagration, as so large a part of it did in the Great Fire a few years later. When it was finally decided that the king should return, the fires again blazed up, and crowds of excited loyalists surrounded them, drinking the king's health upon their knees, which even the loyal Mr. Pepys thought was a little too much. Similar demonstrations accompanied the actual arrival of Charles II.; but for his queen there was little popular enthusiasm. On the night of her coming to London it was observed that only three fires were lighted. The been weary of their nightly blazes; but when the coronation took place, a few months later, there were again great fires, and much excited health-drinking on loyal knees. Little more than a year later, in 1662, the king's birthday was duly observed with bonfires; but Londoners were already beginning to be disillusioned, and the fires were "nothing to the great number that was heretofore at the burning of the Rump;" while, as for the queen's birthday, fires were only lighted by the constables, on the imperative order of the lord mayor- a rejoicing to order which our genial diarist thought, rightly enough, was a "poor thing to be forced to be commanded." The enthusiasm for the Stuarts quickly declined, and thirty years after the citizens had roasted rumps in Cheapside and the Strand, and had madly drunk healths upon their knees and shouted themselves hoarse for King Charles, Londoners were celebrating in more sober fashion their final deliverance from the ill-starred house of Stuart. In Georgian times London skies were often reddened by the glare of bonfires on the king's birthday, as in older days; but such fires were fewer in number, and were more often built in the squares and open spaces of the town than in the streets. Lincoln's Inn Fields was a favorite place for these demonstrations of loyalty, which, like the 5th of November celebrations, were often accompanied by riot and disturbance. A newspaper of May 31, 1718, thus describes the keeping of the king's birthday in that year: "On Wednesday night a great mob gathered about a bonfire made before the Duke of Newcastle's House, in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and flung the faggots about the Fields, and at the windows whereupon several gentlemen of the duke's servants came out with drawn swords, and wounded several of the mob; a poor woman had her eye struck out with a fire-stick." It was high time, indeed, that such incentives to riot and uproar should be swept out of existence. However smaller measure, the reflection of many bonfires used to proclaim the rejoicings of the citizens to the surrounding country; but the bonfires themselves have disappeared from London streets as finally and as irrevocably as the glimmering lights of candle and lamp that preceded the blaze of gas and picturesque and pleasant they may have been in earlier times, when the city was small and the population comparatively scanty, there can be no doubt that in later days bonfires could hardly be anywhere more thoroughly out of place than in the streets and squares of a crowded metropolis. The glare of London lights | electricity. now nightly illumines the skies for many miles around the capital, as, in G. L. APPERSON. curious Manx Superstitions. — It is that in the Isle of Man the term butch, or witch, is applied to either sex. As a proof of this we may mention that a writer in the Mona's Herald newspaper of January 24, 1844, in commenting on a famous witchcraft case which had recently been adjudicated upon, remarked: "According to popular belief, if the witch swears he has not done it, and does not wish to do it he cannot witch again." Another curious and novel idea is that it was supposed to be possible to manufacture a witch. The method of doing so was given to our informant by an old man about the year 1875, who said that he had it from the victim herself, then an old woman. An old woman, who had practised witchcraft and charms during a great part of her life, had grown very feeble, and so, being wishful to endow her daughter with similar powers, made her go through the following performance: "A white sheet was laid on the floor, and beside it was placed a tub of clean water. The girl was made to undress and go into the water, and, after thoroughly washing herself, to get out and wrap herself in the sheet. While she stood in the sheet she had to repeat after her mother a number of words, the exact nature of which, as she was in an abject state of terror, she had forgotten, only remembering that their general purport was that she swore to give up all belief in the Almighty's power, and to trust in that of the Evil One instead. The old woman died soon afterwards, but the girl made no attempt to practise the attributes with which she was supposed to have been endowed." If cattle were supposed to be bewitched, it was customary, till quite recently, to burn one of the herd, usually a calf, both for the protection of the others and to detect the bewitcher. For it was supposed that while the animal was being burned, he would be certain to appear on the spot, and if he could not get the animal's heart into his possession, he lost his power in the future. It was believed that, if cattle which died of disease were buried, one would be lost for each one so treated. Dust was also efficacious in such cases. Thus, Train remarked that "if a person supposed to have the evil eye passed by a herd of cattle, and one of them were taken suddenly ill, the owner of the cattle would hasten after him and take the dust from his shoes if possible, or, if not, from the ground he had just trodden, and apply it to the sick beast; or even if an animal were taken ill without any one endowed with the evil eye having passed near it, it would probably be cured by the dust from the threshold of the house of a person close by who was notoriously a possessor of the evil eye.—Antiquary. For EIGHT DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually for warded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 18 cents. |