Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth

The Lyke-Wake Dirge

‘Art thow i-wont at lychwake
Any playes for to make?’

John Myrc’s Instructions for
Parish Priests (circa 1450).

Aubrey’s version of The Lyke-Wake Dirge is printed, more or less correctly, in the following places:—

i. Brand. Observations on Popular Antiquities, ed. Ellis (1813), ii. 180-81. (Not in first edition of Brand.)

ii. W. J. Thoms. Anecdotes and Traditions, Camden Society, 1839, pp. 88-90, and notes pp. 90-91, which are reprinted by Britten (see below).

iii. W. K. Kelly. Curiosities of Indo-European Tradition and Folklore, 1863, pp. 116-17.

iv. Edward Peacock. In notes, pp. 90-92, to John Myrc’s Instructions for Parish Priests, E.E.T.S., 1868. (Re-edited by F. J. Furnivall for the E.E.T.S., 1902, where the notes are on pp. 92-94.)

v. James Britten. Aubrey’s Remains of Gentilisme and Judaisme: the whole MS. edited for the Folklore Society, 1881, pp. 30-32.

Aubrey’s remarks and sidenotes are as follow (Lansdowne MS. 231, fol. 114 recto):—

‘From Mr. Mawtese, in whose father’s youth, sc. about 60 yeares since now (1686), at country vulgar Funerals, was sung this song.

‘At the Funeralls in Yorkeshire, to this day, they continue the custome of watching & sitting up all night till the body is inhersed. In the interim some kneel down and pray (by the corps) some play at cards some drink & take Tobacco: they have also Mimicall playes & sports, e.g. they choose a simple young fellow to be a Judge, then the suppliants (having first blacked their hands by rubbing it under the bottom of the Pott) beseech his Lo:^p [i.e. Lordship] and smutt all his face. [‘They play likewise at Hott-cockles.’ —Sidenote.] Juvenal, Satyr II.

“Esse aliquos manes, et subterranea regna,
“Et contum, & Stygio ranas in gurgite nigras,
“Atq. unâ transire vadum tot millia cymbâ.

‘This beliefe in Yorkshire was amongst the vulgar (& phaps is in part still) that after the persons death, the Soule went over Whinny moore [‘Whin is a furze.’ —Sidenote.] and till about 1616 (1624) at the Funerall a woman came [like a Præfica] and sung this following Song.’

Then follow several verses scratched out, and then the Dirge, to which, however, is prefixed the remark,

‘This not ye first verse.’

As regards the doubtful reading ‘sleete’ for ‘fleet,’ there is curiously contradictory evidence. Pennant, in his Tour in Scotland, MDCCLXIX. (Chester, 1771, pp. 91-92), remarks:—

‘On the death of a Highlander, the corps being stretched on a board, and covered with a coarse linen wrapper, the friends lay on the breast of the deceased a wooden platter, containing a small quantity of salt and earth, separate and unmixed; the earth, an emblem of the corruptible body; the salt, an emblem of the immortal spirit. All fire is extinguished where a corps is kept; and it is reckoned so ominous, for a dog or cat to pass over it, that the poor animal is killed without mercy.

‘The Late-wake is a ceremony used at funerals: the evening after the death of any person, the relations and friends of the deceased meet at the house, attended by bagpipe or fiddle; the nearest of kin, be it wife, son, or daughter, opens a melancholy ball, dancing and greeting; i.e. crying violently at the same time; and this continues till daylight; but with such gambols and frolicks, among the younger part of the company, that the loss which occasioned them is often more than supplied by the consequences of that night. If the corps remains unburied for two nights the same rites are renewed.’

The Rev. J. C. Atkinson, on the other hand, states the contrary regarding the fire,—see his Glossary of the Cleveland Dialect (1868), p. 595. He supposes ‘fleet’ to be equivalent to the Cleveland ‘flet,’ live embers. ‘The usage, hardly extinct even yet in the district, was on no account to suffer the fire in the house to go out during the entire time the corpse lay in it, and throughout the same time a candle was (or is yet) invariably kept burning in the same room with the corpse.’

Bishop Kennett, in Lansdowne MS. 1033, fol. 132, confirms Aubrey’s gloss of ‘fleet’ = water, in quoting the first verse of the dirge. He adds, ‘hence the Fleet, Fleet-ditch, in Lond. Sax. fleod, amnis, fluvius.’

The ‘Brig o’ Dread’ (which is perhaps a corruption of ‘the Bridge of the Dead’), ‘Whinny-moor,’ and the Hell-shoon, have parallels in many folklores. Thus, for the Brig, the Mohammedans have their Al-Sirat, finer than a hair, sharper than a razor, stretched over the midst of hell. The early Scandinavian mythology told of a bridge over the river Giöll on the road to hell.

In Snorri’s Edda, when Hermôdhr went to seek the soul of Baldr, he was told by the keeper of the bridge, a maiden named Môdhgudhr, that the bridge rang beneath no feet save his. Similarly Vergil tells us that Charon’s boat (which is also a parallel to the Brig) was almost sunk by the weight of Æneas.

Whinny-moor is also found in Norse and German mythology. It has to be traversed by all departed souls on their way to the realms of Hel or Hela, the Goddess of Death. These realms were not only a place of punishment: all who died went there, even the gods themselves taking nine days and nights on the journey. The souls of Eskimo travel to Torngarsuk, where perpetual summer reigns; but the way thither is five days’ slide down a precipice covered with the blood of those who have gone before.

The passage of Whinny-moor or its equivalent is facilitated by Hell-shoon. These are obtained by the soul in various ways: the charitable gift of a pair of shoes during life assures the right to use them in crossing Whinny-moor; or a pair must be burned with the corpse, or during the wake. In one of his Dialogues, Lucian makes the wife of Eukrates return for the slipper which they had forgotten to burn.

Another parallel, though more remote, to the Hell-shoon, is afforded by the account of one William Staunton, who, like so many others, was privileged to see a vision of Purgatory and of the Earthly Paradise, on the first Friday after the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross in the year 1409. Accounts of such experiences, it may be remarked here, were popular from the tenth century onwards amongst the Anglo-Saxons and English, especially after the middle of the twelfth century, when the story of the famous ‘St. Patrick’s Purgatory’ was first published. William Staunton relates (Royal MS. 17 B. xliii. in the British Museum) that in one part of Purgatory, as he went along the side of a ‘water, the which was blak and fowle to sight,’ he saw on the further side a tower, with a fair woman standing thereon, and a ladder against the tower: but ‘hit was so litille, as me thowght that it wold onnethe [scarcely] bere ony thing; and the first rong of the ladder was so that onnethe might my fynger reche therto, and that rong was sharper than ony rasor.’ Hearing a ‘grisly noyse’ coming towards him, William ‘markid’ himself with a prayer, and the noise vanished, and he saw a rope let down over the ladder from the top of the tower. And when the woman had drawn him safely to the top, she told him that the cord was one that he had once given to a chapman who had been robbed.

The whole subject of St. Patrick’s Purgatory is extremely interesting; but it is outside our present scope, and can best be studied in connection with the mythology of the Lyke-wake Dirge in Thomas Wright’s St. Patrick’s Purgatory (1844). The popularity of the story is attested by accounts extant in some thirty-five Latin and English MSS. in the British Museum, in the Bodleian, at Cambridge, and at Edinburgh. Calderon wrote a drama round the myth, El Purgatorio de San Patricio; Robert Southey a ballad; and an early poem of George Wither’s, lost in MS., treated of the same subject. Recently the tale has received attention in G. P. Krapp’s Legend of St. Patrick’s Purgatory, Baltimore, 1900.

A correspondent in Notes and Queries, 9th Ser., xii. 475 (December 12, 1903), remarks that the ‘liche-wake’ is still spoken of in the Peak district of Derbyshire.