Cliff Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe Part 21

Creeping through a holed stone, or under one suspended over another, is still practised in Ireland as a cure for disorders. From pa.s.sing under the earth the custom pa.s.sed to going through a split tree, the tree representing the coffin. An interesting account of this usage will be found in White's "Selborne."

And now let us turn to something else.

A religion of the worship of ancestors formed the ground-work of many religions that in process of time have totally changed their character.

It lies at the root of the creeds and practices of most peoples in east and west. It was in Greece before its religion pa.s.sed into the stage of the deification of natural forces. The a.s.syrians and Chaldeans clung to it in Western Asia. The Egyptians in the valley of the Nile, the Etruscans in Italy. At the other extremity of the world, the Chinese and Anamites perform its rites to this day from Saghalien to Cambodia.

But in Western Asia and in Europe the primitive religion became modified little by little. On the borders of the Tigris and the Euphrates, as well as on the banks of the Nile, appeared the beginnings of a different eschatology and a vague expectation of a resurrection of the dead. The h.e.l.lenes and Romans, under the influence of philosophy, acquired another conception of immortality, and their inst.i.tutions, issuing from collectivism, broke up into individualism.

In the extreme East, on the other hand, the ancient beliefs and inst.i.tutions remained stationary, and Buddhism was unable materially to disturb them. It introduced its doctrine of Metampsichosis, its Nirvana, and its h.e.l.l; but these notions did not modify, they got mixed up with the old conceptions in a jumble of heterogeneous and contradictory beliefs. To the present day the family remains the unit in the State; it is under the patriarchal despotism of the head of the line, the priest of the domestic hearth, the proprietor for the time being of the family estate. Every household has its particular G.o.ds and protectors--the ancestors thus sublimated, and the master of the family, the prospective G.o.d. The condition beyond the grave in no way depends on conduct during life, it is determined by the descendants. If the defunct be honoured, enriched with sacrifices, he becomes a beneficent protector and is happy; neglected and abandoned, he avenges his unfortunate condition on his forgetful posterity. To transmit the family cult and the patrimonial field to an heir is the first duty of man. We inherit unconsciously, not the physical character of our ancestors only, but also their ideas and prejudices. Our practices are often dictated by custom of very ancient date, not at all by reason or by conviction. Expense and trouble are incurred to convey a corpse from one end of Europe to England, that it may repose in the family vault.

We decorate our graves with flowers as though the dead appreciated them; they are but the representatives of the ancient sacrifice to the dead. We drink to the memory of the deceased as though pouring out libations to them. Our tombstones are direct descendants of the menhir and the obelisk, our altar-tombs of the dolmen, our family vault of the primeval cave ossuary.

But in one point we have diverged very far from the path of old beliefs. We have lost touch with the invisible world; we put our dead out of sight and remember them no more, as though no part of the community to which we belong, nor links in a chain of which every link is living.

It was one of the sayings of Swedenborg, that the Aryan West had something to learn from the Turanian East. It is so--the reverend thought of the dead as still forming a part of the organism of the family. With the revolt at the Reformation at the trade made out of the feelings of the bereaved, the coining of their tears into cash to line the pockets of the priests, came an unwarranted oblivion of the dead, a dissociation from them. The thought that the departed had still a claim on our sympathy and on our prayers was banished as smacking of the discarded abuse. Prayer for the dying was legitimate and obligatory at ten minutes to three, but prohibited at five minutes to three when the breath had pa.s.sed away. We have gone too far in this direction. We live in an immaterial as well as in a material world. We are planted at the overlap of two spheres, that which is spiritual and that which is physical, and we gravitate so sensibly and so rapidly to the latter as to lose touch with the former, and finally to disbelieve in the existence of such a sphere.

The earth can radiate its heat, and receive and be steeped in the falling dew only when the sky is not overcast; but our heavens are so thick with clouds that our spirits can exhale no warmth into the Infinite, nor drink in any balm descending from the Unseen. It is only by detachment from the routine of vulgar life that we can enter into any relation with the spiritual world. Political interests, social obligations, financial concerns, choke the spiracles of our inner being, and we lose all concern about what is supersensible, and hold no communication with it. There are stars and planets overhead, Orion with his spangled belt, Ca.s.siopeia in her glittering chair, and Pleiades in their web of silver, but we cannot see them because of the fog that envelops us.

According to an Indian legend, the first men were bred like maggots in the heart of the earth, but laying hold of some depending fibres drew themselves up into the light of day. We reverse the order, and from the bright spiritual sphere crawl underground by the thousand tendrils of daily life.

The early Methodists and the Quakers broke away from the low material conception of life common in their day, and a.s.serted the reality of the spiritual world, and the duty of living for it, as also the certainty of holding intercommunion with the spirits. The 'Other worldliness' of the mediaeval monastic mysticism had produced a revolt against a conception of life that was false, its pa.s.sive hostility to civilisation, the hollowness of its ideal existence, its exaggerated asceticism, its disparagement of the family life, and the result was the swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction. The recoil came with the Methodists. But we cannot live wholly in the world of spirit, any more than we ought to live wholly in the world of matter, for our nature is double, and no portion of it should be atrophied. Extreme mysticism is as falsifying of our nature as is extreme worldliness. The stupidity and charlatanism of modern spiritualism is the rebellion of men and women against the materialism of present conception of life.

Where natural expression of a need is checked, it breaks out in a disordered form, just as arrested perspiration and circulation of the blood produce fever. If all recognition of supersensible existence be denied, the a.s.sertion that it does, has its place, and makes its demands on us, will call forth, if not a wholesome, then a diseased expression.

We are intended to rise at times and breathe the atmosphere above us, and then to descend again to the lower region. It is only the dab and the common plaice that are content to lie ever on the bottom, and they are but one-sided fish. They see with one eye only, the other has been absorbed and become dead. Every creature has in it a promise of something better than what it is. The slow-worm has rudimentary legs, but they are never developed; the oyster has rudimentary eyes, but they come to nothing. The larva has in it the promise of wings, and it grows into a b.u.t.terfly or dies a grub. The soul of man has its wings so battered by its cage and is so enamoured of its groundsel and bit of sugar, that even if the door be left open it will not look forth, certainly not break away. Yet there is a world beyond the bars, and a world peopled by happy spirits, and if it cannot at once join them, it can call to them and unite with them in rapturous song. The old turnspit was bred in the kitchen, and its daily task was to run in the revolving drum that helped to roast the meat. Its legs became deformed like those of the dachshund. It cared not to romp in the green meadows, to run with the hounds, it waddled about the kitchen floor looking out for the bones and sc.r.a.ps of fat cast to it, as payment for its toil.

And that is what we are becoming through unremitting neglect of our spiritual avocation.

More than fifty years ago I was walking at night through lanes near Dartmoor, and caught up a trudging postman who daily, nightly, measured long distances. I soon found that he was a man who had his spiritual eye open.

"Do you not feel lonely in these long walks in the dark?" I inquired.

"I am never alone," he replied, "the spirits are always with me."

"Your thoughts," I suggested.

"My thoughts are indeed within me, humming in my head. I must go forth to meet the spirits. Look here," he went on, "the soul of man is like a fly in a cobweb. It can't spread its wings till it breaks loose, and then it very often carries away some of the threads with it."

Mr. Jacks gives us, in his "Human Studies," one of a shepherd on the Wolds, the counterpart of my postman. There be more of these men than is generally supposed. But he who would deal with this subject would be constrained to say with the knight in the "Canterbury Pilgrims"--

"I have, G.o.d wot, a large field to ere And wayke ben the oxen in the plough."

I have broken away from my caves, and have rambled--I know not whither.

Vive, vale: si quid novisti rectius istis, Candidus imperti; si non, his utere mec.u.m.

--HORACE, Epist. i. 6.

APPENDIX

Owing to the great kindness of Mr. Wm. Stevenson, author of "Bygone Nottinghamshire," I am able to give some additional matter that must be of interest, with which he has supplied me.

(p. 32.) "Your account reminds me of a rock excavation of great extent with turns and windings on the old time 'Way to the Gallows,' in Nottingham, where a number of cave-dwellings existed down to a century ago. The last tenant was a sandman who stabled his a.s.s in the cave behind. He pa.s.sed the greater part of his life in selling sand about the town, carrying it in a sack across the back of his a.s.s. Time wore him out, and he had to enter the workhouse. His cave was then explored, and it was found of enormous extent, in two storeys. It is supposed to have been mainly wrought day after day and year after year by this sandman. It is still to be seen, but dangerous to explore. One party of investigators a few years ago carried a string with them as a clue by means of which to find their way out again. There is a story of it becoming a lurking place of robbers after the sandman's day. A number of the excavations under the town are held to have been made or extended by the tenants above, obtaining their supply of sand from below. Formerly floors were sanded."

(p. 35.) Puticoli. Slave pits have been found in South Africa. "When the old town hall and town prison at Nottingham was demolished a few years ago, and the site was excavated for the advance of the Great Central Railway, seven or more pits were found, one with a rusty chain in it. They were about four feet in diameter at the top, and seven feet at the bottom, with dished floors. They varied from about twelve to eighteen feet in depth. We had no knowledge of anything of the kind in local history. Two others were found a distance away that could have had no connection with the prison site."

Formerly at Monte Carlo the bodies of suicides were thrust into the holes that riddle the limestone rock and gave it the name of Les Spelunges. But the conditions became insanitary, and Italian workmen were employed to get them out, and carry them away to sea and there sink them.

(p. 50.) "Formerly it was the way in which wells were ascended and descended in Nottingham, by means of notches cut in the side for the insertion of toes and fingers. I have had to do with the exploration of the base of Edward IV.'s Tower at Nottingham Castle, destroyed with gunpowder during the Civil War. In one corner of the bas.e.m.e.nt we found a well filled with rubbish. This the workmen cleared out for over fifty feet, and all the way down were notches in the wall, and the men went up and down like monkeys, using no other means for ascending and descending."

(p. 83.) Ventholes for smoke were common in Nottingham, Sneinton, and Mansfield.

(p. 82.) SOUTERRAINS. Mr. Stevenson writes relative to the pits before the entrance doors of refuges: "Some years ago I had a part in exploring the Norman Keep of Scarborough Castle, erected early in the reign of Henry II.; we worked under the entrance staircase, and found a pit arched over at a later period and covered with a stone landing, but originally it must have been a pit or well in front of the only entrance door. It was partly cleared out of fallen masonry and rubbish, but not properly explored. Overhead was a shoot for stones or molten lead. It would appear that the pit system was abandoned about the close of the Middle Ages."

(p. 98.) "It is fairly well determined in the 'History of Nottingham'

that the Roman Catholics in Elizabeth's and James I.'s reign met secretly in the caves in the rock of the town. They were also refuges of the Dissenters in the days of Charles II."

(p. 153.) NOTTINGHAM. "There have been several falls of the rock, both at Nottingham itself and at Sneinton. Mortimer's Hole, under the Castle, is only one of four that are known to exist, three of which can be traversed, one wholly and two in part; one of these latter is by many regarded as the true historical pa.s.sage. It started at the meadow level, and was partially closed by a wall; the rock wasted with time, and the thin wall gave way, bringing down a vast amount of rock above, and leaving the cavern in this part an open alley. The cave was then converted into malt offices, which yet remain in the higher and perfect part. The rock-caverns in the park, the old cell of S. Mary-le-rocke, formed possibly the parent of Lenton priory, just as those at Liguge were the parent of the abbey on the further side of the river. The rock monastery, the 'Papists' Holes' has long ago lost most of its front by falls of rock and the destruction wrought by the Roundheads. A huge artificial pillar has of recent years been erected to prevent further falls. A fall in 1829 brought down from 1000 to 1400 tons, a ma.s.s some seven or eight feet thick. On 10th May in the same year, evidently due to an earth tremor, a like great fall occurred at the rock habitations at Sneinton. The inhabitants escaped as by a miracle. A dog barked furiously in the night, and the inhabitants of the cave dwellings rushed forth, fancying that robbers were at work there. In 1830 a portion of the town cliff fell, as did also some of that in the park.

"The county or sheriff prison for Notts and Derby was, as far as can be traced back by records, half-way up the over ninety feet cliff of the town of Nottingham, and was entered from the King's hall at the top.

Light holes were made in the face of the rock to the south. In these vaults, now closed, men and women were confined like wild beasts, on straw. The prior and monks were enclosed here in the time of Henry VIII., and were marched thence to the gallows. The inhabitants of the lower part of the town under the prison complained of the ordure exuding from the prison and trickling down the rock. There are records of marvellous escapes of prisoners, both male and female, down the face of the rock, till comparatively recently. As may well be supposed, gaol-fever raged in these horrible dens. One vault is still shown under the castle. Leland and Camden both speak of an underground dungeon in which tradition (this time falsely) says that King David of Scotland was confined, and on the walls of which with a nail he carved a crucifix. These travellers do not say that they actually saw it; but Thomas Bailey, in publishing his 'Annals of Notts,' employed a local artist to depict the scene. After the erection in the seventeenth century of the Italian castle, the vault was converted into a wine- cellar. Leland says that there had been three chapels in the castle, but he does not say where.

"In the town of Nottingham are two rock-hewn stairs. The most important is called the 'Long Stairs,' they begin, cut out of the perpendicular face of the rock, at its highest point, landing opposite the old mother church. The steps are now faced with harder material than the local sandstone. On the side there are houses, and indeed houses on the tops of houses, a tenant at a lower level, another at a higher, each obtaining entry from the stairs. The 'Short Stairs' are not wrought in the face of the cliff, and have houses on both sides. These are clearly in a prehistoric quarter of the town, where was once a hill-fort."

(p. 159.) FORD CASTLES. The ancient ford at Retford, Notts, was more north than the present, and beside it is a red cliff largely cut into with joist-holes, &c., for floors and roofs, and give indications of former habitations.

Radford, a name borrowed by the priory, _alias_ Worksop, is a hill of red sandstone that dominated the ford. On the hill is an entrenchment.

(p. 160.) Mr. Stevenson remarks on the holes in the floor at Rochebrune; "This is what I should expect to find in a maltery, which must be of two floors, the lower one for steeping and sprouting the corn, and holding the fire-crates, the higher one for drying and storing the malt. The higher floors are now made of perforated tiles, the holes too small for the grains to pa.s.s through, but in old times I think the malt was dried in braziers something like large frying-pans.

Drying rooms for wheat were attached to corn-mills to dry the corn before grinding. In some seasons corn is difficult to dry; perhaps in France they did not make malt, but they may have dried grapes." Malt was not made in Perigord, I believe; and the indications at Rochebrune are strongly those of defence against a.s.sailants. Grapes would hardly be dried in a cavern, but in the sun, and there is plenty of sun in the South of France.

THE END