Folk-lore of Shakespeare. Dyer Thomas Firminger Thiselton
dimpling in a fondling smile.”
Shakespeare alludes to the practice of teaching choughs to talk, although from the following passages he does not appear to have esteemed their talking powers as of much value; for in “All’s Well That Ends Well” (iv. 1), he says: “Choughs’ language, gabble enough, and good enough.” And in “The Tempest” (ii. 1), he represents Antonio as saying:
“There be that can rule Naples
As well as he that sleeps; lords that can prate
As amply and unnecessarily
As this Gonzalo; I myself could make
A chough of as deep chat.”
Shakespeare always refers to the jackdaw as the “daw.”166 The chough or jackdaw was one of the birds considered ominous by our forefathers, an allusion to which occurs in “Macbeth” (iii. 4):
“Augurs and understood relations have,
By magot-pies and choughs and rooks brought forth
The secret’st man of blood.”
At the present day this bird is not without its folk-lore, and there is a Norwich rhyme to the following effect:167
“When three daws are seen on St. Peter’s vane together,
Then we’re sure to have bad weather.”
In the north of England,168 too, the flight of jackdaws down the chimney is held to presage death.
Cock. The beautiful notion which represents the cock as crowing all night long on Christmas Eve, and by its vigilance dispelling every kind of malignant spirit169 and evil influence is graphically mentioned in “Hamlet” (i. 1), where Marcellus, speaking of the ghost, says:
“It faded on the crowing of the cock.
Some say, that ever ’gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long.
And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.”
In short, there is a complete prostration of the powers of darkness; and thus, for the time being, mankind is said to be released from the influence of all those evil forces which otherwise exert such sway. The notion that spirits fly at cock-crow is very ancient, and is mentioned by the Christian poet Prudentius, who flourished in the beginning of the fourth century. There is also a hymn, said to have been composed by St. Ambrose, and formerly used in the Salisbury Service, which so much resembles the following speech of Horatio (i. 1), that one might almost suppose Shakespeare had seen it:170
“The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn,
Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat
Awake the god of day; and, at his warning,
Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air,
The extravagant and erring spirit hies
To his confine.”
This disappearance of spirits at cock-crow is further alluded to (i. 2):171
“the morning cock crew loud,
And at the sound it shrunk in haste away,
And vanished from our sight.”
Blair, too, in his “Grave,” has these graphic words:
“the tale
Of horrid apparition, tall and ghastly,
That walks at dead of night, or takes his stand
O’er some new-open’d grave, and, strange to tell,
Evanishes at crowing of the cock.”
This superstition has not entirely died out in England, and a correspondent of “Notes and Queries”172 relates an amusing legend current in Devonshire: “Mr. N. was a squire who had been so unfortunate as to sell his soul to the devil, with the condition that after his funeral the fiend should take possession of his skin. He had also persuaded a neighbor to be present on the occasion of the flaying. On the death of Mr. N. this man went, in a state of great alarm, to the parson of the parish, and asked his advice. By him he was told to fulfil his engagement, but he must be sure and carry a cock into the church with him. On the night after the funeral the man proceeded to the church, armed with the cock, and, as an additional security, took up his position in the parson’s pew. At twelve o’clock the devil arrived, opened the grave, took the corpse from the coffin, and flayed it. When the operation was concluded, he held the skin up before him and remarked, ‘Well, ’twas not worth coming for after all, for it is all full of holes!’ As he said this the cock crew, whereupon the fiend, turning round to the man, exclaimed, ‘If it had not been for the bird you have got there under your arm, I would have your skin too!’ But, thanks to the cock, the man got home safe again.” Various origins have been assigned to this superstition, which Hampson173 regards as a misunderstood tradition of some Sabæan fable. The cock, he adds, which seems by its early voice to call forth the sun, was esteemed a sacred solar bird; hence it was also sacred to Mercury, one of the personifications of the sun.
A very general amusement, up to the end of the last century, was cock-fighting, a diversion of which mention is occasionally made by Shakespeare, as in “Antony and Cleopatra” (ii. 3):
“His cocks do win the battle still of mine,
When it is all to nought.”
And again Hamlet says (v. 2):
“O, I die, Horatio;
The potent poison quite o’er-crows my spirit” —
meaning, the poison triumphs over him, as a cock over his beaten antagonist. Formerly, cock-fighting entered into the occupations of the old and young.174 Schools had their cock-fights. Travellers agreed with coachmen that they were to wait a night if there was a cock-fight in any town through which they passed. When country gentlemen had sat long at table, and the conversation had turned upon the relative merits of their several birds, a cock-fight often resulted, as the birds in question were brought for the purpose into the dining-room. Cock-fighting was practised on Shrove Tuesday to a great extent, and in the time of Henry VII. seems to have been practised within the precincts of court. The earliest mention of this pastime in England is by Fitzstephens, in 1191. Happily, nowadays, cock-fighting is, by law, a misdemeanor, and punishable by penalty. One of the popular terms for a cock beaten in a fight was “a craven,” to which we find a reference in the “Taming of the Shrew” (ii. 1):
“No cock of mine; you crow too like a craven.”
We may also compare the expression in “Henry V.” (iv. 7): “He is a craven and a villain else.” In the old appeal or wager of battle,175 in our common law, we are told, on the authority of Lord Coke, that the party who confessed himself wrong, or refused to fight, was to pronounce the word cravent, and judgment was at once given against him. Singer176 says the term may be satisfactorily traced from crant, creant, the old French word for an act of submission. It is so written in the old metrical romance of “Ywaine
“Coriolanus,” iv. 5; “Troilus and Cressida,” i. 2; “Much Ado About Nothing,” ii. 3; “Twelfth Night,” iii. 4; “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” v. 2, song; “1 Henry VI.” ii. 4.
Swainson’s “Weather-Lore,” 1873, p. 240.
Henderson’s “Folk-Lore of Northern Counties,” 1879, p. 48.
See Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 438.
See Ibid.
See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. pp. 51-57; Hampson’s “Medii Œvi Kalendarium,” vol. i. p. 84.
1st series, vol. iii. p. 404.
“Medii Œvi Kalendarium,” vol. i. p. 85.
Roberts’s “Social History of Southern Counties of England,” 1856, p. 421; see “British Popular Customs,” 1876, p. 65.
Nares’s “Glossary,” 1872, vol. i. p. 203.
Singer’s “Shakespeare,” 1875, vol. ix. p. 256; Halliwell-Phillipps’s “Handbook Index to Shakespeare,” p. 112.