Folk-Lore of West and Mid-WalesDavies, Jonathan Ceredig
History
Folk-Lore of West and Mid-Wales
Davies, Jonathan Ceredig
Folklore -- Wales; Wales -- Social life and customs
In Pembrokeshire, it is the custom for young girls to put under
their pillow at night, a shoulder of mutton, with nine holes bored
in the blade bone, and at the same time they put their shoes at the
foot of the bed in the shape of the letter T, and an incantation is
said over them. By doing this, they are supposed to see their future
husbands in their dreams, and that in their everyday clothes. This
curious custom of placing shoes at the foot of the bed was very
common till very recently, and, probably, it is still so, not only
in Pembrokeshire, but with Welsh girls all over South Wales. A woman
who is well and alive told me once, that many years ago she had
tried the experiment herself, and she positively asserted that she
actually saw the spirit of the man who became her husband, coming
near her bed, and that happened when she was only a young girl, and
some time before she ever met the man. When she was telling me this,
she had been married for many years and had grown-up children, and
I may add that her husband was a particular friend of mine.
Another well-known form of divination, often practised by the young
girls in Carmarthenshire, Cardiganshire and Pembrokeshire, is for
a young woman to wash her shirt or whatever article of clothing she
happens to wear next to the skin, and having turned it inside out,
place it before the fire to dry, and then watch to see who should come
at midnight to turn it. If the young woman is to marry, the spirit
of her future husband is supposed to appear and perform the work for
the young woman, but if she is to die single, a coffin is seen moving
along the room, and many a young girl has been frightened almost to
death in performing these uncanny ceremonies. The Rev. D. G. Williams
in his excellent Welsh essay on the Folk-lore of Carmarthenshire,
mentions a farmer's daughter who practised this form of divination
whilst she was away from home at school. A young farmer had fallen
in love with her, but she hated him with all her heart. Whilst she
was performing this ceremony at midnight, another girl, from mere
mischief dressed herself in man's clothing, exactly the same kind
as the clothes generally worn by the young farmer I have mentioned,
and, trying to appear as like him as possible, entered the room at
the very moment when the charm of invoking the spirit of a future
husband was being performed by the farmer's daughter, who went half
mad when she saw, as she thought, the very one whom she hated so much,
making his appearance.
The other girls had to arouse their schoolmistress from her bed
immediately so that she might try and convince the young girl that
she had seen nothing, but another girl in man's clothes. But nothing
availed. The doctor was sent for, but he also failed to do anything
to bring her to herself, and very soon the poor young woman died
through fright and disappointment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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