[365] "_Anglos quosdam caudatos esse._ Suspicabar quod de Anglorum caudis traditur, nugatorium esse, nec hoc meminissem loco, nisi ipsi Anglicarum rerum conditores id serio traderent: nasci videlicet homines, instar brutorum animalium caudatos apud Strodum Angliae vicum, ad ripam fluvii Medueiae, qui Roffensem, sive Rocestrensem agrum alluit. Narrantque ejus vici incolas, jumento quod D. Thomas Canthuariensis episcopus insideret, per ludibrium caudam amputasse, ob idque divina ultione adnatas incolis ejus loci caudas, ut in hos fatidici regis carmen torqueri possit: 'Percussit eos (inquit) in posteriora eorum, opprobrium sempiternum dedit illis'. De hujusmodi caudis quidam in hunc modum lusit:-- Fertur equo Thomae caudam obtruncasse Britannos, Hinc Anglos caudas constat habere breveis." --_Angliae Descriptionis Compendium, per Gulielmum Paradinum Cuiselliensem_, 1545, p. 69. [366] Ed. 1546, pp. 29-30. [367] Pp. 76-77. [368] Ed. 1576. [369] P. 91. [370] Song 23. [371] _Church History_, p. 67. [372] P. 63. [373] _Itinerary_, vol. iii, p. 53. [374] As bearing out this opinion, the following passage from Tylor's _Primitive Culture_ may be quoted: "But these apparently silly myths have often a real ethnological significance. When an ethnologist meets, in any district, with the story of tailed men, he ought to look for a despised tribe of aborigines, outcasts, or heretics, living near or among a dominant population who look upon them as beasts, and furnish them with tails accordingly.... The outcast race of Cagots, about the Pyrenees, were said to be born with tails; and in Spain the medieval superstition still survives, that the Jews have tails, like the devil, as they say. In England the notion was turned to theological profit by being claimed as a judgment on wretches who insulted St. Augustine and St. Thomas of Canterbury."--Vol. i, pp. 346-7. INDEX