Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand and One Nights — Volume 3 (of 6) Part 2
General
Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand and One Nights — Volume 3 (of 6) Part 2
Fairy tales; Tales -- Arab countries
“This is the tradition of the inhabitants, as it was told me there. And
in testimony thereof, there was then his picture, with his wife and
three children, in every window of the aisle, with an inscription
running through the bottom of all those windows, viz., ‘Orate pro bono
statu Johannis Chapman.... Uxoris ejus, et Liberorum suorum, qui quidem
Johannes hanc alam cum fenestris tecto et ... fieri fecit.’ It was in
Henry the
Seventh’s time, but the year I now remember not, my notes being left
with Mr. William Sedgwicke, who trickt the pictures, he being then
with me. In that aisle is his seat, of an antique form, and on each
side the entrance, the statue of the Pedlar of about a foot in
length, with pack on his back, very artificially [? artistically]
cut. This was sent me from Mr. William Dugdale, of Blyth Hall, in
Warwickshire, in a letter dated Jan. 29th, 1652–3, which I have
since learned from others to have been most true.—ROGER TWYSDEN.”
Mr. William E. A. Axon, in “The Antiquary,” vol. xi. p. 168, gives the
same version, with some slight variations, from a work entitled “New
Help to Discourse,” which he says was often printed between 1619 and
1696: The dream was “doubled and tripled,” and the Pedlar stood on the
bridge for two or three days; but no mention is made of his finding a
second pot of money: “he found an infinite mass of money, with part of
which he re-edified the church, having his statue therein to this day,
cut out in stone, with his pack on his back and his dog at his heels,
his memory being preserved by the same form or picture in most of the
glass windows in taverns and alehouses in that town to this day.” The
story is also told of a cobbler in Somersetshire (in an article on
Dreams, “Saturday Review,” Dec. 28, 1878), who dreamt three nights in
succession that if he went to London Bridge he would there meet with
something to his advantage. For three days he walked over the bridge,
when at length a stranger came up to him, and asked him why he had been
walking from end to end of the bridge for these three days, offering
nothing for sale nor purchasing aught. The man having told him of his
strange dream, the stranger said that he too had dreamt of a pot of gold
buried in a certain orchard in such a place in Somersetshire. Upon this
the cobbler returned home and found the pot of gold under an apple-tree.
He now sent his son to school, where he learnt Latin, and when the lad
had come home for his holidays, he happened to look at the pot that had
contained the gold and seeing some writing on it he said, “Father, I can
show you what I have learnt at school is of some use.” He then
translated the Latin inscription on the pot thus: “Look under and you
will find better.” They did look under and a large quantity of gold was
found. Mr. Axon gives a version of the legend in the Yorkshire dialect
in “The Antiquary,” vol. xii. pp. 121–2, and there is a similar story
connected with the parish church of Lambeth.[130]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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