6215. The principal object of interest is the castle, now partly in ruins, but formerly the seat of the dukes of Normandy and the birthplace of William the Conqueror. It is situated on a lofty crag overlooking the town, and consists of a square mass defended by towers and flanked by a small donjon and a lofty tower added by the English in the 15th century; the rest of the castle dates chiefly from the 12th century. Near the castle, in the Place de la Trinité, is an equestrian statue in bronze of William the Conqueror, to whom the town owed its prosperity. The churches of La Trinité and St Gervais combine the Gothic and Renaissance styles of architecture, and St Gervais also includes Romanesque workmanship. A street passes by way of a tunnel beneath the choir of La Trinité. Falaise has populous suburbs, one of which, Guibray, is celebrated for its annual fair for horses, cattle and wool, which has been held in August since the 11th century. The town is the seat of a subprefecture and has tribunals of first instance and commerce, a chamber of arts and manufacture, a board of trade-arbitrators and a communal college. Tanning and important manufactures of hosiery are carried on.
From 1417, when after a siege of forty-seven days it succumbed to Henry V., king of England, till 1450, when it was retaken by the French, Falaise was in the hands of the English.
FALASHAS (i.e. exiles; Ethiopic falas, a stranger), or “Jews
of Abyssinia,” a tribe of Hamitic stock, akin to Galla, Somali
and Beja, though they profess the Jewish religion. They claim
to be descended from the ten tribes banished from the Holy Land.
Another tradition assigns them as ancestor Menelek, Solomon’s
alleged son by the queen of Sheba. There is little or no physical
difference between them and the typical Abyssinians, except
perhaps that their eyes are a little more oblique; and they may
certainly be regarded as Hamitic. It is uncertain when they
became Jews: one account suggests in Solomon’s time; another,
at the Babylonian captivity; a third, during the 1st century
of the Christian era. That one of the earlier dates is correct
seems probable from the fact that the Falashas know nothing
of either the Babylonian or Jerusalem Talmud, make no use of
phylacteries (tefillin), and observe neither the feast of Purim
nor the dedication of the temple. They possess—not in Hebrew,
of which they are altogether ignorant, but in Ethiopic (or Geez)—the
canonical and apocryphal books of the Old Testament;
a volume of extracts from the Pentateuch, with comments given
to Moses by God on Mount Sinai; the Te-e-sa-sa Sanbat, or
laws of the Sabbath; the Ardit, a book of secrets revealed to
twelve saints, which is used as a charm against disease; lives of
Abraham, Moses, &c.; and a translation of Josephus called Sana
Aihud. A copy of the Orit or Mosaic law is kept in the holy of
holies in every synagogue. Various pagan observances are
mingled in their ritual: every newly-built house is considered
uninhabitable till the blood of a sheep or fowl has been spilt in it;
a woman guilty of a breach of chastity has to undergo purification
by leaping into a flaming fire; the Sabbath has been deified, and,
as the goddess Sanbat, receives adoration and sacrifice and is
said to have ten thousand times ten thousand angels to wait
on her commands. There is a monastic system, introduced
it is said in the 4th century A.D. by Aba Zebra, a pious man
who retired from the world and lived in the cave of Hoharewa,
in the province of Armatshoho. The monks must prepare all
their food with their own hands, and no lay person, male or
female, may enter their houses. Celibacy is not practised by the
priests, but they are not allowed to marry a second time, and no
one is admitted into the order who has eaten bread with a
Christian, or is the son or grandson of a man thus contaminated.
Belief in the evil eye or shadow is universal, and spirit-raisers,
soothsayers and rain-doctors are in repute. Education is in the
hands of the monks and priests, and is confined to boys. Fasts,
obligatory on all above seven years of age, are held on every
Monday and Thursday, on every new moon, and at the passover
(the 21st or 22nd of April). The annual festivals are the passover,
the harvest feast, the Baala Mazalat or feast of tabernacles
(during which, however, no booths are built), the day of covenant
or assembly and Abraham’s day. It is believed that after death
the soul remains in a place of darkness till the third day, when the
first sacrifice for the dead is offered; prayers are read in the
synagogue for the repose of the departed, and for seven days a
formal lament takes place every morning in his house. No
coffins are used, and a stone vault is built over the corpse so
that it may not come into direct contact with the earth.
The Falashas are an industrious people, living for the most part in villages of their own, or, if they settle in a Christian or Mahommedan town, occupying a separate quarter. They had their own kings, who, they pretend, were descended from David, from the 10th century until 1800, when the royal race became extinct, and they then became subject to the Abyssinian kingdom of Tigré. They do not mix with the Abyssinians, and never marry women of alien religions. They are even forbidden to enter the houses of Christians, and from such a pollution have to be purified before entering their own houses. Polygamy is not practised; early marriages are rare, and their morals are generally better than those of their Christian masters. Unlike most Jews, they have no liking for trade, but are skilled in agriculture, in the manufacture of pottery, ironware and cloth, and are good masons. Their numbers are variously estimated at from one hundred to one hundred and fifty thousand.
Bibliography.—M. Flad, Zwölf Jahre in Abyssinia (Basel, 1869), and his Falashas of Abyssinia, translated from the German by S. P. Goodhart (London, 1869); H. A. Stern, Wanderings among the Falashas in Abyssinia (London, 1862); Joseph Halévy, Travels in Abyssinia (trans. London, 1878); Morais, “The Falashas” in Penn Monthly (Philadelphia, 1880); Cyrus Adler, “Bibliography of the Falashas” in American Hebrew (16th of March 1894); Lewin, “Ein verlassener Bruderstamm,” in Bloch’s Wochenschrift (7th February 1902), p. 85; J. Faitlovitch, Notes d’un voyage chez les Falachas (Paris, 1905).
FALCÃO, CHRISTOVÃO DE SOUSA (? 1512–1557), Portuguese
poet, came of a noble family settled at Portalegre in the Alemtejo,
which had originated with John Falcon or Falconet, one of the
Englishmen who went to Portugal in 1386 in the suite of Philippa
of Lancaster. His father, João Vaz de Almada Falcão, was an
upright public servant who had held the captaincy of Elmina on
the West African coast, but died, as he had lived, a poor man.
There is a tradition that in boyhood Christovão fell in love
with a beautiful child and rich heiress, D. Maria Brandão, and
in 1526 married her clandestinely, but parental opposition
prevented the ratification of the marriage. Family pride, it is
said, drove the father of Christovão to keep his son under strict
surveillance in his own house for five years, while the lady’s
parents, objecting to the youth’s small means, put her into the
Cistercian convent of Lorvão, and there endeavoured to wean
her heart from him by the accusation that he coveted her fortune
more than her person. Their arguments and the promise of a
good match ultimately prevailed, and in 1534 D. Maria left the
convent to marry D. Luis de Silva, captain of Tangier, while the
broken-hearted Christovão told his sad story in some beautiful
lyrics and particularly in the eclogue Chrisfal. He had been the
disciple and friend of the poets Bernardim Ribeiro and Sá de
Miranda, and when his great disappointment came, Falcão laid
aside poetry and entered on a diplomatic career. There is
documentary evidence that he was employed at the Portuguese
embassy in Rome in 1542, but he soon returned to Portugal,
and we find him at court again in 1548 and 1551. The date of
his death, as of his birth, is uncertain. Such is the story accepted
by Dr Theophilo Braga, the historian of Portuguese literature,
but Senhor Guimarães shows that the first part is doubtful,
and, putting aside the testimony of a contemporary and grave
writer, Diogo do Couto, he even denies the title of poet to
Christovão Falcão, arguing from internal and other evidence
that Chrisfal is the work of Bernardim Ribeiro; his destructive
criticism is, however, stronger than his constructive work. The
eclogue, with its 104 verses, is the very poem of saudade, and its
simple, direct language and chaste and tender feeling, enshrined
in exquisitely sounding verses, has won for its author lasting
fame and a unique position in Portuguese literature. Its
influence on later poets has been very considerable, and Camoens
used several of the verses as proverbs.
The poetical works of Christovão Falcão were published anonymously, owing, it is supposed, to their personal nature and allusions,
