Pennant’s Tour; in Wiltshire, with Aubrey’s Remains; and would note the variations in each case. The Scouring of the White Horse, though in the dress of fiction, is almost a model example of the historical method of collecting folk-lore.
Anything that can be ascertained about the reasons of the differences between past and present is specially precious; for the same sort of things which are affecting folk-lore now are probably the sort of things which have been affecting it from all time. Since I came to my present home in 1877, I have seen one custom die out in the parish, and another take a new lease of life. “Souling”, or begging for apples on All Saints’ Day, was suddenly checked by a new Vicar forbidding it to the National School children; while begging by women on St. Thomas’s Day, a disagreeable custom which was on the wane ten years ago, has risen to extraordinary proportions since the arrival in the neighbourhood of a very rich and very benevolent family, who give to all comers without distinction. But these two events have little or no influence on neighbouring parishes; and so variations are set up.
Physical features and surroundings also cause variations of folk-lore. The variant of the story of the Elfin-maid who marries a mortal, which is current in the Faroe Islands, makes the heroine a transformed seal. Giant-legends, again, cling to hilly countries. We do not (so I understand) find them in Norfolk; we do find them in Cornwall, in Shropshire, and in Yorkshire. So incomplete is the record of English folk-lore, that I hesitate to say they are not found in other hilly counties where they have not yet been noted.
Again, there is the question whether the folk-lore of any given nation—composite as modern nations mostly are—represents the lore of the governing race, the lore of the bulk of the population, or the lore of some inferior or enslaved race; whether, in fact, a nation can adopt a new folk-lore as it can a new language, and how far, therefore,
