may have crossed the seas with them. But that any more direct relationship than this can have existed between a rite practised by a settled agricultural and pastoral people[1] and one practised by nomadic tribes of hunters, can hardly, I think, be maintained.
One more example, of a more general kind. I mean the annual hunts of creatures not usually killed, either for food or for sport. These at once suggest the idea of totemism to the folklorist mind, and, in the case of Hunting the Wren on St. Stephen's Day, I would not attempt to contest the point. That custom is confined to the "Celtic fringe" of our islands, the parts where invasions have been fewest, where the oldest existing stocks of the population are to be found, and where, if anywhere, totemism may be supposed once to have flourished. But the annual hunts of owls and squirrels noted in various parts of England (and included by Mr. N. W. Thomas among relics of totemism, Folk-Lore, vol. xi., p. 250), differ from the wren-hunt in several important points. The species of creature hunted is not held specially sacred at other times, the dead body of the victim is not the subject of any subsequent rite, and the pursuit (wherever any definite details are forthcoming), is carried on in some particular spot, not visited or accessible on other occasions. The likeness to the wren-hunt is in fact only the superficial one of the annual recurrence of the chase.
The origin of the squirrel-hunt must be looked for, I think, in the hi.story of enclosures. From the time of the Statute of Merton in 1235, which empowered the lords of manors to enclose the waste lands of their manors, down to the final settlement come to by the local Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the question of enclosures was a source of chronic dispute and
- ↑ Cattle pastures were a special feature of Needwood Forest at the time of Domesday, and remain so to this day.
